Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Picture this

It's a veritable picture gallery today.

First up there's a picture from the meeting with the Ukrainian ambassador - which was slightly depressing and not fruitful at all. He couldn't update us at all about the progress of the investigations in to the murder of Gyorgy Gongadze.
I did an interview with the BBC's Ukrainian service after the meeting in which I said that unless we started to get some answers over the coming months to key questions we have raised, next year we would raise the profile and publicity around the failure of the Ukraine authorities to bring the instigators to justice.
Maybe the ambassador's mind was elsewhere. When I got home last night I read the Ukrainian government had finally collapsed!




LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - 16.09.08. Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the
National Union of Journalists leads a delegation for a meeting at the
Ukraine Embassy on the anniversary of the murder of journalist Gyorgy
Gongadze London, England on Tuesday 16th September 2008. The headless
body of Gongadze was found in a ditch outside Kiev in 2000. Despite the
arrest of three people in connection with the killing press freedom
campaigns hold the view that the people who ordered the killing have
evaded justice. (Photos by Marc Vallée/marcvallee.co.uk) (c) Marc
Vallée, 2008.

Next up is from the Public Service not Private Profit Rally I spoke at in Nottingham last night. It was far more inspiring and a chance to get a wider group of trade unionists to understand the importance of defending public service broadcasting - and in the local context backing our fight to save jobs at Central. Alan Simpson MP spoke really well about the current economic crisis and Mark Serwotka, the PCS General Secretary, as ever, gave an excellent analysis of the government's privatisation obsession and in particular the new workfare proposals.




(c)Pete Jenkins

One meeting I forgot to mention on yesterday's blog was an informal get-together of leading legal and media press freedom campaigners to discuss ways to tackle the crackdown on independent journalism through the use of the terrorism laws in light of the Shiv Malik judgement.There's certainly some food for thought from that for our meeting with Tony McNulty.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well done on Gongadze.
Sorry I couldn't make the lobby this year.