Description:

"Campaigning for Free Expression: A Handbook for Advocates" was featured at UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day conference in Dakar, Senegal on May 1, 2005.

The publication is aimed at equipping human rights activists around the world with essential tools to campaign more effectively for freedom of expression and press freedom. It provides best practice case studies and showcases a variety of campaign tools, including investigative missions, coalition-building, legal advocacy and Internet-based actions, such as blogging, e-mail protest letters and SMS text messaging. It also gives activists important tools for mounting campaign strategies and doing power analyses of their local situations.

"This handbook gives us vivid examples of how a variety of campaign techniques have been used to persuade governments to act in less repressive ways," says Luckson Chipare, IFEX Convenor and Regional Director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa. "By doing skillful, tactical and strategic campaigning, free expression advocates can maximize their resources to become even more powerful agents of change," he adds.

With threats to journalists, writers, Internet users and human rights activists on the rise in many countries, the need for more concerted campaigning on free expression issues is increasingly urgent. "Governments and other forces are employing more sophisticated methods to restrict freedom of expression," says Chipare.