The freed al-Jazeera journalist Peter Greste has warned that the “war on terror” is being used as an excuse by governments to limit press freedom as he attempts to garner support for a universal charter of media freedoms.



Greste returned to Australia in February after spending 400 days in a Cairo prison. He and his colleagues were convicted of supporting the banned Muslim Brotherhood group. An Egyptian national, Baher Mohamed, and a dual Egyptian-Canadian national, Mohamed Fahmy, still face retrial in Cairo.

While in prison, he and Baher Mohamed formulated a plan to protect other journalists facing politically motivated charges.

“We wanted to find a way to help protect journalists that might transcend state boundaries and in the end he suggested some kind of universal media freedom charter,” Greste told journalists at the National Press Club.

“It would set a gold standard defining the relationship between governments and the media. It would set out the responsibilities of each. It could be used as a kind of benchmark by which both of us can be measured.”

He added he would like it to operate in the same way as the UN declaration on human rights.

Greste warned that abuses of human rights and press freedoms had been increasing since the so-called war on terror began because the “us versus them” mentality had made it difficult to question governments.

“It almost feels like a kind of globalised McCarthyism, where simply invoking terrorism is enough in some cases to get away literally with murder,” he said.

“In this new world, to simply ask questions about the conflict or to seriously investigate either extremism or the government’s handling of it is to make yourself a target,” he said. “The trouble for us journalists is that in this conflict there is no neutral turf, no safe ground from which to report.

“In effect, what it has done is to make the media the battleground.”

Studies show that only 14% of the world’s population has a free press, and that the past three years have been the most dangerous for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists began keeping records in 1991.

“We’re not meant to be friends of the government, friends of politicians,” Greste said. “We’re meant to hold them to account.

“That’s our job. It’s why we exist, it’s what the whole point of the fourth estate … and we shouldn’t be apologetic about that.”

He expressed some concerns about the Australian government’s proposal to make telecommunications companies collect users’ data, saying weakening the role of the media would undermine the functioning of democracy.

“In my work in more authoritarian places I’ve often noticed that [in] the relationship between the government and the media there is a sliding scale that defines the way that power is distributed. If you take power away from one then you give it by definition to the other.”

Greste said it was vital that whistleblowers felt comfortable to step forward without fear of reprisal.

He also criticised the government for not allowing the media access to offshore immigration centres. “The public has a right to know. It’s as simple as that. This is our government. We hire the government – they work for us, not the other way round,” he said to applause.

He thanked journalists – whom he described as a “cranky, cantankerous lot” – for rallying around and pressing for his release.

“We’re impossible to organise, we are by nature argumentative and we’d rather compete than cooperate,” he said. “The only time that any of us move in the same direction is when there’s a bar in the room.

“Now, as everyone here well knows, through our detention the media somehow abandoned the habits and instincts of a lifetime to line up behind us in a truly extraordinary way.

“I’m willing to bet that journalists have never united around a single common cause in the way they did ours and, in fact, not only journalists have united but politicians united and how many times can you honestly say that journalists and politicians have been on the same side?”

He also thanked members of the public who took it upon themselves to communicate with him while he was in jail. “Those letters turned out to be a source of enormous strength, giving meaning to me in what often seemed like a quite helpless situation,” he said.

“However it’s happened, this hasn’t damaged me. I had my limits tested and I discovered, much to my surprise, that my limits are actually a whole lot further than I ever imagined them to be.”

The journalist also paid tribute to the strength and tenacity of his family, whose appearance at the press club address he said threatened to upstage him. “There is one thing I can say with absolute certainty here this afternoon, and that is that I would not be standing here before you if it weren’t for my absolutely extraordinary family.”