Key-Note Address of Dr. Karol Jakubowicz, Professor, Institute of Journalism, Warsaw University to the Human Dimension Seminar on Free Media Warsaw, 2 - 5 November, 1993 The CSCE is, in its own words, "a forum for dialogue, negotiation and co-operation, providing direction and giving impulse to the shaping of the new Europe". As we all know, the field of information and communication was for a long time an area of intense political confrontation, so progress from inevitably modest beginnings was slow. Let me just recall that in the Helsinki Final Act participating states agreed among other things to encourage competent firms gradually to increase the sales of foreign newspapers and publications. They also said they would examine requests from journalists for visas "in a favourable spirit." Clearly some interpreted that phrase in their own way, because during the 1980 Follow-up Conference in Madrid participating states pledged to re-examine "within a reasonable time frame" visa applications which had been refused. They also undertook to facilitate travel by foreign journalists on their territory, but at the same time to "inform them in advance, whenever possible, if new areas were closed for security reasons." By the time of the 1986 Follow-up Meeting in Vienna, there was already talk of live telebridges between CSCE countries. However, the Concluding Document also contains an undertaking that official press conferences would be open to foreign journalists. Clearly, some were not. It would be easy today to scoff at the limited scope of these pledges and promises. At the time, however, they marked important advances in extending the limits of the possible in Central and Eastern Europe. Still, genuine recognition of freedom of speech and freedom of the press had to await the collapse of the communist system. The 1990 Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE could finally affirm, in the language of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that everyone would have the rights to freedom of expression, including the rights to communication, and to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. It took Europe 42 years to agree on that. Central and Eastern European countries are today at work on creating media systems that are to be open, giving access to the media to all who want it, and plural, involving a wide variety of independent and autonomous media, permitting the reflection of a diversity of ideas and opinions. Great strides have already been made in this respect. New and unexpected problems loom large, however. Available evidence suggests, for example, that unstable governing coalitions, shifting political alliances and the existence of scores of small parties desperate for publicity are not conductive to full respect for media autonomy, whatever the new media laws may say. Therefore, we deduce that conditions for this will not be created until there is a social consensus on the shape of the political and economic system a and a stable system of strong parties and state authorities secure in their backing by important social constituencies. Clearly, that will be a long time coming. Some journalists are surprised to find that they are expected, in the interest of impartiality, to refrain from exercising freedom of speech in declaring their own political preferences and from promoting the parties and politicians they support. Or they go overboard in repudiating their old propagandistic role and refuse to engage in analysis and interpretation of events, therefore failing in their duty to explain to audiences the processes which are reshaping their lives. Some believe that in order to demonstrate their CSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 18