This 27th and 28th of May, EIBF participated in the 3rd edition of World Expression Forum, a conference taking place in Lillehammer, Norway, and is a meeting place and driving force for global cooperation to ensure freedom of expression for future generations.
Among the attendees were Nobel Peace Prize laureates, national and European policymakers, researchers, representatives from international organisations and other key stakeholders and freedom fighters from all over the world. Moreover, as one of the proclaimed goals of WEXFO is to foster the participation of young people in civic and democratic activities, WEXFO also welcomed a large delegation of young professionals from around the globe through different scholarship programmes. Through WEXFO Youth, a separate programme that ran in parallel to the main conference, WEXFO also invited 500 pupils from schools from across Norway to foster dialogue and conversation on the topic of freedom of expression amongst young people.
The conference kicked off with an account of the state of freedom of expression in 2024, by researcher and political scientist, Staffan Lindberg. Lindberg’s research shows that, for the past 15 years, we have seen a decline in states entering a process of democratisation and a rise in states following a process of autocratisation. These developments go hand in hand with a recession of freedom of expression in many large countries, which affects a big percentage of the global population.
Next, WEXFO invited us to ponder the lack of justice and recognition of the copyrighted material that was used, presumably illegally, in the creation of data sets that feed and train generative artificial intelligence tools, like for instance Open AI. Director of the Copyright Licensing Administration Society of Singapore (CLASS), Peter Schoppert, walked us through the process by which thousands of presumably pirated books from many well-known publishers were used for this purpose and why there has been no compensation to neither authors nor publishers to this day.
For the first time, EIBF contributed to the conference programme, as our Policy Officer, Tora Åsling, joined the session "Access to information, books and ideas - how to advance the freedom to read?", together with International Publishers Association (IPA), International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), International Authors Forum & PEN International, with whom we published an international statement on the Freedom to Express, Publish and Read earlier this year. The statement was inspired by the joint effort of the book sector in the USA, who collectively re-published a statement initially issued in 1953 on the Freedom to Read, as part of their work in resisting a wave of book bans in different parts of the country.
As the voice of booksellers, we know that bookshops are cornerstones of healthy democracies because they, as an intrinsic part of the book ecosystem, ensure that all people have access to books. Therefore, we are deeply concerned by the increasing testimonies from bookshops suffering from censorship, attacks and vandalism all around the world and we invite you to sign the statement as organisations and as individuals. You can sign the Freedom to Read statement online here.
WEXFO gave us two days of difficult discussions on the decline of democratisation & rise of autocratisation, internet shutdowns, recession of freedom of expression, censorship & limitations to the access to books.
Despite the sombre image that the reports on the state of freedom of expression in the world today paint, we are strengthened by the connections we made in Lillehammer; people who in various ways use all their wit, strength and resources to fight for a better world where everyone can practice their right to freedom of expression. We return to Brussels deeply moved, but also reaffirmed in our commitment to work to ensure freedom of expression in any capacity we can.