Does freedom of expression carry responsibilities?
By Alvin Sold, Honorary President and member of the bureau of the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, Editor of “Tageblatt”, Luxembourg 30 September 2002 Does freedom of expression carry responsibilities? How should one answer this trick question, which is perhaps intended to be rhetorical? I am speaking on behalf of two daily newspaper publishers’ associations, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), of which I am Vice-Chairman and Treasurer and which brings together 71 national federations with 18,000 newspapers, and the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association (ENPA), of which I am Honorary President and which represents the interests of 3,000 newspapers with a total circulation of 91 million per day in seventeen European countries, including fifteen European Union member states. To whom do we owe our freedom of expression, if not the 19th-century editors and journalists who managed to snatch it from political regimes, and their judicial systems, that denied such freedo
