Roberta Metsola
President of the European Parliament
Roberta Metsola was first elected as an MEP for Malta and Gozo in 2013, being re-elected in 2014 and 2019. She is also the Head of the Partit Nazzjonalista (PN) Delegation within the European People’s Party Group in the European Parliament. She is a lawyer by profession, specialising in European law and politics. She will be addressing the conference with a recorded message.
Caroline Muscat
Founder of The Shift
Caroline Muscat is a Maltese award-winning investigative journalist and the founder of The Shift, an online investigative news portal based in Malta. Her main areas of focus are corruption, human rights and environmental issues. Caroline contributed to and co-edited the book, ‘Invicta: The Life and Work of Daphne Caruana Galizia’, a journalist assassinated in Malta in October 2017. She was awarded the prestigious Reporters Without Borders Prize for Independence in 2019 for her dedication to investigative journalism in the public interest in a hostile climate.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC
Barrister, Doughty Street Chambers, UK
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is an international human rights lawyer. She has acted in many landmark cases on a wide range of human rights issues in the UK and internationally over the past 20 years, before the European Court of Human Rights, international courts and UN bodies. In her international practice, Caoilfhionn has acted for, and secured the freedom of, many arbitrarily detained journalists, cartoonists, peaceful protestors and human rights defenders around the world, including in Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. Caoilfhionn has particular expertise in journalists’ safety and accountability for crimes against journalists. Her cases in this field include leading the international legal teams for the bereaved family of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, assassinated in Malta in 2017; for pro-democracy campaigner and media owner Jimmy Lai, imprisoned in Hong Kong; for over 150 BBC News Persian journalists, targeted extraterritorially by Iran; and (jointly with Amal Clooney) for Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist in the Philippines. Caoilfhionn is a Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, sits part-time as a Coroner in England and Wales and is Ireland’s Special Rapporteur on Child Protection.
Charlie Holt
Legal Counsel Campaigns, Greenpeace
Prior to joining the Legal Unit at Greenpeace International, Charlie was a legal consultant in Somaliland, where he worked with government ministries and state institutions to build up the territory’s justice sector in line with international human rights standards. Having helped set up the US anti-SLAPP coalition Protect the Protest, Charlie is currently focussing on building resilience against SLAPPs in Europe through the new Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE). Charlie is a member of the Bar of England & Wales and holds an LL.M. degree in international human rights law from Northwestern Law School in the USA.
Maria Ordzhonikidze
Director, Justice for Journalists Foundation
Maria designed and managed a number of public awareness, advocacy, human rights and crisis management campaigns. Sociologist and security specialist, she authors research and articles, speaks and teaches on subjects including sociological and political trends, freedom of speech, international relations and security. Maria is risks assessment specialist, she teaches in Orkhan Dzhemal Media Safety Academy and beyond.
David Casa
Member of the European Parliament
David Casa is a Maltese politician and Member of the European Parliament. He belongs to the European People’s Party and is Malta’s longest-serving MEP, having served since June 2004. He is Co-Chair of the Media Working Group of the European Parliament and the EPP’s Head of National Delegation for Malta. In 2018, David Casa, together with five other MEPs addressed a letter to the European Commission saying that SLAPPs require an EU response. In 2021, David Casa presided over the first edition of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism.
Eve Borg Costanzi
Lawyer, BCGL Advocates
Dr Borg Costanzi specialises in human rights and constitutional law, in which fields she has represented several clients before the European Court of Human Rights. In recent years, she has successfully argued cases before the domestic constitutional courts regarding freedom of expression and the right to life, leading to landmark judgments. She is a member of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts on Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation.
Damilola Ojuri
Dami is a Legal Officer at Thomson Reuters Foundation where she leads the legal components of a media defence project. Dami is an International Human Rights Lawyer whose most recent work has focused on the provision of legal advice, litigation and advocacy support to survivors of serious human rights violations across a number of jurisdictions, focusing on torture, media defence and exiled media. As a United Nations consultant for several years, Dami was called upon to lead the legal thinking for responses to several crises including the Libyan modern slavery crises, Syrian refugee crisis and forced labour crises across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Dami also has a track record of advising the world’s leading businesses regarding the law at Deloitte, the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses, and the UK’s financial regulator.
Jamie Wiseman
Advocacy Officer, International Press Institute (IPI)
Jamie Wiseman joined IPI in 2020 as an Advocacy Officer, focusing on Europe. As part of the press freedom team, he researches, monitors and covers violations, assists with advocacy and campaigns and helps coordinate media freedom missions. Previously he worked as a newspaper journalist in the UK, where he grew up. He holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of Liverpool and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.
Flutura Kusari
Senior Legal Advisor, European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
Flutura leads ECPMF’s legal support programme which has supported hundreds of media workers across Europe. She also advocates with international organisations to improve legislation to defend freedom of expression. During the last decade, she has been engaged in building capacities of judges, prosecutors, police officers, and lawyers on freedom of expression across the Western Balkans. In addition, she advises journalists on pre- and post- publication legal matters such as defamation, access to information, contempt of court, and privacy. Flutura co-leads the Anti-SLAPP work at a European level as part of the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE) and as an expert for the European Union and Council of Europe. She holds a PhD in Media Law from Ghent University, Belgium.
Matthew Caruana Galizia
Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation
Matthew Caruana Galizia is a Pulitzer Price-winning journalist and software engineer. He worked for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) from 2014 until 2018. Matthew left the ICIJ to continue working on the case around the assassination of his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was an investigative journalist killed by a car bomb near her home in Malta in October 2017. Matthew has been a tireless advocate for justice for his mother’s murder, leading efforts to galvanise the international community and hold the Maltese authorities to account despite the significant risk to his personal safety. Matthew holds a joint postgraduate degree from the Danish School of Journalism and City University London and was a Carnegie-Knight fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Peter Geoghegan
Former Editor-in-Chief, openDemocracy
Peter Geoghegan is an Irish writer, broadcaster and journalist. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and many other publications. He was openDemocracy’s UK investigations editor from 2018 to 2021 and was nominated for a 2019 and 2020 British Journalism award and the Paul Foot award in 2019 and 2021. He was editor-in-chief and CEO at openDemocracy from 2021 to 2023. In December 2022, openDemocracy won Campaign of the Year at the British Journalism Awards for its ground-breaking work on transparency in British public life. He co-founded the Scottish investigative website the Ferret.
Joseph Borg
Media expert and University of Malta lecturer
Joseph Borg occupied top editorial and management positions in several media houses in Malta, including public service broadcasting. He was responsible for setting up the Maltese Church media structures. He was also the main drafter of the National Broadcasting Policy of 2005. His contribution to Malta’s media landscape was recognised by the Malta Press Club which presented him with the first Gold Award for journalism. The Maltese state awarded him the Membership of the Order of Merit in 2002.
He is currently Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication at the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences.
Herman Grech
Herman Grech joined Times of Malta as a journalist in 1997. He is now editor in chief. For the past 20 years he has closely analysed the migration dilemma and written about the threat of right-wing discourse. He is also a theatre director and the author and director of the play ‘They blew her up’, the first play written to address the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
