“The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.”
Václav Havel (Summer Meditations, 1991)
"Each of us is responsible for the whole world," said Václav Havel in one of his many reflections on the topic of human freedom and responsibility. For an individual this seems a superhuman task.
International law, international justice and their mechanisms are failing as a principle of international governance. However, the interconnection of today's world, through the network of relationships, processes and flows of raw materials, goods, technologies and information, continues to deepen. We depend not only on the entire surrounding inhabited world and on the state of the planet as a whole. We have no escape.
We can hardly think that we are safe as long as nothing happens to us personally. That we are not concerned with civilizational conflicts, with the power interests of totalitarian regimes in Russia, Asia and the Middle East, because they take place far away and, in principle, have nothing to do with us. The unpunished systematic crimes of these governments only reinforce the belief that corruption, censorship, impunity and violence are the most effective means of achieving their goals.
There is only one world, and everything that happens in it affects us all. We all have our share of responsibility.
- Date: October 2, 2024
- Venue: Prague Crossroads, Zlatá 1, Prague
- Organisers: Václav Havel Library & Charta 77 Foundation
- Partners: Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
- The conference is being held with the kind financial support of the Sekyra Foundation and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. The main strategic partner of the Václav Havel Library in 2024 is the Bakala Foundation.
- Media Partners: Czech Radio Plus, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Conference Programme
13.30 Registration
14.00 Welcome: Zuzana Tvarůžková, journalist, conference moderator
14.05 Conference opening: Milan Babík, Director of the Václav Havel Library, Jolana Voldánová, Director of the Charta 77 Foundation
14.10 Opening speech: Jan Lipavský, Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs
14.20 Conference keynote: Marci Shore, Professor of history, Yale University
Why we must be interested in what is happening in other countries and other parts of today's globalized world, as well as in connection with ongoing military conflicts
14.50 Interview with the 2024 Václav Havel Human Rights Prize laureate
The laureate will be announced at a ceremony held at the beginning of the autumn session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on September 30, 2024.
Chair: Milan Babík, Director of the Václav Havel Library
15.10 Panel I: Discussion with 2024 Václav Havel Human Rights Prize finalists
Chair: Zuzana Tvarůžková
15.55 Coffee break
16.15 Panel keynote: Jessikka Aro, Finnish journalist and expert on the Russian disinformation war
Exposing Russia's hybrid operations despite a decade of harassment by Putin’s trolls
16.30 Panel II: Propaganda and information manipulation: Invincible tools of evil ?
Are we still able to effectively counter manipulation and lies? In today's world are we able to defend the basic values of democracy, which are being "blurred" by boundless relativization? What role do authorities play in this process? What role do power interests play? And what role does artificial intelligence play?
Panellists:
▪ Jessikka Aro, Finnish journalist and expert on the Russian disinformation war
▪ Otakar Foltýn, Security Expert, Deputy Chief of the Military Office of the President of the Czech Republic
▪ Siim Kumpas, Head of the Policy, Strategy and Global Priority Issues Team within the Information Integrity and Countering FIMI Division, European External Action Service
▪ Kateřina Kümpel, co-founder of Choose Your Info (originally Zvolsi.info)
Moderated by Jeremy Bransten, Regional Director for Eastern Europe, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
17.50 Coffee break
18.10 Panel Keynote: Irina Scherbakova, historian and translator, co-founder of the Russian historical-educational, charitable and human rights organisation Memorial
What is the situation of the Russian dissent today and how can the world help?
18.25 Panel III: No Evil Is Far Away
Human rights violations are often a harbinger of more widespread violence and conflict. Why do all ongoing and potential conflicts in the world affect everyone? How much does it cost to ignore human rights crimes in the name of economic interests?
Panellists:
▪ Irina Scherbakova, historian and translator, co-founder of the Russian historical-educational, charitable and human rights organisation Memorial
▪ Olga Misik, activist, symbol of Russia's pro-democracy movement in 2019
▪ Dominika Urhová, freelance contributor for think tanks with a particular focus on China's foreign policy, cross-strait relations
Moderated by: Jakub Szántó, journalist, Czech Television
19.40 Closing remarks
Milan Babík, Director of the Václav Havel Library
Discussions will be held in Czech and English with simultaneous translation from/to both languages.Conference speakers and moderators
Zuzana Tvarůžková is a Czech journalist, reporter and presenter. From 2014 to 2022 she hosted the TV programme Interview ČT24; before that she also briefly moderated the shows Události, komentáře and 168 hodin. Since March 2024 she has hosted Spotlight, a video interview slot on news site Aktuálně.cz.
Milan Babík grew up next door to Soviet barracks in the Czech town of Šumperk. In 1995 the Foundation for a Civil Society awarded him a scholarship to a boarding school in the United States, and he spent the next three decades abroad. He is a graduate of Colby College, LSE and Oxford, where he obtained a D.Phil. in International Relations (2009). Prior to becoming director of the Václav Havel Library he taught at American universities in New England. During this time he organised several international conferences dedicated to Central Europe and Václav Havel and founded a study abroad programme in Prague, which enabled tens of students to gain first-hand knowledge of Czech history and literature. He has published numerous academic articles and two books.
Marci Shore is professor of history at Yale University and a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in March 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book project she is currently completing about phenomenology in East-Central Europe, tentatively titled Eyeglasses Floating in the Sky: Central European Encounters that Took Place while Searching for Truth.
Jessikka Aro is an award-winning investigative reporter with the Finnish Broadcasting Company who specialises in Russia, extremism and information warfare. In 2014 she started to investigate pro-Kremlin social media troll techniques and influence on public debates outside of Russia's borders; now her reporting is widely quoted and used in international troll investigations. Due to her work, she became the target of a severe and ongoing international propaganda and hate speech campaign. In 2019, Aro published a best-selling investigative book about the Kremlin's information warfare in Finnish; it has since been translated into several languages. Aro also lobbies for better legislation to counter hybrid threats and protect citizens from state-sponsored online security threats and has testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs at a hearing on "Russian Disinformation Attacks on Elections: Lessons from Europe.” In 2019, the US State Department awarded her with the International Women of Courage Award, though the prize was mysteriously rescinded by the Trump administration, allegedly due to her social media criticism of President Trump.
Colonel Otakar Foltýn is an army officer and lawyer. He is currently Deputy Chief of the Military Office of the President of the Czech Republic. He mostly deals with unconventional warfare, hybrid conflicts, information operations and international law. After his graduation from Prague’s Charles University’s Faculty of Law he volunteered and became a professional officer. He served in various positions at G3/G5 branches and at the Directorate of Special Forces. Foreign deployments include stints in the Balkans and Afghanistan. In his civil career he teaches Theory of Armed Conflict and Law of Armed Conflict at Charles University and has co-authored four books on history and security.
Siim Kumpas serves as Head of the Policy, Strategy and Partnerships Team within the Information Integrity and Countering FIMI Division at the European External Action Service, the European Union's diplomatic service. Before joining the EEAS, Kumpas worked at the Government Office of Estonia on designing and implementing the country’s approach to building resilience to foreign information manipulation. He is also a guest lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences, where he teaches a course on Information Manipulation and Strategic Communication. He holds an MA in Communication Management from the University of Tartu.
Jeremy Bransten, is Regional Director for Eastern Europe of Radio Free Europa/Radio Liberty and has been with the organisation in Prague since 1995. He began as a news writer and reporter focused on Russia, subsequently becoming a senior editor in RFE/RL’s Central Newsroom and later its director for five years. Bransten holds a B.A. in Russian Studies from Harvard University and an MA in Central and East European Studies from the University of London. He is fluent in Russian and Czech.
Irina Shcherbakova is co-founder of the Russian historical-educational, charitable and human rights organisation Memorial. Memorial was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, less than a year after it was ordered to shut down during a wave of repression against critical voices. A historian, journalist and translator, Shcherbakova documents and maps the communist totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union. She lives in exile in Germany.
Olga Misik is an activist and a symbol of the Russian pro-democracy movement of 2019. After her arrest, she was placed under temporary detention and then under house arrest, while a court banned her from studying at the journalism department of Moscow State University. On 11 May 2021 she was sentenced to two years house arrest. As the end of her sentence approached she became the victim of police provocations, leading her to flee the country from one day to the next. She is now on the wanted list in Russia and lives in exile in Germany.
Dominika Urhová is a freelance contributor to think tanks including the Association for International Affairs and the European Values Center for Security Policy. Recently she also co-authored an article for a Middle East Policy special issue on “The Persian Gulf and the US-China Rivalry”. Her research focuses on China’s foreign policy in the Middle East, cross-strait relations, and broader socio-economic developments in the Indo-Pacific. Urhová holds an MA in Security and Diplomacy from Tel Aviv University and a BSc in Economic Development from Lund University.
Jakub Szántó began working as a television reporter in 1999, starting out on TV Nova before moving to Czech Television in 2006. Between 2013 and 2018 he was the station’s first permanent correspondent in the Middle East, a region he has been focused on throughout his career. He received the Novinářská cena journalism award in 2014 for his coverage of the Maidan revolution in Ukraine; three years later he won the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize, the most prestigious Czech journalism award. In 2019 he received the Magnesia Litera prize for his first book Za oponou války (Behind the Curtain of War) (Argo, 2018), describing his experiences of conflicts and revolutions. Szántó graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Prague’s Charles University and also studied history at the Central European University in Budapest. He completed his studies with a doctorate in modern history from Charles University.