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Christophe Deloire, whose nonpartisan organization to protect journalists rescued dissidents from jail and championed a diversity of viewpoints in the profession around the world, died on Saturday in Paris. He was 53.<\/p>\n
The cause was complications of brain cancer, according to Reporters Without Borders<\/a>, the media group for which he served as secretary general for the last 12 years.<\/p>\n Mr. Deloire, who was himself a journalist and an author, lobbied publicly and labored behind the scenes to promote a free press in countries that muzzled journalists. He helped negotiate freedom for those who had been threatened with arrest, imprisoned or held hostage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2023, Reporters Without Borders, known by its French initials R.S.F., coordinated the clandestine escape of Marina Ovsyannikova<\/a>, a former Russian state TV journalist who incensed the Kremlin by storming a live news program in 2022 to denounce the invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Ovsyannikova was fined and forced to choose between prison and exile. Then, after another public protest, she was placed under house arrest pending a trial. On her lawyers\u2019 advice, she fled Russia with her 11-year-old daughter, evading the authorities by switching cars several times before trudging through mud to cross the border and make her way to France.<\/p>\n Mr. Deloire also assisted in the release of Olivier Dubois,<\/a> a French journalist who was abducted<\/a> by Islamic extremists in Mali and held for nearly two years until he was freed in 2023.<\/p>\n As leader and spokesman for the Paris-based R.S.F., Mr. Deloire oversaw a program to provide Ukrainian journalists with protective equipment and training after the Russian invasion began, and he established a Journalism Trust Initiative to certify the validity of news outlets as a way to help restore public confidence in the news media.<\/p>\n In his quest for pluralism in the profession, Mr. Deloire was a leading opponent of the appointment last summer of Geoffroy Lejeune,<\/a> a far-right media mogul, as editor in chief of Le Journal du Dimanche, France\u2019s only Sunday newspaper.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2017, protesting the car bombing that killed Daphne Caruana Galizia<\/a>, Malta\u2019s best-known investigative journalist, Mr. Deloire declared, \u201cThe pen conquers fear.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He also warned that the coronavirus pandemic<\/a> had a chilling effect on free expression, allowing governments to \u201ctake advantage of the fact that politics are on hold, the public is stunned and protests are out of the question, in order to impose measures that would be impossible in normal times.\u201d<\/p>\n