SECRETARY BLINKEN: Hello, everyone. Before I begin, allow me to take a moment to once again salute the safe return of Mark Frerichs, a United States Navy veteran who spent more than two and a half years in captivity in Afghanistan. His return is the culmination of many, many months of tireless and efficient work by so many colleagues in our government. I especially want to thank our President’s Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs, Roger Carstens, who is actually with Mark as we speak, and our Special Representative for Afghanistan, Tom West.
Many national security professionals across the government have given their all in this effort to break Mark out of captivity and eventually bring him home, and I want to thank everyone who has worked on this over these many month. We care about Mark and are deeply grateful to them. The support we received from our Qatari partners was also essential in securing his release.
Mark will soon be reunited with his family. The president had the opportunity to speak to them a few hours ago. I want the families of Americans who are arbitrarily detained or held hostage anywhere in the world to know that our commitment to bringing their loved ones home is steadfast and that we will continue our unrelenting focus on that. We bring the same determination and focus to these efforts that we have made to bring Mark Frerichs out of captivity and reunite with his loved ones.
For the United States, for me personally, there is no higher priority than bringing Americans who are arbitrarily and unjustly detained, held hostage, home to freedom, back to their families. We will continue to work tirelessly and secure the release of all wrongfully detained Americans, everywhere. We mean what we say: Mark’s family had my word; all the other families also have my word.
With that, I also want to say how happy we are to be with amazing colleagues today. And it is only fitting that we open the High Level Week here at the United Nations with an event, a conversation, focused on freedom of expression and freedom of the press. It is also particularly appropriate that we do so at the Foreign Press Center, which in fact embodies these two principles. Our commitment, the United States’ commitment to free speech, freedom of the press, is unwavering, and it is unwavering because it is the foundation of a healthy democracy.
Increasingly, however, we see these freedoms as threatened – threatened by censorship, surveillance, restrictive laws, propaganda, the use of detention and prosecution, violence, and we see it literally all over the world. . Even as we condemn efforts to restrict free speech and freedom of the press, we are determined to do all we can to defend them, including with a number of important US programs that we will have occasion to to discuss today with our colleagues who do exactly that.
But let me conclude by saying – by saying this: virtually everything we’re doing here this week at the United Nations, the issues we’re focusing on, from food insecurity to climate to global health, we couldn’t do it without the information, the insight that freedom of speech and freedom of the press bring to these and all the other difficult issues in the world. The work of the United Nations, the work of our own foreign policy and diplomacy, would be dramatically undermined in a world where freedom of expression and freedom of the press are threatened, contested, in decline.
We therefore have a real interest in enforcing these principles, in making them real, in defending them against those who seek to dilute them, to diminish them, to eliminate them. Above all, I look forward to hearing from all our colleagues who, in various ways, have shown extraordinary courage in defending these principles around the world. I look forward to hearing their experiences and ideas about what more we can do to support, defend, protect freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
