Václav Havel, dissident, playwright, first president of the Czech Republic, and author of Charter 77 died today.

Samuel Beckett wrote a play for Havel when he was in jail. On being freed, Havel returned the favour.

It was the making of a great dramatic double-act. In 2009, Index on Censorship editor Jo Glanville reflected on the relationship between the two

In 1982, Samuel Beckett dedicated a new play, Catastrophe, to Václav Havel, then a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia, serving a four and a half year sentence for “subversive activities”. He had been asked to write the play by the International Association for the Defence of Artists, who were organising a night of solidarity for the Czech playwright at the Avignon festival that summer. Although Beckett had never met Havel, he was concerned by the persecution of artists in eastern Europe and was horrified to hear that Havel had been forbidden to write in prison.

“The fact that Samuel Beckett made himself heard in this way pleased me immensely,” recalls Havel. “He was a father of modern theatre, who dwelt somewhere up in the heavens, isolated from the hubbub down below.” When Havel was released the following year, he returned the honour by dedicating a play, Mistake, to Beckett. It’s a little-known footnote to both writers’ careers. The plays were performed together in Stockholm in 1983 and first published in 1984 by the magazine Index on Censorship.

It was Havel’s friend František Janouch who first asked him to write a play when he came out of prison. Janouch, a nuclear physicist, had been granted political asylum in Sweden in 1974. He then founded the Charter 77 Foundation, to support the dissident movement back home. Havel, Janouch recalls, was initially reluctant to write: “I told him, ‘It will be a fantastic announcement that you are now free and you are the same Havel.’ I called a week after and he said, ‘Well, the piece is ready.’”

After Havel’s release, Janouch served as a go-between in an exchange of letters between Beckett and his fellow playwright. Havel thanked Beckett for dedicating Catastrophe to him. “For a long time afterwards,” he wrote, “there accompanied me in the prison a great joy and emotion, [helping] me to live on amid all the dirt and baseness.” According to James Knowlson, Beckett’s friend and biographer, Beckett was deeply touched: “He talked about the extraordinarily moving letter he’d had. He was very moved by Havel’s plight.”

Janouch then had a brainwave. He asked Beckett if they could stage Catastrophe in Stockholm alongside Mistake. “We had six or seven of the best known Swedish actors, who did it free of charge for one performance only,” he says. “The director practically made it one piece – so people who didn’t know the plays had a problem seeing where Havel ended and Beckett started.”

An act of resistance

Catastrophe has been described as Beckett’s most overtly political play. “Beckett took political positions: he was against oppression, he was for individualism, he was certainly against all forms of totalitarianism and fascism,” says Knowlson. “But he had this view of art – that it suggested rather than stated. If you got too explicit, you countermanded what you were trying to do.”

Catastrophe is a short work consisting of one scene, in which a director and his assistant discuss a mute figure they are preparing for a performance: he is a dehumanised character, like a tailor’s dummy, at the mercy of their direction; his only gesture of independence is to raise his head at the end of the play – an act of resistance in the face of oppression.

Knowlson recalls Beckett’s furious response when a critic described the ending as ambiguous. “I can still remember sitting with him outside a cafe in Paris,” he says. The playwright pounded the table and told him: “It’s not ambiguous – he’s saying, ‘You bastards, you haven’t finished me yet!’” Knowlson thinks this reaction, and the play he dedicated to Havel, epitomise Beckett’s mindset: “Beckett is about going on, persisting; however much you reduce somebody to an object, a victim, there is this resilience and persistence of the human spirit.”

Mistake is less oblique: a group of prisoners intimidate a newcomer, who has failed to observe the rituals of their incarceration. As with Beckett’s play, the main character is mute and the focus is on the dehumanisation of an individual. “Beckett is looking at a lack of freedom of the spirit,” says Jo Blatchley, who is directing the London performances. “Havel is looking at what happens, physically, in that type of situation. We don’t know where [the characters] are, but they’re clearly prisoners, and they’re recreating tyranny.”

Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot, came to symbolise the agony of the Czech opposition – waiting for something that seemed as if it was never going to come. When the Communist government fell in 1989, protestors took to the streets of Prague with posters saying: “Godot is here.” Beckett died that December: he lived to see the fall of the Communist government, but just missed Havel’s election as president.

This piece was originally published in The Guardian. Jo Glanville is the editor of Index on Censorship

Plus: Read Havel from Index on Censorship in 1979. “We became dissidents without actually knowing how”
And: Goodbye Havel by Pavel Theiner

Latest revelations on the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal puts the police under the spotlight, says Brian Cathcart. The Met should be taken off the case and the investigation reopened

We like to think that a good detective leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of truth. In the Met’s phone-hacking investigation of 2006 it now seems that, on the contrary, almost every stone was left unturned, no matter how suspicious it looked. Miller has now turned one over all on her own, and what it reveals looks very bad for Scotland Yard.

Her claim document states that when the Met arrested the NoW hacker Glen Mulcaire in 2006, among the documents they seized were the following:

— the number, account number, pin number and password for not just one but three successive mobile telephones she used

— the times and dates of a number of mobile phone calls she made

— the contents of two voicemail messages left on her mobile phone

— the mobile phone number, pin number and password of her friend Archie Keswick

— the confidential mobile phone numbers of Jude Law and of his personal assistant

— the confidential mobile phone numbers of Miller’s publicist and the address and home telephone number of Miller’s mother

Just a reminder: voicemail hacking is illegal and all these materials were in the hands of a man employed full time by a national newspaper.

This impressive file should surely have been enough, you might think, to arouse the suspicions of even the least inquisitive of detectives. But no. No detective saw fit to phone or visit Miller either to alert her that she might have been a victim of a campaign of illegal intrusion or to inquire whether she had anything to say.

On the evidence of the claim document, if detectives had contacted her they would immediately have been presented with another impressive bundle of evidence. She could have told them about new messages that mysteriously appeared in her voicemail queue as messages already accessed, about messages that disappeared altogether, about her concerns in 2005-06 that her phone was being hacked, and about stories that appeared in the News of the World which she could not account for.

If detectives had then examined some back numbers of the News of the World, they would have found at least 11 articles relating to Miller whose origins they might have investigated in a phone-hacking inquiry.

But there was no investigation of Miller’s case at all. The Met contented themselves with a prosecution which implicated only one reporter at the News of the World — Clive Goodman — and left the rest of the organisation untouched. The offices of the paper for which Mulcaire did his hacking were never raided. No journalist other than Goodman was even questioned.

Worse, the Met sat on the Miller information. The claim document hints at the effect of hacking on Miller — her personal distress, her suspicions of close friends, her repeated changes of phone, her sense of being exposed. But the Met did not tell her what it knew.

She has had to go to court to secure documents giving her that information, and the Met released it with the greatest possible reluctance — just as it is currently employing every legal means to prevent many others from finding out whether they were hacked.

When the Commons select committee on the media looked at all this last year (and, to declare an interest, I was an adviser) it criticised in blunt terms the Met’s failure to even question three News of the World journalists — Neville Thurlbeck, Greg Miskiw and Ross Hindley aka Hall — in connection with a very simple paper trail of phone hacking evidence.

At that time, the Met’s position in this scandal appeared to be a secondary one, though very serious — it had conducted a bad investigation and failed to get to the bottom of the affair. The picture is now much darker than that.

Much fuller disclosure of the Mulcaire documents is now required, so that everyone who was targeted knows about it. And the Met needs to answer a lot of questions about why it failed to investigate the News of the World in a proper and timely fashion. At the very least, the force should be removed from all contact with the case and with the evidence, and a reinvestigation should be undertaken by outsiders.

Finally, it is worth noting that Miller’s claim document contains the strong suggestion that at least three more people associated with her have a case to sue the News of the World. About 20 people are already suing or are about to sue. For the newspaper too, it’s definitely not over.

Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here, here and here

Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follow him on twitter at @BrianCathcart

Today (Nov 1) marks two years since the arrest of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan in his parents’ home in Tehran.

Index on Censorship has joined with ARTICLE 19, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and PEN Canada to express dismay at the sentence of 19 and a half years handed down to blogger Hossein Derakhshan.  Although the prosecutor’s call for the death penalty was not approved, the sentence against Hossein Derakhshan represents a serious violation of Iranian obligations under international law.   It is clear that Derakhshan, charged with cooperating with hostile countries, spreading propaganda and insulting religious figures, was sentenced for merely enjoying the right to freedom of expression.

Reports from former cellmates indicate that Derakhshan has been tortured while in prison and subjected to harsh interrogations.  Index on Censorship, ARTICLE 19, CJFE, CPJ and PEN Canada believe that Derakhshan remains at risk for as long as he is in prison, and that the extreme length of the sentence adds to the danger that he faces. Derakhshan has been held in Evin prison for almost two years, but his case only went to trial last summer.

The 19 and a half year prison sentence was announced on the conservative website Mashreghnews.ir this morning.  The sentence also includes several fines – €30,750, US $2,900, and £200.

The free speech groups call on the Iranian government to release Derakhshan immediately and meet its commitment to protect basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression.  The groups also ask the international community to continue to hold Iran to its obligations and to support Iranian bloggers, journalists and writers to do their work without fear of imprisonment or reprisal.

Prison is no place for Hossein Derakhshan or for the dozens of other writers, journalists, academics and bloggers who continue to languish in Iran’s jails.

Sign a petition to free the blogfather

Read here

Read here

In an exclusive interview for Index on Censorship‘s ‘Made in China issue’, he told Simon Kirby about challenging state censorship and the status quo.

Read here

‘We cannot agree to a statement saying that the investigation of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder is finished. How can it be if the mastermind has not been identified and the supposed killer is on the run?’ declared the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where Politkovskaya worked.

Politkovskaya primarily wrote about Russia’s military atrocities against Chechen civilians and criticised Chechnya’s pro-Russian president Ramzan Kadyrov. She was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow in October 2006. The radio station Ekho Moskvy has reported that a CCTV camera recorded Politkovskaya meeting her killer face to face. Although the footage also shows the gunman and a woman following Politkovskaya on her way to a supermarket, there were no women among the initial suspects.

The three men charged with Politkovskaya’s murder are Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former officer in the combating crime unit of the Moscow City Police Department, and Ibragim and Jabrail Makhmudov, who are brothers of Chechen origin. A fourth suspect, Russian security service officer, Pavel Ryaguzov, has been charged with abuse of office and extortion. According to Alexei Sokolov, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, the Prosecutor’s Office is continuing its investigation of another suspect, Rustam Makhmudov, who is said to be at large. An international warrant has been issued for his arrest.

The chief investigator, Petros Garibyan, told Novaya Gazeta that Khadzhikurbanov is considered the brains behind the murder. However there have been reports in the media that the investigation is also focusing on the Chechen rebel leader Khozh Akhmed Nukhayev, who has been officially named as responsible for the murder of the journalist Paul Klebnikov in 2004.

Media campaigners also fear that the trial will fail to reveal the real instigator of the crime, as the judiciary is not independent in Russia. In an interview with Ekho Moskvy last week, Dmitry Muratov, editor of Novaya Gazeta, expressed concerns that leaks from the investigation had meant that suspects had managed to avoid prosecution.

According to the International Federation of Journalists, Russia is now the second most dangerous country in the world for journalists, after Iraq. The Russian Union of Journalists has recorded the names of 211 journalists killed in Russia since 1991. ‘In many cases those masterminding such crimes are never found accountable before a Russian court,’ says IFJ president Jim Boumelha.

The UN’s rather random observations on the UK’s free speech record shows just how necessary such a review is. Some of the legislation under criticism has been with us for a long time and is well overdue for reform — above all our internationally popular libel laws and our draconian Official Secrets Act. The UN also rightly takes the government to task for the most recent terrorism legislation — the offence of ‘encouragement of terrorism’ in the 2006 Act. This is a crime that a member of the public can be guilty of — even if they did not intend to encourage a member of the public to commit an act of terrorism. At an Index on Censorship conference this summer in London on counter terrorism and free speech, the Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve, along with leading barristers and human rights lawyers, drew particular attention to the chilling effect of this legislation.

Yet it is in fact the terrorism legislation that predates both 9/11 and 7/7 that is having the greater impact on free speech. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, journalists investigating terrorism may have the police knocking on their door for their notebooks and sources – as happened to Shiv Malik this year; postgraduate students researching terrorism and downloading jihadi material may find themselves detained by the police — as happened to Rizwaan Sabir (pictured) in May; protestors may fall victim to stop and search powers — as happened at the Heathrow climate camp last summer.

So while the UN is performing an important service in highlighting the government’s record, it’s an incomplete picture. Moreover, there is a certain inconsistency in the UN’s support for free expression. While the committee rightly praises the government’s decision to abolish the offence of blasphemy, in the same breath it welcomes the adoption of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act — legislation that introduced the offence of inciting religious hatred. While the initial threat the Act posed to free speech was significantly diluted after highly effective campaigning by English PEN and others, it means that we haven’t quite seen the back of the offence of blasphemy.

The UN’s position was made very clear earlier this year. In March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution that will subtly turn the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression into a free speech policeman. The Special Rapporteur now has to report on abuses of the right to freedom of expression when they constitute an act of racial or religious discrimination. As Index observed at the time, in a joint statement with English PEN and other concerned groups, the role of the Special Rapporteur is not to look at abusive expression but to monitor abusive limits on expression. The council also passed a resolution expressing concern about the defamation of religions and urging governments to prohibit it.

The UN is not alone in its sentiments. Random House supported its decision not to publish Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, about the life of Mohammed’s wife Aisha, this month by saying they had been advised that the novel was offensive to Muslims and that ‘it could incite acts of violence by a small radical segment’. This justification of censorship on the grounds of causing offence –– backed up by the spectre of violence — has become routine. As we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it would help to see the UN set a more consistent example.

The News of the World had arranged for Mosley’s sadomasochistic sex exploits to be secretly filmed and had then accused him of engaging in a ‘sick Nazi orgy’. The judge did not accept the argument that publication was in the public interest. Yet the ruling does not mean that all public figures in the future can rest easy that their particular pecadilloes will be safe from press intrusion. If it had been a politician or business leader whose sexual antics were under scrutiny, then it’s less likely that the judge would have been able to rule that it was not in the public interest. It was, after all, Justice Eady who ruled that the Mail on Sunday could publish its revelations about John Browne, the head of BP, last year.

Yet there are a number of critical questions here for press freedom in the UK. In the first place, the question of defining what is in the public interest. Justice Eady drew attention to the risks Max Mosley was taking by engaging in conduct that could expose him to blackmail: ‘it might seem that the claimant’s behaviour was reckless and almost self-destructive’. This view of Mosley’s behaviour influenced the level of damages the judge awarded him. Yet there is surely an argument that such ‘reckless and…self-destructive’ behaviour in the president of FIA, the motorsport world’s governing body, should be in the public interest: it raises questions about his judgment.

Justice Eady has come to be known as the ‘privacy judge’. When the European Convention on Human Rights became part of English law eight years ago, the UK found itself with a privacy law for the first time and Eady has taken on many of the cases. In his judgment yesterday, he showed himself to be a little sensitive to such criticisms: ‘It is not simply a matter of “unaccountable judges” running amok,’ he wrote. ‘Parliament enacted the 1998 statute which requires these values to be acknowledged and enforced by the courts.’ He is right, but what is a concern is that there are too few judges taking on these cases and that there needs to be a wider pool of experience making rulings on such a new area of the law.