Across too many EU member states, press freedom is weak, faltering or in decline with little comment and less action from the EU’s leaders or the European Commission. And in neighbouring member states, including applicant countries like Turkey, the EU is failing to tackle substantive attacks on the media.

In Hungary, the independence from political interference of the country’s central bank, judicial system, media regulation and more has been called into question as its government drew up a new constitution and regulatory approaches. This is now so bad that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (Europe’s human rights watchdog – quite separate from the EU) is proposing putting Hungary on its monitoring list. If it does, Hungary will joning Bulgaria as the two EU member states on this list of shame. Yet where are the EU’s leaders? More concerned on the whole with whether Hungary’s central bank is genuinely independent than whether a core element of political and economic accountability, a free media, is under attack.

A similar picture can be seen in Greece. As the ferocity of the economic crisis, and the measures imposed by the EU’s Troika, tear at the fabric of Greek society, media freedom is deteriorating – from a position that was already weak by EU standards. Journalist Kostas Vaxevanis, winner of this year’s Index Press Freedom Award, was prosecuted in 2012 for publishing the so-called Lagarde list of Greeks who have Swiss bank accounts, and may be evading tax as a result. Having won his case, Greek prosecutors rapidly announced a retrial, due this June – which if he loses will see Vaxevanis jailed. This case is ignored in Brussels. When Index and its international partners wrote to Commission president Barroso, he delegated the reply to a junior official who wrote in a letter to Index this January that the case had been positively resolved but the Commission would keep a careful watching brief. This dismissive ignorance would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

Meanwhile, across the EU’s border, Turkey’s government is attacking media freedom with ever more brazen impunity, something Index recognised by putting Turkey’s imprisoned journalists on its press freedom Award shortlist this year.Turkey now stands ahead of China and Iran in the number of journalists it has jailed, while other journalists week by week lose their columns, their jobs, are censored by editors or owners or have learnt to self-censor. The EU is in – slow and lengthy – membership negotiations with Turkey. Any such candidate state is meant to meet basic standards of democracy including a free and fair press before talks start. So where is the EU and why has it not suspended talks until Turkey stops attacking the cornerstone of its democracy – the media?

Going North to the UK, there is chaotic disarray as British politicians attempt to establish a new system of press regulation in response to the phone-hacking scandal. The cross-party consensus on the proposed new regulator oversteps a crucial press freedom red line, with MPs voting on detailed characteristics of a new regulatory system. The bulk of the press has rejected this new approach – one that would impose exemplary damages for those not joining its ‘voluntary’ regulator – something the European Court of Human Rights will doubtless be called to judge on if the new regulator goes ahead. The Telegraph, Daily Mail, News International and others have proposed a different form of ‘independent’ regulator – one that gives them a veto on core appointments, an industry own-goal where genuine backing for a truly independent regulator would have given them the moral highground. It’s a shambolic mess – parliament showing itself careless on press freedom, and the UK apparently incapable of designing a tough, new regulator that is genuinely independent both of politicians and the press.

Where is the EU in all this? Mostly still ever-focused on the euro crisis. Senior EU leaders are starting to worry about the vertiginous loss of political trust in the EU across most member states, but showing little concern for a key element of European political systems, a free press. European Commission Vice-President Nellie Kroes did establish a High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism. But while its report had some welcome recommendations, the Group, rather anachronistically failed to begin to address and embrace the freedoms of the digital age where we are potentially all reporters and publishers.

On this World Press Freedom Day, it is time that the EU remembers its roots in democracy and freedom of expression and starts to hold its members – and candidate countries – seriously to account wherever press freedom is under attack.

Tunisia: Press faces repressive laws, uncertain future
Egypt: Post-revolution media vibrant but partisan
Brazil: Press confronts old foes and new violence

Photos: Shutterstock

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Kostas Vaxevanis gives his speech after winning Index on Censorship’s 2013 Journalism Award

In 2006, Mr Vgenopoulos bought a percentage of the Laiki Bank in Cyprus, through the Marfin Investment Group (MIG). Since then, the bank has been used to grant loans to businesses and individuals so that they may increase their share capital in MIG. Within Greece, MIG seemed like a giant, at the leading edge of the financial miracle. Despite occasional reports, the Governor of the Central Bank of Greece assured everyone that this was all legal.

At the end, the Laiki Bank collapsed and dragged Cyprus down with it. My magazine published the entire history of the theft of capital involved, utilising official documents including one report on the control mechanism of the Bank of Greece, which in 2009 mentioned the dangers implicit in the loaning process.

Andreas Vgenopoulos, instead of replying to these public accusations and disclosures, filed an official complaint. Apparently everyone has the right to choose legal measures to defend themselves, if they are offended. But here we have a Greek phenomenon. Politicians, businessmen, public figures regarding whom scandalous things are revealed through investigative journalism, instead of replying publicly, as they should, file complaints and lawsuits.

So the public, instead of getting answers, hears only about a slew of complaints and lawsuits filed in order to construct the image of an “offended and slandered victim”. Political and business elites have created an industry of lawsuits and intimidation, instead of apologising.

When, after many years, the cases go to trial, the harassed journalist, who has suffered great financial cost, has to continue to do his job. Needless to say, these legal measures are used against independent journalists and are usually accompanied by various anonymous reports in anonymous blogs which wonder whether the journalist is being paid off. Thus, the intimidation and the “hostage taking” of journalists replace any requirement for public figures to be accountable.

In our own defence

And what do the journalists do to defend themselves? That is a long story. In 1989, private television was introduced in Greece. This seemed to be the voice of freedom measured against a “public” television controlled by the government. Soon it became clear that this was not the case. The businessmen who invested in these new media used them as a means of pressuring successive governments in order to close various lucrative government deals. The former prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, called them “a group of pimps” before finally succumbing to them.

Alongside the press interest groups, companies for audience monitoring and media retailers were established, all getting a slice of the revenue and advertising pie. Very soon an interwoven system was created. Journalists should have stood out against this system. Unfortunately they stood beside it. Today in Greece, where not even a grocery store can operate without a license, a law has been passed that allows TV channels to operate without a permanent license.

The policy of the banks added to this mess. They loaned to publishers, creating another hostage-taking relationship. Recently a Greek channel (one of many that exist, and it’s a wonder how they survive financially), ALTER, closed leaving debts and loans of over 500 million euros. This means that a company whose market value was only a few million received loans of one hundred times that amount.

There is a corrupt core operating in Greece. It consists of businessmen doing whatever they like, even breaking the law, of politicians that secure government deals with them and legitimise them by passing laws, and of journalists who don’t say a word.

When last October, Hot Doc published the Lagarde list of Greek depositors in Switzerland who had never been audited, the Public Prosecutor’s Office instead chose to charge me, without the official complaint of a single citizen. They arrested me at a friend’s house on the grounds of a personal data breach. Since then, five newspapers have published lists of tax evaders or others who are being legally audited, but the Public Prosecutor did not bring any charges. I was violently brought to trial and acquitted. And then the Public Prosecutor again did something unprecedented. They had the verdict cancelled and ordered that I should go on trial again on June 6. Apparently they didn’t like the fact that I was initially acquitted.

None of the Greek mass media (whose owners were on the Lagarde list) said anything about this whole affair. My arrest, my trial and my silencing were a huge point of discussion in the foreign press, but not in the Greek ones. Of course this was not the only case. When a few months ago Reuters, after a big inquiry, disclosed the substantial scandals of a Greek bank, again no comment from the Greek media. On the contrary, they published the bank’s denial. It was ridiculous and at the same time tragic to see a hollow denial for something that had never been published in the first place.

The same bank became the subject of a Hot Doc investigative report. On the same day, a fake story appeared in an anonymous blog that presented me as an employee of the Secret Services. A few months later, five people ambushed me in the garden of my house, waiting for me to come home. I called the police, but they diminished the charges to “attempted burglary”. Again the mainstream media has mentioned nothing about the incident, although it concerned a journalist and a well-known citizen.

Closing ranks

Greece lives in the grip of a peculiar state within the state. The role of journalism is trimmed and those who defend it are being targeted. Silence and concealment is one issue. The second is that an effort is being made to criminalise the investigation of the truth in opposition to the public’s right to transparent and accountable journalism. In essence, the basic journalistic functions of public scrutiny have been neutralised.

I will mention one other example from Hot Doc. Recently we discovered that Ilias Philippakopoulos, the director of New Democracy, the leading party in the government, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Greek Junta. We published letters which he had written praising the military dictatorship which ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. The Prime Minister and his party had the obligation to prosecute this antidemocratic member of their executive. Not only did they not, but they didn’t even answer our request for an official public statement.

Greece lives under a hybrid democracy. Sure, the citizens can vote every four years, but then democracy becomes a process of manipulation by politicians, much of it deeply corrupted by vested interests. In the last three years alone, over 30 laws have been passed which favour the interests of businessmen. The citizens never learn about this, so they cannot form an opinion, nor react to it. The Greek press, being in a chronic financial state, is funded by banks’ promotions, loans and state organisations that give out their favours selectively.

Since 2010, Lavrentis Lavrentiadis, the owner of Proton Bank, who has now been detained for the embezzlement of 800 million euros, bought 10-20 per cent of almost all the media in Greece: thereby securing their silence for whatever scandalous thing he did. Independent journalism is up against a system that knows that it is in mortal danger from disclosure and will do anything it needs to survive. It funds publishers, it is engaging journalists in money laundering, and in return employs them in “press offices”. A network of bribery has always existed, but now a culture of silence has spread everywhere.

When we launched the publication of Hot Doc exactly one year ago, we chose the motto “the truth as it is, the journalism as it should be”. That is exactly what we believe. We have to reinvent journalism and to reassign it its rightful role as an authority alongside the other authorities. Alongside society.

Kostas Vaxevanis is a Greek investigative journalist and Index on Censorship Award-winner.

The post Corruption, fear and silence: the state of Greek media today appeared first on Index on Censorship.

This article was originally published on the Guardian’s Comment is free

Journalism is often either invested with magic powers or blamed for all that is wrong in the world. Both positions are wrong. Journalism is the way, lonely most of the times, of truth. Often colleagues discuss journalistic objectivity as a mausoleum where we kneel down. There is no objectivity. What matters is the decency of our subjectivity: how decent, honest and professional we stay in a world where everything is relative. How determined we are to fight against set-ups in this world of overloaded information.

It is often said: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want to print. Everything else is public relations.” This has to be done with respect for human rights and people’s dignity. Nevertheless it has to be done.

For the past few years, journalism in Greece has had nothing to do with the truth. A corrupted elite rules the country. At its centre lie businessmen who are unaccountable. They act as they please and usually make deals with the government. The politicians then legislate as if they were common mobsters, in order to serve and many times legitimise those businessmen. In the end, the journalists reveal nothing.

There are countless examples. My arrest is one of them. For two years the government stubbornly refused to use the Lagarde list of possible tax dodgers. When I published it, I was arrested by the special branch and led to court. I was acquitted but the district attorney’s office cancelled the court’s decision as it was probably expecting a different one. Around the same time, the Guardian disclosed the fact that the Greek police had tortured individuals. The Greek media did not mention anything. The Greek minister came to sue the newspaper on account of telling the truth.

A few days earlier, Hot Doc, the magazine I publish, had revealed the fact that the director of New Democracy, the political party that is led by the Greek prime minister, had been an affiliate of the Greek junta. The government refused to answer. The Greek media made no reference to this fact. Yet the Greek constitution demands respect to the press.

The Greek Republic has become a crossbred republic. You have the right to vote every four years, but those who govern pass provocative laws, for which the public will hear nothing from the media. The ministers themselves are in a constant state of impunity because of a phenomenal law that grants them immunity.

Media barons work in close partnership with the political system. They define what is legal and what should become known to the public. Recently, Reuters had a very harsh experience after trying to conduct a research on the state of the Greek media. An attack was launched against Reuters to make it appear as if wanted to destroy Greece.

It is often said in Greece that there is no muzzling of the press since Vaxevanis can write whatever he wants. But freedom of the press is not defined by a snapshot of the greater narrative but by the environment in which journalism can operate.

We launched Hot Doc exactly one year ago. Apart from the legal adventures we have faced so far, they’ve also tried to make us appear as journalists of a specific political shade, unreliable and collaborating with the secret services. Five people attacked me in my home and the Greek police made it look like an attempted burglary. They try to intimidate and eliminate any independent voice. Even though Greeks are eating from the garbage bins, the Greek National Council for Radio and Television prohibited TV from showing pictures of poverty.

We live in a European Union of stark contrasts. Europe cannot overlook its culture or its tradition of freedom. I’m proud I was born in a country that gave birth to democracy and civilisation. But democracy is like bicycle: if you don’t move forward, you will fall. Journalism today is not about recording the facts. It ought to be a battle against barbarity and obscurity. On this continent we must rediscover the universal ideas and of course the role of journalism.

On 6 June I will stand trial again for the disclosure of the Lagarde list. I don’t know what the outcome of the trial will be. I want to state that if I am going to be convicted I will not appeal but I will ask to be put in jail. I want to be a journalist in a country that is not afraid of the truth. I care for the truth of the people not that of a caste of corrupted politicians and businessmen. I do not want the people of my country to read foreign newspapers to learn what happened in their own country, as it was happening during the junta. I don’t want myself or any other journalist to in danger, because of what I reveal. I don’t want to be in danger of being presented as a “suspicious” journalist, just for stating self-evident facts, by the very propagandists of the power structure that brought my country on the edge. I want to be able to say what I think without the risk of my physical or psychological damage.

They want a journalism that is muzzled, we want a socially sensitive and truthful journalism.

Read more here about the winners of this year’s Index Awards 2013

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Greek Journalist Kostas Vaxevani after his arrest for exposing alleged tax cheats – Athens – Stathis Kalligeris | Demotix

Index on Censorship and other freedom of expression groups urge the European Union to defend free speech

IFEX signatories are deeply concerned and appalled at the renewed attempts to prosecute Greek editor Kostas Vaxevanis and the wider chilling effects of this effort to silence a journalist acting in the public interest

Vaxevanis was arrested last month, acquitted of breaking data privacy laws on 1 November, and now faces a re-trial, all for having published a leaked list (nicknamed the “Lagarde list”) of over 2,000 names of Greeks allegedly holding bank accounts in Switzerland.

Following our letter sent to the European Union on 5 November, Index and other IFEX members call on the EU — which has in the past been quick to denounce threats to media freedom — to defend free speech and to condemn this unwarranted harassment and prosecution.

Letter on the renewed attempts to imprison Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis – 23 November 2012

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Greek Journalist Kostas Vaxevani after his arrest for exposing alleged tax cheats – Athens – Stathis Kalligeris | Demotix

The European Union has a duty to speak out against increasing censorship, writes Rohan Jayasekera

It was disappointing to see the European Union reacting so slowly in the days following the arrest of Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis. The EU and its executive Commission (EC) frequently steps up to defend free media in Europe and in the neigbourhood states — Middle East and East European nations with EU commitments, or membership aspirations.

So Index on Censorship and nine other freedom of expression rights defenders across Europe & the region, all members of the IFEX network, wrote on 5 November to remind the Union that under the Lisbon Treaty, compliance with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is legally binding on EU members. This includes the right “to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers,” and the obligation that that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected”.

Even the EU itself says it must be “exemplary” in enabling its citizens “to enjoy the rights enshrined in the Charter” and build mutual trust, public confidence and “improve credibility of EU external action on human rights.” In fact the EC had been relatively forthright when member state Hungary introduced new and restrictive media legislation last year. The EC’s reluctance in this case — when the Union has more at stake — will surprise few and disappoint many.

Vaxevanis walked free from an Athens court last week after naming alleged account holders in an offshore bank that had been protected from tax investigation for two years. He walked free from an Athens court last week after but another journalist, Spiros Karatzaferis, still faces trial on an old, unrelated criminal libel charge after claiming he would publish classified files on Greece’s financial bailout.

Appeal to EU Institutions to Defend Free Expression in Greece

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UPDATE : Kostas Vaxevanis was acquitted of breaking data privacy laws on 1 November

UPDATE: Since this article was published, journalist Spiros Karatzaferis was arrested on an outstanding charge after claiming he would publish classified documents relating to Greece’s financial bailout. Read here

In recent months Greece has recorded multiple instances of censorship and attacks on the press. Systematic efforts to curtail media freedom are taking place against a backdrop of rising police brutality used to quell anti-austerity protests and mounting neo-Nazi violence against journalists, immigrants, and homosexuals linked to rise of the far-right Golden Dawn party, which gained 18 seats in June’s parliamentary elections (having achieved a record 21 seats in the May election).

28 October, National Day in Greece, saw the arrest of investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis, whose Hot Doc magazine published a leaked list (nicknamed the “Lagarde list”) of over 2,000 names of Greeks with bank accounts in Switzerland. Reporters Sans Frontieres appealed for his release, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatović, expressed her concern, and netizens rallied to his support on Twitter, gathering over 16,000 signatures on a petition demanding that charges be dropped, as did the European Federation of Journalists.

“They are after me instead of  the truth,” Vaxevanis stated in a video uploaded on the night before his arrest.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkCcgh5mUYA

A New York Times editorial slammed the Greek government for being “shamefully quick” to attack the messenger and strip basic social services from the country’s most vulnerable citizens but shamefully slow at probing possible tax evasion by the well-connected. Vaxevanis, whose magazine has been steadily publishing investigative reports on graft and corruption scandals, had reported a seemingly abortive ambush at his home on the northern suburbs of Athens earlier in September by five unknown individuals.

Several other incidents of censorship have plagued the media in the last month, leading to international condemnation and grave concerns about the state of democracy in its nominal birthplace.

On 25 September, a 27-year-old netizen was remanded to trial on blasphemy charges for maintaining a Facebook page titled “Gerontas Pastitsios” (Elder Pastitsios), which included satirical comments on Christianity and the noted Eastern Orthodox monk Elder Paisios and his alleged “prophecies”, as well as the commercial exploitation of Paisios’s legacy. The matter was raised by a member of parliament from Golden Dawn. According to the defendant, the blasphemy charge was later dropped, but he still faces defamation and insult charges over third-party comments left on the Facebook page (he maintains he never defamed or used abusive language himself, and even deleted abusive comments).

On 9 October, the Guardian published a report by the Nation’s Maria Margaronis on torture allegations made by anti-fascist protesters arrested after a clash with Golden Dawn members on 26 September, in which detainees spoke of being subjected to an “Abu Ghraib-style humiliation” at police headquarters in Athens. The Μinister of Public Order, Nikos Dendias, later announced his intention to sue the British newspaper for defamation and instead of ordering a public inquiry while investigating the torture allegations in a “sworn administrative inquiry”, a process described by the UNHCR in 2008 as an internal and confidential police procedure designed to protect the rights of the officer involved rather than those of the complainant.

On 11 October, religious groups and neo-Nazis protested against the gay-themed play Corpus Christi in Athens, deeming it blasphemous; they assaulted a theatre critic and forced the cancellation of the performance. Five days later, Greek public television channel NET censored a gay kiss scene from the British TV series Downton Abbey. Management apologised after a furore online against censorship, and rebroadcast the episode uncensored.

On 26 October, ERT3 state TV reporter Christos Dantsis, assigned to cover the celebrations of the liberation centenary of Thessaloniki, “disappeared” on screen, after reporting on citizen protests against the Greek Prime Minister and President of the Republic outside St Dimitrios’ church and the heavy police presence that had descended on the city. His substitute was ordered to present a more amicable image of festivities.

On 28 October, a 35-year-old man arrested in Corfu for posting photos of police and Golden Dawn on Facebook during the Ochi Day parade, was reportedly charged with breaching privacy, defamation and “spreading false news with the intent to destabilise the state”.

The following day, two journalists, Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi, had their morning news show on Greek state TV (ERT) cancelled, after analysing claims by the Guardian of police torture of Greek anti-fascist protesters in Athens, and criticising the Greek Minister of Public Order, Nikos Dendias.Katsimi told the Guardian:

About an hour after the programme ended, the director of information called for a transcript. He didn’t ask to talk to us. And it was then announced that two other journalists would present tomorrow’s show. We were cut.

Aimilios Liatsos, ERT’s general director, defended his decision and stated that the two journalists “violated minimum standards of journalistic ethics”. Various political parties and organizations have condemned ERT’s action, while journalists at ERT/NET launched a 24-hour rolling strike as of 30 October, until the decision on Arvanitis and Katsimi is withdrawn.

In reaction to these developments, The Nation’s Maria Maragaronis argues:

Greece can no longer be called a functioning democracy [...], as press freedom, always precarious in Greece where most private media are in the hands of well-connected oligarchs, is a dead letter.

David Hughes of the Daily Telegraph underlines that “press freedom is under threat in Greece and the EU doesn’t seem to care”.  Yiannis Baboulias similarly accuses European leaders of treating what is happening in Greece as a national problem, predicting in a New Statesman article that “they’re holding the door open for their countries to go down the same path”.

2006, where it all began…

An apparent lack of Internet policy and judicial ignorance of the nature of the internet had led to the first publicised incident of online censorship in Greece in October 2006. During the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) held in Athens, news emerged that Greek authorities had arrested Antonis Tsipropoulos, a Greek aggregation service administrator, and confiscated his hard drives, for linking to US-hosted blog posts that satirised Greek businessman and tele-evangelist Dimosthenis Liakopoulos. Bloggers organised a massive online solidarity campaign and held courtside protests, declaiming the lack of web savvy of the complainant and the court, as well as the technophobe spirit of the time. Tsipropoulos’ case was mired in legal limbo for years, as often happens in similar cases. Subsequent attempts over the years by Greek governments to institute “anti-blog laws” — similar to ones recently enacted in Jordan, Zambia and Malawi, among others — that would enforce mandatory registration and hold bloggers accountable for third-party comments, were held in check by netizen initiatives.

Rising encroachment of press freedom

Overt press censorship is banned by the Greek Constitution, but systematic efforts to curtail press freedom have intensified in recent years, as unpopular austerity measures, corruption scandals and police violence are fueling frequent protests and dissent. Greece notably plummeted 35 ranks in the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders in 2010, in large part due to the assassination of online journalist Sokratis Giolias, allegedly because of his work on an undisclosed corruption story, and targeted police attacks on photojournalists covering protests. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other international human rights organisations have repeatedly chastised the Greek state, urging a “zero tolerance” approach to police violence. Threats and abuse against journalists by newly-elected politicians from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party prompted CPJ to remark that the party “casts a shadow on Europe’s press freedom”.

While Greece is widely and casually demonised as “patient zero” of the European financial crisis, politicians and the media are routinely displaying a callous shortsightedness in addressing its corrosive effects on press freedom and free speech,  eating away at the core values that made the European Union a necessary reality. This is, in large part, to oppose the spectre of totalitarianism ever rising again in the continent.

As Kostas Vaxevanis has written: “Greece gave birth to democracy. Now it has been cast out by a powerful elite”.

Asteris Masouras and Veroniki Krikoni are Global Voices authors and editors of Global Voices in Greek

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In February 1663, the London printer John Twyn waited in Newgate prison for his execution, the unique horror of being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, the place known today as Marble Arch. This medieval agony was the recently restored monarch King Charles II’s terrifying lesson to his subjects: do not write, or print, treason against the state.

Even more cruel, Twyn’s offence was merely to have printed an anonymous pamphlet justifying the people’s right to rebellion, “mettlesome stuff” according to the state censor (the King’s Surveyor of the Press). No one suggested that Twyn had written this treason, only that he had transformed it from manuscript to print. Perhaps he hadn’t even read it. Never mind: he was sentenced to death.

Pressed both to admit his offence and reveal the name of the pamphlet’s anonymous author (and thereby save his own life), Twyn refused. In words of breathtaking courage that echo down the centuries, he told the prison chaplain that “it was not his principle to betray the Author”. Shortly afterwards, Twyn went to his doom. His head was placed on a spike over Ludgate, and his dismembered body distributed round other city gates.

Words can be weapons, and the pen challenges the sword. Writers, and printers, “the troublers of the poor world’s peace”, in Shakespeare’s phrase, have always seemed a danger to the state. Across Europe, for the first three centuries of the printing press, questions of religion and politics were usually settled by the authorities of the day with rare and explicit savagery. As John Mullan has shown in his excellent monograph Anonymity, the safest course for the dissident writer was a pseudonymous or anonymous cloak of identity.

Eventually, the Romantic assertion of the heroic individual’s place in the world at the beginning of the 19th century ended this prudent convention, but slowly. The scandalous first two Cantos of Don Juan were printed without naming either Lord Byron or his publisher, John Murray. Despite the risks, the poet soon found fame irresistible. “Own that I am the author,” he instructed Murray, “I will never shrink.” By the reign of the fourth George, Britain’s liberal democracy was never likely to eviscerate, hang or decapitate a transgressive writer, though some terrible penalties did remain on the statute book for decades to come.

Abroad in Europe, as repressive states, notably Tsarist Russia, grew harsher, the fate of writers worsened, but hardly varied. The essential predicament was unchanged from John Twyn’s day. Putting black on white, words on the page, as accurately and truthfully as one could, would never fail to make trouble with vested interests, arterio-sclerotic authorities and evil despotisms. Dostoevsky was marched before a firing squad, but reprieved. The distinguished list of writers, before the Cold War, who died for their art includes Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, possibly the greatest loss of all.

Writers and despotic regimes

By the middle of the 20th century there was, in the words of Graham Greene, a fairly general recognition that “it had always been in the interests of the State to poison the psychological wells, to encourage cat-calls, to restrict human sympathy. It makes government easier when people shout Gallilean, Papist, Fascist, Communist.” In the same essay, on “the virtues of disloyalty”, Greene expressed the writer’s credo in an age of growing state control. “The writer is driven by his own vocation,” he said, “to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist state.” Greene concludes this celebration of opposition by quoting Tom Paine: “We must guard even our enemies against injustice.”

Confronted by the intractable collision of the creative individual of fiery conscience with the frozen monolith of the powers that be, there is one essential question: What Is to Be Done? In 1968, the poet Stephen Spender, sickened and dismayed by reports of literary repression in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa (as well as several recently decolonised African states), responded to the spirit of a revolutionary year. He decided to organise a fight-back, setting the pen against the sword, based in London.

George Orwell had already pointed out, in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, that “literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian”. In fact, it was the totalitarian regime of the USSR, and its trial of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, that proved the tipping-point for Spender. He was joined by Pavel Litvinov, the Soviet scientist, dissident and human rights activist, who wrote an open letter asking if it might not be possible to form in England an organisation of intellectuals who would make it their business to publish information about what was happening to their censored, suppressed and imprisoned colleagues abroad. Litvinov was inspired by the fates of fellow Russians, but he insisted that such an organisation should operate internationally and not just concern itself with victims of Soviet oppression, though their plight was possibly the worst in those dark days of the Cold War.

Spender, who was exceedingly well-connected, organised a telegram of support in response to Litvinov’s appeal, signed by an awesome roll-call of the great: Cecil Day-Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, WH Auden, Henry Moore, AJ Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Mary McCarthy, JB Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes, Paul Scofield, Igor Stravinsky, Stuart Hampshire, Maurice Bowra and George Orwell’s widow, Sonia. These, and subsequently many others, declared they would “help in any way possible”.

This initiative led, in turn, to the formation of the Council of WSI (Writers and Scholars International), whose founding members included David Astor, editor of the Observer, Elizabeth Longford, Roland Penrose, Louis Blom-Cooper and Spender himself. Index on Censorship was born when Michael Scammell, an expert on Russia, came up with the idea of founding a magazine. Thus was the ongoing battle for ‘intellectual freedom’ moved onto new terrain best suited to writers and scholars — the printed word published in a little magazine. Soon, the advantages and benefits of fighting oppression from a dedicated bastion of free expression became obvious to both sides, free and unfree alike.

A clarion voice in the fight for free speech

Index, whose first issue appeared in 1972, declared that its aim was to “record and analyse all forms of inroads into freedom of expression”. Further, it would “examine the censorship
situation in individual countries” and would publish “censored material in the journal”. In the long and bloody history of the fight for intellectual freedom there had been many impassioned statements of principle about the writer’s role as a piece of grit in the engine of the state. No one, however, had ever thought to jam a whole toolbox into the machinery of power, and place a fully-funded institution (such as WSI) in direct opposition to the repressive intentions of despotic regimes. This was the unique and historic importance of Index. But its success was not a foregone conclusion. Spender, its founder, was fully alert to the potential for windbaggery and failure inherent in such a venture. There was, he wrote, “the risk that the magazine will become simply a bulletin of frustration”.

Actually, the opposite came to pass. Index became a clarion voice in the cause of free expression. The abuses of freedom worldwide in the 1970s were so appalling and so widespread that the magazine rapidly found itself in the frontline of campaigns against repression and censorship in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Latin America and South Africa. Alongside Amnesty International and the PEN Club, Index gave vivid expression to the truth that “censorship” today takes many cruel forms: writers who are sent to labour camps, or blackmailed by threats to their families, or harassed into silence and isolation.

Perhaps the most important thing Index did, from the beginning, was to universalise an issue that was in peril of becoming a special interest: freedom was not “a luxury enjoyed by bourgeois individualists”. Along with self-expression, it was a human right, and an instrument of human consciousness that should be fought for worldwide.

Historically, the classic polemical statement against censorship, John Milton’s Areopagitica, a pamphlet against the Licensing Order of 1643, had focused on the English Parliament’s threat to a free press. Milton, writing in the midst of Civil War, was less worried about blood than ink: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image,” he writes, “but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Three centuries later, Index would concern itself with both the breath of the oppressed writer but also the lifeblood of liberty, namely, free expression.

In an astonishingly short time, barely a generation, from 1972 to 1989, the magazine established itself as a force to be reckoned with. At first, it took up the issue that had inspired its beginnings: Soviet oppression. In defence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Index published part of a long, autobiographical poem, “God Keep Me from Going Mad”, composed in 1950-53 while Solzhenitsyn was serving a sentence in a labour camp in North Kazakhstan, the setting for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was followed by a scoop in 1973, the unexpurgated text of an interview Solzhenitsyn had given to AP and Le Monde in which the writer revealed that “preparations are being made to have me killed in a motor accident”.

Václav Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the Iron Curtain

The importance of this document, one of the writer’s very rare accounts of his predicament, is that it described in horrifying and particular detail the true nature of the Soviet regime’s campaign against him, especially the constant surveillance and the unrelenting menace of the state’s agents. Solzhenitsyn was also able to draw attention to the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. In the bleakest depths of the Cold War, taking up the cause of Russia’s dissident community made the difference between international recognition and utter oblivion.

As the magazine grew in confidence, it began to focus on other, related injustices behind the Iron Curtain, notably in Czechoslovakia (as it was). It was among the first to publish the banned playwright Václav Havel in English. In 1976, a retrospective on Czechoslovakia eight years after the Soviet invasion of Prague described how Havel was being “constantly harassed and persecuted by the authorities”, the beginning (as it turned out) of a long assault on Havel’s liberty.

When Charter 77 was formed the following year, Index became a vital link in the chain of communication between the samizdat literary community in Prague and the wider world. The exiled Czech journalist George Theiner, who succeeded Michael Scammell as editor, strengthened this link. Context and continuity, the steady accumulation of a body of work and opinion, are vital ingredients in any effective campaign on behalf of oppressed writers. Index now provided both a sober and authoritative framework for its protest and also, through the office in London, a team of journalists dedicated to monitoring the devious and sinister machinations of oppressive regimes worldwide.

In the 1980s, the magazine spread its wings. There were exposés of repression in Latin America and persecution in Africa (Kenya, Nigeria). Roa Bastos, who had suffered so badly in Paraguay, found a new champion. Nadine Gordimer, who had supported Index from the beginning, published a story about the romantic dilemmas of a secret policeman in South Africa. In Europe, Samuel Beckett became so engaged with the plight of Václav Havel that he dedicated a short play, “Catastrophe”, to his fellow playwright and allowed Index to publish it in its pages, another notable scoop. By the end of the 1980s, the idea of standing up for the abstract idea of ‘intellectual freedom’ by reporting censorship and publishing banned writing had become a recognised part of the common discourse within the libertarian community.

The influence of Index on the literary world has been at once subtle and impossible to overstate. In my mind, there is no doubt that its example became an inspiration to those British publishers, like Faber, Penguin and Picador, who (especially in the 1970s and 1980s) published banned or oppressed writers such as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Josef Skvorecky. The literature that came from behind the Iron Curtain added a new dimension to the reading of the West. Translations of novels like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were so exceptional that the book would briefly become, ex officio, as it were, almost a part of the Anglo-American literary tradition.

The institutional importance of Index is hard to overstate because, in the words of André Gide, good sentiments do not usually generate good literature. Just because a writer is committed to fighting injustice in his or her society, there’s no guarantee that his or her work will have artistic value. But once the role of literature as “witness” is established in the minds of the public, it makes it more difficult to dissociate literary merit and the social or political value of the text. Index provided a forum for banned writers to demonstrate the role of literature, both good and less good, as unsubmissive, contrarian, transcendent and instinctively transgressive.

Perhaps it was as well that the Index model was so firmly set by Spender and its founders. After 1989, the strength and security of WSI (notwithstanding a constant search for sponsors) was crucial. The fall of the Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union gave every indication that the raison d’être of Index — opposing Soviet oppression — had been trumped by History.

New frontiers for free expression — and censorship

In fact, the reverse was the case. Writers and free expression continued to be persecuted worldwide. Russia did not cease to be despotic with the disbanding of the KGB. In some ways, the condition of everyday life for Russian writers grew significantly worse, and certainly far more dangerous. The war in Chechnya gave the authorities a new pretext to crush free journalism. Anna Politovskaya became just one of many who turned to Index to make her plight better understood in the West.

With the millennium, meanwhile, the rise of the internet and the IT revolution inherent in the development of digital communications offered a new challenge. The old barriers to state control were coming down. Frontiers that had once been impenetrable were suddenly porous. Secret policemen could continue to terrorise writers, printers and publishers, but it was much harder to stop the free flow of information on the worldwide web. What place would Index have in the new world order of “free” content shaped by Google, Wikipedia and Amazon? The answer, of course, is as a research institution, a memory bank and a continuing moral example, along with publishing online as well as in print.

Index in the new century has made the fight for “intellectual freedom” normative as well as liberating. WSI remains the tool of one very simple, good idea. Its historical board members are unchanged: Milton, Paine, Wilkes, Zola and, possibly, Orwell. Index knows that such an achievement is not lightly won. The history of state repression shows that the individual writer and artist and scholar is vulnerable on his own. He, or she, needs the committed support of independent organisations that cannot be crushed by state terror. Furthermore, the plight of writers especially should not be at the mercy of intellectual fashion or the caprice of a Twitter feed. Free expression needs its gatekeepers: publishers, editors, booksellers, and independent columnists. And this community needs a place to meet, a forum for ideas and debate. This is what Index provides. More serious than Twitter; better organised than Facebook, it’s a forum that can exploit the social media, but not become its prisoner.

In the 21st century, this can be virtual, articulated through Google or Wikipedia. But it also needs to be orchestrated by people, standing apart from fashionable trends, who understand the nuances of the fight for intellectual freedom and who know what they are talking about. This, in a sentence, is the unique Index proposition: ideas honestly and freely expressed and writers worldwide uninhibited by the censorship of the mind or tyrannical restrictions on the printed word.

This article appears in 40 years of Index on Censorship which marks the organisation’s 40th anniversary with a star line-up of the most outstanding activists, journalists and authors. Click here for subscription options and more

Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. He has been a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship since 1983

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