13 Jun 19 | Campaigns, Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”107234″ img_size=”full”][vc_column_text]EU leaders from Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain are urged to address the ongoing impunity in the case of assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia
To: Mr Emmanuel Macron, President of France; Mr Giuseppe Conte, Prime Minister of Italy; Mr Nicos Anastasiades, President of Cyprus; Mr Alexis Tsipras, Prime Minister of Greece; Mr António Costa, Prime Minister of Portugal; and Mr Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain.
13 June 2019
Your excellencies,
Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated in Malta by a car bomb on 16 October 2017. There is no process inquiring into the circumstances of the murder. We, the undersigned organisations, have advocated extensively for justice in the case and are closely monitoring the process on the ground.
A report on the assassination, titled “Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination and the rule of law, in Malta and beyond: ensuring that the whole truth emerges”, by the Special Rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Pieter Omtzigt, was adopted by the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee meeting in Paris on 29 May 2019.
The report highlights a series of concerns relating to the investigation into the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and Malta is requested to establish an independent and impartial public inquiry within three months to determine whether the state could have prevented the assassination – a call we have made repeatedly. The Committee noted fundamental weaknesses in Malta’s system of democratic checks and balances, seriously undermining the rule of law. This is an alarming situation, particularly in a Council of Europe and European Union member state. The Maltese authorities are called upon to take steps to end the prevailing climate of impunity.
So far, the Maltese government has blocked a public inquiry, leaving journalists continuing to work in Malta at great risk and forcing Galizia’s family to litigate the Prime Minister’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the assassination. Only a public inquiry can determine how best to guarantee the safety of journalists and prevent future attacks. The Venice Commission Opinion on Malta states Malta’s positive obligations in relation to the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. A public inquiry is the only process that can effectively address these positive obligations. The call for a public inquiry is supported by a resolution by the European Parliament which requests the Maltese government to launch a public inquiry, and calls on the EU institutions and the Member States to initiate an independent international public inquiry into the murder and the alleged cases of corruption, financial crimes, money laundering, fraud and tax evasion reported by the journalist.
By signing the Sibiu Declaration, you have pledged to safeguard Europe’s democratic values and the rule of law. We therefore urge you to address the matter of safety of journalists and ongoing impunity in the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia in your meeting with Prime Minister Muscat in Valletta on 14 June.
Thank you for your attention.
Kind regards,
Dr Lutz Kinkel, Managing Director, European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
Sarah Clarke, Head of Europe and Central Asia, ARTICLE 19
Annie Game, Executive Director, IFEX
Joy Hyvarinen, Head of Advocacy, Index on Censorship
Ravi R. Prasad, Director of Advocacy, International Press Institute (IPI)
Carles Torner, Executive Director, PEN International
Rebecca Vincent, UK Bureau Director, Reporters Without Borders (RSF)[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1560437482746-8cffafe9-48c7-1″ taxonomies=”8996″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
05 Jul 18 | News and features, Volume 47.02 Summer 2018, Volume 47.02 Summer 2018 Extras
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Vicky Baker, Meera Selva, Harriet Fitch Little and Benji Lanyado. Credit: Rosie Gilbey
“I would always err towards saying go rather than don’t go,” said Benji Lanyado, travel writer and founder of picture agency Picfair, speaking at a panel debate to launch the summer 2018 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
The latest issue of the magazine, Trouble in Paradise, looks at the free speech issues that are prominent in certain top travel destinations, and yet are often overlooked by tourists and the tourist industry. Countries covered included Mexico, Malta, the Philippines and the Maldives. For the launch, a panel of travel writers and editors shared their thoughts on the roles of writers to tell the full story, rather than the nice, PR holiday story, and discussed the free speech implications of travel.
Taking place at The Book Club in Shoreditch, London, Lanyado was joined by former foreign correspondent Meera Selva, and Harriet Fitch Little, a Financial Times writer. The discussion was chaired by Vicky Baker, a journalist at the BBC.
“The best travel writers do weave in the history and the politics of a place,” said Selva, while Fitch Little, talking about travel writing that might be paid for by travel companies or tourist boards as opposed to publications, said “there’s a way to write about a press trip that is fascinating and revealing.”
All panellists agreed on the value of speaking to locals in a destination, though they also acknowledged that doing so was not necessarily on the top of everyone’s holiday priority list, in particular families who might just want a nice break or might not have the budget for more adventurous travel – and that shouldn’t necessarily be condemned. “We all need escapism from time to time,” said Baker.
The panel also discussed whether travel journalists should write about problematic countries at all, raising questions about whether travelling to these places – and encouraging others to travel to them – benefits corrupt regimes.
“The best travel writers don’t just regurgitate the travel documents provided by the government,” Lanyado said.
“Sometimes you can get so obsessed by the pitfalls of a country and the leaders of a country that you forget about the people, and they can be totally different,” he added and asked whether boycotting a country was a form of censorship in its own right.
“If you don’t go, you don’t learn about the people,” said Baker.
Selva recalled a story of a travel journalist who went on a press trip to North Korea. While this journalist had first-hand experience of government propaganda, they also saw another side of the country when their bus driver did a detour into the countryside, heading off the beaten track. Had the travel journalist not gone, they would not have been able to report on this side.
The question of “ethical travel” was picked up by an audience member, Tina Urso from Malta, who spoke about Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist who was murdered on 16 October 2017 some 70 metres away from her home. Her death, which remains unsolved, exposed Malta’s dark side. There is now a memorial to Daphne opposite the central law courts in Valletta, the capital.
Urso said how this memorial is constantly dismantled, but that tourists, more so than locals, regularly rebuild it. She therefore saw the presence of tourists in Malta as playing a fundamental – and positive – role in highlighting these free speech abuses.
Finally, Fitch Little, who worked for local press in Lebanon and Cambodia, noted that there can sometimes be pressure coming from the other direction, namely pressure for writers to ham up the darker sides of destinations and that this too can conceal the real truth. She said how when writing about Cambodia, UK media often wanted a particular angle, usually one related to the Khmer Rouge.
Equally, when working for Time Out in Lebanon, her friends back home found it hard to believe that the country could have nice restaurants, for example, having seen the country in a more negative light. “Less sexy stories don’t get told,” she said.
For more information on the summer issue of the magazine, click here. Included in the issue is an article from a Maltese journalist, Caroline Muscat, on corruption in the country, a look at journalists living under protection due to their reporting of the drug wars in Baja California Sur and an interview with Federica Angeli, a journalist who lives under 24-hour police protection following her exposé of the mafia in the pretty Italian seaside resort of Ostia.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Trouble in Paradise”][vc_column_text]The summer 2018 issue of Index on Censorship magazine takes you on holiday, just a different kind of holiday. From Malta to the Maldives, we explore how freedom of expression is under attack in dream destinations around the world.
With: Martin Rowson, Jon Savage, Jonathan Tel [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”100843″ img_size=”medium”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
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30 Nov 17 | Europe and Central Asia, Italy, Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features
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Italian journalist Lorenzo Tondo
On 10 November, like many days over the last two years, reporter Lorenzo Tondo was sitting in a courtroom in Palermo. A correspondent for The Guardian, he has been following closely the trial of an Eritrean man accused by Italian investigators of being at the helm of an international people-smuggling ring. Tondo was among the first to point out, through painstaking investigative work, that, in reality, the person standing in the dock might be a refugee, a victim in a case of mistaken identity.
So, when prosecutors announced new evidence had been filed during the latest hearing, Tondo was eager to get his hands on it. He rushed down to the records office, obtained a copy and started flicking through the hundreds of pages.
He was halfway through the documents when something odd caught his attention. His own name appeared: “Two conversations and a text between Haile Fishaye Tesfay and journalist Lorenzo Tondo, correspondent in Italy for the British newspaper The Gardian [sic] have been wiretapped,” the record states.
The investigators he had been covering for over a year, had listened to his private calls with a source and published the transcripts, in a violation of his professional rights.
“It was very hard to take in,” Tondo told Index on Censorship. “On one hand I suspected these sorts of things might be happening, knowing the environment in which I work. But I was shocked when I actually found out because I thought I had always acted in a transparent and responsible way.”
Tondo was particularly struck by how trivial the conversations published in the documents were. He was not commenting on or revealing information about any possible crime. Tesfay had been helping the reporter translate documents from Tigrinya, a language spoken in Eritrea, and they were now discussing his potential involvement in an upcoming documentary about the case. The transcript shows that, after Tesfay voiced his worries about being identified by people traffickers, Tondo assured his face would not be shown. This promise of anonymity was shattered by the investigators’ decision to release the wiretaps.
“They breached my rights,” Tondo said. “I abide by professional confidentiality and I need to defend my sources. I am not saying that journalist should be totally exempted from wiretapping if they are actually committing any crime. But if you realise the conversations are not relevant in the context of the investigation, I do not see any reason to publish them other than to discredit the person who, for over a year, has been pointing out your mistakes.”
Albeit disturbing, Tondo’s wiretapping is far from an isolated case of the Italian judiciary’s intrusion into the work of Italian reporters. Journalists have been secretly recorded on a number of recent occasions. Even more commonplace is the practice to serve media outlets or individual reporters with orders to hand over evidence and journalistic material. Just a few days after Tondo’s case emerged, officers from Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial police, raided the newsrooms of Il Sole 24 Ore and La Verita, two national dailies, and seized the digital archives of journalists Nicola Borzi and Francesco Bonazzi respectively. The two had just published articles, based on leaked information, detailing the links between Italy’s spying agencies and Banco Popolare di Vicenza, a bank currently in liquidation.
Although some newspapers have expressed concern and the journalists’ association denounced the violations, these episodes have largely gone unnoticed by mainstream public debate.
For Tondo, bugging a reporter or seizing their information has become so commonplace that it is not news anymore. “As wiretapping is such standard practice in Italian investigations, there are many precedents [of journalists being recorded]. So it is no longer that surprising. Italians have become dangerously inured to this, while abroad there is much more outrage.”
As Tondo pointed out, wiretapping forms an integral part of most investigations in Italy. In indictments, the bulk of the evidence is extremely likely to be drawn from secretly recorded conversations. Their wholesale use dates back to the bloody mafia wars of the early 1990s, when the Sicilian crime syndicate, Cosa Nostra, routinely killed prosecutors, judges and politicians, threatening the very foundations of the national democratic state.
In the fightback that followed, investigators have been granted wide-ranging powers. A strategy that has been successful in curbing the power of mafias, but which may have worrying side effects.
“There is a fundamental difference between the use of these tools and their abuse,” Tondo said. “In Italy many prosecutors are overusing them.”
In his case, Tondo argues that by publishing a transcript of his wiretapped conversations prosecutors might not only have violated his professional rights but also potentially broken a law.
Article 271 of the Italian criminal code forbids the use of wiretapped conversations of a range of professionals, including journalists, when they would reveal confidential information obtained because of their role.
“Even if there is no legal implication for myself, I believe it is my duty to defend my rights,” Tondo added. “This is a fair battle to fight because at stake is not only my work but, more importantly, that of many other reporters like us.”
After taking legal advice, Tondo is now evaluating the best course of action to protect himself from further intrusions. In the meantime, his work to lay bare what he believes to be an egregious miscarriage of justice continues. Despite the working situation in Palermo is becoming increasingly tough for him. Criticising the local prosecutors’ office cut his access to a steady flow of information and made many colleagues, relying on investigators for their exclusives, turn their backs on him.
“This case made me understand how visceral the relationship between journalists and the judiciary in Palermo is,” Tondo said. “Many reporters here have become press officers for the prosecutors. They have lost their independence, their impartiality. This closeness becomes a problem when that same authority makes a mistake. And if you try and leave this ‘private circle’ you become marginalised.”
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