Despite the criticism, the draft law — which was prepared by the Islamist-dominated Shura Council’s Human Development Committee — has been given preliminary approval by the Council, the upper house of Egypt’s parliament endowed with legislative powers until the election of a new People’s Assembly or lower house.

Egypt’s government is considering a draft NGO law. Photo: Shutterstock

If passed, the legislation would put the 13,000 or so local and international NGOs operating in Egypt under full government control, requiring security agencies to grant them licenses and monitor their funding. According to the draft law, a committee comprising members of the Interior Ministry and Egypt’s National Security Agency would decide whether NGOs may or may not receive funding from abroad. Furthermore, those allowed foreign funding would not have direct access to the money as transfers would get deposited in a government bank account, ensuring that all transactions take place under close government scrutiny. NGOs would also need the committee’s permission to transfer funds abroad and would be barred from conducting surveys and from profiting from their organization’s activities.
　
Rights groups and campaigners have decried the draft legislation, arguing that it is even more restrictive than the current Mubarak-era Law 84 (issued in 2002) which was designed to limit and control the operations of NGOs. The draft law would severely hamper the work of NGOs, they say.

“The draft law would make it almost impossible for NGOs to operate in Egypt,” lamented Heba Morayef, director of Human Rights Watch, Egypt in comments published in state-sponsored daily al-Ahram.

Freedom House, a U.S.-based NGO working to promote democracy and human rights has also expressed deep concern over the draft legislation, stating “that the proposed bill would radically restrict the space for local and international NGOs working on issues of human rights and democracy.” It called on the Egyptian government to demonstrate its commitment to democratic reform by replacing the current draft law with one that promotes freedom of association.

“The legislation blatantly contradicts the Egyptian government’s stated goal of moving the country toward democracy,” Freedom House President David Kramer said in a statement posted on the NGO’s website. He also urged the international community to link political and financial support for Egypt with the Egyptian government’s actions to advance progress toward democracy.

Lawmakers and some members of the liberal opposition have defended the bill, however, arguing that it was “necessary to protect Egypt’s national security interests. ”

“Some of the NGOs are undercover espionage cells secretly promoting a US-Israeli agenda”, Nagi El-Shehabi, a member of the Generation Party has been quoted by al Ahram as saying.

The allegations echo similar accusations made last year by then-Minister of International Cooperation Fayza Aboul Naga against foreign-funded non-profit organizations working to promote democracy and human rights in Egypt. Aboul Naga had claimed that the pro-democracy organizations were working “to spread chaos in the country”. Her remarks came after a vicious crackdown on NGOs — both local and foreign, including Freedom House by security forces. In December 2011, security raids were conducted on 17 NGO offices and hundreds of their staffers were threatened with investigations. Meanwhile five mostly-US funded NGOs working to promote human rights and democracy were accused of “receiving illegal funding from foreign governments, including the US ” and of “operating in Egypt without a license”–charges that were denied by the NGOs.

Forty-three NGO workers were prosecuted including 17 foreign nationals who left the country some weeks later, save for one defendant who chose to remain and face trial. A verdict in the landmark case is expected on June 4, 2013. While state-run media lambasted the NGOs, accusing them of plotting to divide the country and threatening Egypt’s national security, rights campaigners insisted that the widely-publicized NGO case “was politically motivated”. Bahieddin Hassan, Director of the Cairo Centre for Human Rights Studies, meanwhile suggested that the foreign NGOs were attacked “to intimidate local NGOs and undermine their work.”

The chilling NGO court case also succeeded in fueling suspicions among an already skeptical public of foreign organizations operating in the country, consolidating the government’s view that the NGOs’ activities were tantamount to “foreign interference in the country’s internal affairs”. The trial of the pro-democracy activists (which has dragged on since), meanwhile coincided with public service announcements that were broadcast on Egyptian TV channels, warning citizens against talking to foreigners “because they might be spies.” Although the TV spots were quickly removed after fierce denunciations by critics that they were “fueling xenophobia”, they unleashed a wave of angry attacks by demonstrators on tourists and foreign journalists covering protests against military rule during the country’s turbulent transitional period.

Meanwhile, Essam El Erian, a former Presidential advisor and a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, FJP, has lauded the draft law as “an attempt to curb corruption promoted by some international NGOs.”

“Some of the money given by the US to those NGOs has gone to spreading corruption in the country,” he said, adding that the bill would ensure “greater transparency of NGOs’ activities and funding”.

The storm raised by rights campaigners and NGOs over by the contentious draft legislaion has forced Freedom and Justice Party MPs, who hastily pushed the draft law through at a Shura Council session last week, to back down. After the session during which the draft law was “approved in principle” by lawmakers in parliament, Shura Council Speaker, Ahmed Fahmy — a Muslim Brotherhood member — affirmed that “the Council was still willing to review an alternative NGO law drafted by the government”.

Although no details have yet been released about the government-drafted law, rights groups and activists hope that the alternative legislation — which MPs have promised to discuss in parliament “within days” — will be free from the restrictions and tight control on funding and licensing that threaten to cripple Egypt’s civil society (if the MPs draft law is passed).

“We want an NGO law that would empower civil society organizations contribute to the development of this country not one that undermines their work”, Omar El-Sharif, Deputy Justice Minister, told a parliamentary session last week. Many are holding their breath.

See more coverage: Shahira Amin | Egypt

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Index urges that there is a serious, considered debate about Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations. The free speech organisation opposes the statutory underpinning of press regulation proposed by Lord Justice Leveson.

Kirsty Hughes, Chief Executive of Index on Censorship said:

 We consider that the statutory-voluntary approach to independent press regulation would undermine press freedom in the UK. However, we support the proposal for cheap, effective arbitration, which would help victims get swift redress to their complaints.

Index welcomed the response of the Prime Minister to the Inquiry’s findings. In a statement to parliament, David Cameron said that he had “serious concerns” about passing legislation in relation to the press, which he rightly said would be an “enormous” step.

Kirsty Hughes said: “We share David Cameron’s concerns that statutory underpinning would undermine free speech, and could be the start of a slippery slope of government interference in the media.”

Index’s response to Lord Justice Leveson’s main recommendations are:

Statutory underpinning of an ‘independent’ regulatory body: Statutory underpinning of an ‘independent’ and ‘voluntary’ regulator is a contradiction in terms. Any law which sets out the criteria that the press must meet, by definition introduces some government or political control of the media. Politicians of all hues have an interest in getting the most positive media coverage they can. Keeping print media independent of government so journalists can report on political debate and decision-making, robustly and without fear, is fundamental. Even “light” statutory regulation could easily be revisited, toughened and potentially abused once the principle of no government control of the press is breached.

Arbitration service:  Index welcomes Lord Justice Leveson’s proposal for cheap, effective arbitration.

The press and the police: Index is concerned that proposals to restrict contact between senior police officers and the press could deter legitimate journalism and whistleblowing.

Voluntary membership of regulator: Index suggests that the statutory-voluntary approach proposed by Lord Leveson contains a catch-22 and is set up to fail. While the paragraphs describing the regulator say membership is voluntary, paragraph 23 of the executive summary states that the ‘recognition body’ (suggested to be Ofcom) should only recognise and certify the regulator as ‘sufficiently effective’ if it covers ‘all signifcant news publishers’. This means the proposed system can only work – and be recognised in the way the statute would demand – if no-one exercises their right not to join. If they do exercise this right, then the regulator will fail to meet the required standards.

For further comment on Leveson’s proposals, please contact Pam Cowburn on 07749785932 or pam@indexoncensorship.org

Background

Index’s chief executive on why Leveson goes too far

&

Index Policy Note: Freedom of the Press, Governance and Press Standards: Key Challenges for the Leveson Inquiry

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Guidelines issued by the Crown Prosecution Service today could give greater weight to free speech online by establishing a high threshold for prosecutions for offensive or abusive comments made on social networking sites.

Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has expressed concern over “the potential for a chilling effect on free speech” for prosecuting people who send communications that are “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing.”

Starmer said that a prosecution was unlikely to be necessary, proportionate or in the public interest if the communication were “swiftly removed, blocked, not intended for a wide audience or not obviously beyond what could conceivably be tolerable or acceptable in a diverse society which upholds and respects freedom of expression.”

Prosecutors will now be required to differentiate between such messages and communications that amount to credible threats of violence, a targeted campaign of harassment or those which breach court orders.

The age and maturity of a suspect will also need to be taken into consideration, particularly if they are under 18. The guidelines state that prosecutions of children would rarely be in the public interest, as children may not appreciate the potential harm of their communications.

“We welcome these guidelines and hope that they will be used to end the excessive prosecutions that we have seen in recent years,” said Index CEO, Kirsty Hughes. “In a plural society that respects free expression, there is no right not to be offended, and these guidelines acknowledge that.”

The UK has seen a recent rise in social media prosecutions. In October, Lancashire man Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison for making “despicable” jokes about missing five-year-old April Jones on Facebook, having pleaded guilty to “sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive” (section 127 (1)a of the Communications Act 2003). Also in October, Azhar Ahmed, who posted on Facebook that British soldiers should “die and go to hell”, was given a community order and a fine.

Paul Chambers, the man at the centre of the Twitter Joke Trial who was convicted in 2010 of sending a “menacing communication” after jokingly tweeting that he would blow an airport “sky high”, told Index: “I’m far more heartened than I expected to be. All the noises coming out of the early discussions suggested that lessons had not been learned, but it appears the DPP has finally taken a step in the right direction.”

He added:

I’d like to know, however, are how this is to be applied to arrests, given that this is more geared towards prosecutions. Users shouldn’t face arrest for the same reasons they shouldn’t face prosecutions in these situations. Secondly, given that the guidelines make mention of users who immediately take down the posts and show genuine remorse, where does this leave Azhar Ahmed, who did exactly that yet still finds himself with a criminal conviction. There should be moves to rescind this immediately.

The guidelines are open to public consultation, which is available on the CPS website and closes on 13 March 2013.

More on this story:

Read the guidelines in full here

Graham Linehan on the Twitter Joke Trial

Padraig Reidy: We cannot keep prosecuting jokes

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Social Media Dpp

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The decentralised, ungovernable nature of the early internet was an intentional design feature and not a bug. As a result, today’s internet is an open network, where unprecedented creative and economic innovation, art, commentary and citizen journalism flourish.

But child pornography, hate speech and copyright infringement have also thrived, leading to mounting pressures to bring online activity under government control. As nations push for these changes, global interconnectivity and freedom of expression are at risk.

As long as computers speak the TCP/IP protocol, or ‘language’, they can exchange information without centralised controls, standardised operating systems or consideration of geographic location. Users do not need to register or identify themselves. These networks are both simple and robust, and there is no single point of failure.

The Innocence of Muslims film was widely censored

The laissez-faire design principles of the network are reinforced by the legal regime of its birthplace, the United States. The US allows private, unregulated businesses to connect to and innovate on the network without government permission. The First Amendment guarantees that the vast majority of online communications will not result in governmental sanction. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), which states that online platforms should not be treated as if they are the speaker or publisher of user-generated content, ensures that online companies are not required to review user posts in advance to avoid liability, a precaution that would be impossible anyway, considering 72 hours of video are uploaded to platforms like YouTube every minute.

While the founding fathers of the internet weren’t envisioning Facebook or YouTube, the TCP/IP protocol made these innovations possible. Photos of cats, indie music and films from around the world can all be found online, along with fraudsters, Nazi propaganda and videos about how to be anorexic.

Activist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Gilmore said in 1993: ‘The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.’ But in the face of the darker uses of the network, Gilmore’s celebration has become a rallying cry for regulation. Apprehending individuals who behave illegally online can be difficult.

An individual posting illegal content might be pseudonymous and their identity not readily ascertained. Or the user might be based outside the jurisdiction where legal proceedings have been initiated. If one service provider blocks access to content or removes a video or song, another user, or users, will almost certainly repost the material, giving it far more attention than it originally received and far wider distribution.

This phenomenon is so common it has been given a name, the Streisand Effect, based on Barbra Streisand’s extensive but ineffectual legal attempts to stop online publication of photographs of her Malibu, California beach house.

Tools for government control

Nevertheless, despite the assertion that technology has outpaced the ability of the law to regulate it, as a result of technological, economic and political changes, online speech on today’s internet is no longer beyond governmental control.

The vast majority of activity is not anonymous – it’s branded with a unique identifier that links details to a particular network account. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) collect and store which IP address information was assigned to what subscriber for billing and operational purposes. Moreover, online businesses increasingly collect IP address information to identify repeat customers, tailor services and target advertising.

These services associate IP address data with other information that can be used to profile, track, physically locate or otherwise identify a user. Governments and civil litigants are learning how to use this information to identify individuals. The old joke was that on the internet, no one knew you were a dog.

Today, everyone knows your breed and what kind of kibble you buy. Not long after the implementation of TCP/IP protocol, its creators decided that easy-to-remember domain names like stanford.edu or facebook. com were better monikers for networked sites than the original IP addresses, which consisted of a long string of numbers.

They set up the domain name system (DNS), a system of databases that translates unique identities into machine-readable addresses. Without accurate and cooperative DNS servers, users cannot find and connect to pages. DNS has become a powerful tool for governments to control the internet.

DNS redirection or filtering, called DNS poisoning, is increasingly common. The Chinese government uses this technique extensively. When a user attempts to connect to sites the government does not want them to access, he or she is simply redirected elsewhere. Domain names themselves are targets for government control.

In 2011, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency automatically shut down over 700 websites for alleged copyright infringement, including the sports streaming sites rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org and music site http://dajaz1.com. In many cases, ICE was able to seize these domain names without an adversarial hearing, meaning that website owners were not able to defend their practices in court.

The secrecy of the proceedings was another huge challenge. For both rojadirecta and dajaz1, the government eventually gave the names back, without providing probable cause for the seizure. But the harm was done. In a fast moving economic environment, a business that loses its domain name for even a few months is basically dead.

Governments have also found ways to control online expression by controlling the services people use to connect to the network: electricity providers, ISPs, broadband and cellular providers. Companies that lay power lines or fibre optic wires to users’ homes or operate cellular networks to which internet-enabled devices connect are usually highly regulated and have a cosy relationship with the government. In some countries, these services cannot operate without government approval.

The Arab Spring

During the 2011 protests the Egyptian authorities cut internet access

During the 2011 Arab Spring protests, some reports say that the Egyptian governmentsimply shut off power at an important internet exchange point where ISP lines connected to the network outside the country. The government contacted those ISPs that were not directly affected by this move and instructed them to discontinue services or risk losing their communications licences.

Similarly, Syria has only one domestic internet provider and it is owned by the government. So Syrian authorities have a direct avenue for monitoring, filtering and blocking traffic. Authorities in that country have also disconnected the mobile 3G network to prevent access through the phone network; they have been known to disconnect the electricity supply to control citizens during clashes between the military and protesters or rebel forces.

Unable to use normal means of communication, activists have no choice but to give news and footage to those who know how to circumvent bans so that the information gets out to the world. These kinds of wholesale shutdowns obviously produce a lot of collateral damage for ‘innocent’ users of electricity and communications services.

There is a public cost to this kind of obvious, direct censorship. In the case of Tunisia, the tactics were less obvious. There were reports that the government manipulated Facebook login pages to obtain activists’ passwords and delete their accounts, along with pages organising protests. During Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, the government prevented citizens from accessing popular dissident websites and used DNS blocking to redirect activists attempting to organise protests via Facebook or Twitter. Since much of the data transmitted over the Iranian (and global) network is unencrypted, the Iranian government has an easy time spying on its citizens.

Blocking offensive material

Communications platforms like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are ripe targets for censorship. In September, Google refused to delete the YouTube-hosted video The Innocence of Muslims, which depicted the Prophet Mohammed and insulted many around the world. The video has been widely regarded to be connected to attacks on the US consulate in Libya, in which the US ambassador and three other State Department employees were killed. As word of the video spread, there were violent protests around the world and governments faced demands to remove the video from the internet.

As a result of the protests, Google initially blocked access to the video in Libya and Egypt by blocking IP addresses associated with those countries’ ISPs so that they could not connect to the YouTube server. It also blocked access in India and Indonesia and, in response to government requests, in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Google also blocked the video using geographical filtering. Eventually, it restored access in Libya and Egypt. The video continues to be accessible to the rest of the world and people in blocked countries may view the clip by routing requests through non-local IP addresses.

It’s not surprising that the video remains online – the First Amendment and a decentralised network guaranteed that. What’s surprising is that Google actually blocked the video. The company has such considerable international business interests that following local law in the jurisdictions concerned was in its best interests.

A purely US-based company or an online speech platform with no business interests might have chosen to do nothing. But these days it’s rare for an internet platform to ignore international demands for censorship or for user data. Companies have a potentially international user base and in order for them to exploit it, they increasingly give foreign government demands substantial weight, and not only when they have staff or assets on the ground.

When intermediaries like ISPs fail to comply, this doesn’t stop national censorship. Thailand has blocked the entire YouTube site for hosting videos that mock the Thai king. Turkey has blocked access to webpages about evolution. A decade ago, France successfully stopped Yahoo!’s local subsidiary from hosting auctions for Nazi memorabilia and fined its US division for failure to block French users. Today copyright holders are pressuring European ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, a website dedicated to the sharing of copyrighted materials.

Network problems like unwanted spam and malware have encouraged providers to develop tools that can analyse and disrupt traffic. The economic consolidation of network providers and entertainment companies has encouraged conglomerates to look at favouring and disfavouring – essentially blocking – certain content or applications on their networks. Some countries are now asking these providers to block access to certain content, or to collect transactional data about users’ internet access for subsequent monitoring and potential prosecution.

In 2009, a German man convicted of murder sued Wikipedia and various news outlets for posting information about his crime, asserting his ‘right to be forgotten’, which is recognised in Germany. Wikipedia’s German language service removed the entry, but the English language version has so far refused.

In 2010, Italy criminally convicted three Google executives in response to a YouTube video depicting a disabled child being bullied. Though the content was removed within hours of the company receiving notification, the court faulted it for not screening the video prior to posting. And a court in Brazil ordered the arrest of Brazil Google’s senior executive for failing to remove a video critiquing a mayoral candidate, which violates local election laws.

Also in 2010, various US businesses and government agencies took steps to block the WikiLeaks website after it published a classified cache of leaked diplomatic cables. Private companies, including Amazon and PayPal, stopped doing business with WikiLeaks on the grounds that it violated their terms of service, although, according to reports, the US State Department encouraged the decision. Copyright is a particularly salient cause for censorship in the West.

In one you-can’t-believe-it’s-true example from earlier this year, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle devices because the books had been added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have the rights to distribute them. No censor could ever hope to seize and burn every paper copy of Fahrenheit 451, and yet digital books can easily be disappeared.

The end of the global network?

Today, our global network is evolving into a parochial one. China already has its own surveilled and monitored internet. Iran is in the process of creating its own domestic network and has started blocking American companies like Google from providing online services to its citizens. As companies block or are blocked in compliance with international assertions of sovereignty from countries around the world, we are in danger of fragmenting the network along national borders.

International efforts to regulate the network are even more frightening. Taking place behind closed doors, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations organisation representing 193 countries, is reviewing international agreements governing telecommunications with a view to expanding its regulatory authority over the internet.

During the meeting, many countries hope to seize power over internet policy, taking it out of the hands of the US. Authoritarian and democratic countries would have equal say. Of those 193 countries, 40 of them currently block or otherwise censor the internet. Voices around the world, including the US Congress and Vint Cerf, one of the creators of TCP/IP, have called for the ITU to keep its hands off the internet.

Under the ITU, the internet would be pushed towards the lowest common denominator, with the potential for rampant civil rights abuses, widespread surveillance and fragmentation of creative and political freedoms. Most experts believe that the days are long gone when internet companies could simply follow US law alone.

Some international legal regulation of the internet is inevitable. Still, it’s important for any changes to be made slowly and incrementally, and to be aware that any major changes applied to internet technology or its network might be hard to reverse. Nations must understand the risk of fragmentation and companies must resolve to restrain sovereign demands.

Multi-stakeholder agreements on how to manage cross-border problems, even without the force of law, may alleviate the urgency of addressing some online crimes. Choices made by communications intermediaries, rather than just governments, will continue to have a disproportionate effect on individual freedoms, so we must be very careful about imposing liability on those platforms for their users’ conduct.

Policy should encourage provider diversity and network neutrality, or else deviation from the internet’s original design as a global, open network will threaten economic growth, creativity and political activism. None of these precautions will be taken, however, until we accept the fact that the law is, indeed, catching up with the internet.

Jennifer Granick is an American attorney and educator. She tweets from @granick

Digital Frontiers. Click here for subscription options and more

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Newspapers [Shutterstock]

Already, the jockeying for position has begun. Labour leader Ed Miliband has suggested that he will “accept” the Leveson recommendations — perhaps recklessly, considering he has not, to our knowledge seen them yet. Senior conservatives such as Michael Gove and William Hague have implied wariness of anything the judge might come up with, with Hague saying he would “err on the side of free expression”.

What emerged during the Leveson Inquiry is no less shocking for the retelling. Lord Justice Leveson heard harrowing accounts of phone hacking and intrusion, of newsrooms that appeared to have lost any sort of ethical bearing, and of unnervingly intimate relations between politicians and media executives. The need for change is genuine, and urgent.

So what’s actually at stake in the coming months? The question most discussed is “statutory regulation or not?” Or, in simpler terms — Should the government create a law that will decide how the press is regulated?

It’s important to state the issue simply. Over the past year, the Leveson orbit has developed its own subculture and jargon, with angels-on-pinheads arguments on issues such as the difference between self regulation and independent regulation.

If parliament is allowed  to create a specific press law then a precedent is set whereby politicians may feel they have the right to meddle with press freedom, for party political reasons or short term gain. Even a “light dab” of statute could create a level of parliamentary power over the press. Maintaining a positive image is vital for politicians, and they may find themselves tempted to pressurise papers, who in turn may feel less free to criticise our leaders — a crucial function of a free press.

Members of the press are already subject to restrictions on free expression: that is, the same restrictions everyone in the country is subject to. A law relating specifically to the press creates a kind of licensing, meaning that journalists would potentially face more restrictions on their right to speak freely than the average Briton.

So what do we do? Several newspaper proprietors and editors have come up with suggestions for independent regulation “with teeth”, in the hope of convincing the government that the industry can clean up after the disastrous and disturbing News of the World phone-hacking scandal. There are rumours that David Cameron is willing to give the press “one last chance” to put its house in order.

It’s important that the press shows willing here. The population was rightly horrified by the breaches exposed in the Inquiry, and newspapers, with trust at an all time low, must themselves make the case for high standards, good governance and common decency throughout the industry.

Whether the press is really in the last chance saloon or not, it’s vital that the government steps back from statute, and that the press makes a convincing case that it is really capable of reform.

Padraig Reidy is news editor at Index. He tweets at @mepadraigreidy

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In 1999, as the Tour de France peloton made its way torward’s the summit of Alpe d’Huez, at 1,850 metres one of the race’s most feared climbs, leader Lance Armstrong cycled alongside young French rider Christophe Bassons. Bassons had been making a name for himself by speaking out against doping in the sport, and Armstrong was not happy with him.

According to Bassons, Armstrong told him “it was a mistake to speak out the way I do and he asked why I was doing it. I told him that I’m thinking of the next generation of riders. Then he said ‘Why don’t you leave, then?’”

Armstrong never denied the incident, saying that he felt Bassons’s criticisms were bad for the sport. Ostracised by his fellow riders, Bassons quit the Tour, and gave up pro cycling shortly afterwards. The tone was set for Armstrong’s seven-win reign over the Tour, a reign we now know was characterised by systematic doping, bullying, denial and libel cases, real and threatened.

Lance Armstrong boasted of winning defamation cases over doping allegations – Demotix

Professional cycling, and particularly the Tour, has probably never been “clean”, though current champion Bradley Wiggins and his Sky team insist that they have ushered in a new era in the sport. The demands the Tour makes on the human body make doping very difficult to resist. 1910 Tour winner Octave Lapize famously turned to tour organisers in a particularly brutal climb and shouted “Vous êtes des assassins! Oui, des assassins”. Even before and certainly since then, riders used a variety of substances to get them through the race, or just to the end of the day.

The 90s in particular were a dark time, with 1998′s Festina affair exposing some of the sport’s major teams as complicit in doping and almost bringing an end to that year’s tour as teams abandoned the race in protest. That year’s winner Marco Pantini was the subject of rumours for much of his career. He was to die alone in a hotel room in 2004.

In short, no one should ever be surprised if allegations about doping in cycling are made. And everyone involved i the sport has a duty to take these allegations seriously.

Instead, allegations against Armstrong and doping were held as an affront to the “cycling family”, and critical journalists and riders were silenced. The Sunday Times’s David Walsh, co-author of L.A. Confidentiel, an early exposé of Armstrong, was treated as a pariah. Walsh told Press Gazette how fellow tour journalists went so far as to be unwilling to travel in the same car as him. In 2006 Walsh’s employers settled a £600,000 libel case to Armstrong, who has now been disgraced by the US anti-doping agency’s report into cheating at Armstrong’s US Postal team. (the Sunday Times is reported to be looking into suing Armstrong for fraud).

Armstrong’s former masseuse Emma O’Reilly, a major source for L.A. Confidentiel (which has never been published in English) also faced legal action. Armstrong went on a litigation spree, boasting “I think we’re 10-0 in lawsuits right now” in 2006.

Bradley Wiggins’s Team Sky hopes to herald a new era of drug-free cycling – Demotix

All this would seem embarrassing to recount now. And one would imagine that “the cycling family” is suitably chastened.

One would be wrong. The current head of the Union Cycliste Internationale, Pat McQuaid, and his predecessor Hein Verbruggen have not just shirked any responsibility for the Armstrong era, they have decided to sue journalist and former rider Paul Kimmage, a longstanding critic of doping, for libel. McQuaid recently told Scottish rider David Millar, who himself was banned for doping, that there was no reason for the UCI to feel guilty: “How could we be apologetic? The UCI is not responsible for the culture of doping.”

The peloton of Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish is, we are told, and we hope, a very different place to the peloton of Lance Armstrong and the US Postal doping machine. But the UCI has chosen to continue with the same culture that led to this point in the first place. It’s time to stop shooting the messengers.

Padraig Reidy is News Editor at Index on Censorship

Read more here:

How fear of privacy and defamation laws made Jimmy Savile untouchable
Five ludicrous libel cases
Last chance to sign our petition to reform libel laws that stifle debate, curtail criticism and even endanger lives

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Disabled critics of ‘fit for work’ scheme have their online support forum axed

Libel threats from Paralympic sponsors Atos Healthcare forced public disability support forum CarerWatch to close in August 2011, after users criticised the company’s record in assessing government disability benefits. The private corporation threatened the internet host with legal action if the site was not plugged. Frances Kelly, the founder of CarerWatch, said at the time: “The sudden disappearance of a support group has caused a lot of distress and fear. Some (members) are ringing us in tears.” After public outcry, CarerWatch is now back online.

Tennis player sues press for reporting on his losing streak

In April 2008, Robert Dee was branded “the world’s worst tennis pro” by the press, after he lost 54 consecutive matches in straight sets in his first three years on the international professional tennis circuit. Whilst Dee’s performance was the worst ever run in the world ranking ITF / ATP tournament’s history, his representatives secured more than 30 settlements from the global media in payments and apologies. Dee lost once again in April 2012 when The Telegraph upheld its comments, becoming the only publication to contest Dee’s claims of defamation and leaving the courtroom victorious.

Icelandic libel tourists take Danish tabloid to UK courts

Danish tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet was sued in London by Kaupthing, an investment bank in Iceland, over articles that criticised advice the company had given to clients about tax shelters. Kaupthing claimed UK jurisdiction because some of the critical articles published online had been translated into English and Sigurdur Einarsson, chairman of the bank and subject of some of the articles, was resident in London. Ekstra Bladet was forced to settle the case before it went to trial. The newspaper carried an apology on its website for a month, paid substantial damages and costs to Kaupthing. Editors have since reconsidered their policy of providing English translations of their articles online.

Heart doctor risked losing house in headache-inducing case

NHS cardiologist Dr Peter Wilmshurst battled a four-year legal process after refuting the credibility of a product by US company NMT Medical claiming to eliminate migraines. The medical device manufacturer’s product (pictured) claimed to help by closing small holes in the heart, but when Wilmshurst’s self-designed clinical trial, called MIST, failed, he suggested in a TV interview that there was a fault with the product. Wilmshurst suffered serious financial loss in defending his statement, and the legal action against him only ended when NMT went into liquidation in April 2011.

Spinal trap

Science writer Simon Singh celebrated National Chiropractic Awareness Week by writing an article for the Guardian newspaper critical of the alternative treatment, which he said made “bogus” claims for healing without a “jot of evidence”. The British Chiropractic Association decided to sue, and a long and bitterly fought case followed, with the science of alternative medicine coming under scrutiny. The BCA eventually dropped the case, after judges decided that the article was written from “honest opinion”. But the writer remains considerably out of pocket.

Daisy Williams is an editorial intern at Index on Censorship

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