The independent journalists covered an annual street action of the Belarusian opposition, The Chernobyl Way, that commemorates the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

The journalists were detained by plain-clothed police officers on Friday evening on their way to editorial office. The police claimed the journalists “behaved in a suspicious way” and allegedly forcibly resisted detention. Barbarych and Yarashevich spent the weekend in a detention centre and stood an administrative trial on Monday. Judge Kiryl Paluleh sentenced them to three days of arrest each for “unlawful resistance to legitimate claims of police officers”, despite the fact accusations against the reporters were only based on contradictory evidence from the police.

The journalists denied the charges, saying the plain-clothed officers failed to present valid police IDs and they did not resist their detention.

Both reporters were released on Monday evening.

“I think the reason for our detention were pictures we made. Our cameras were confiscated, and given back to us with all the photos deleted,” Henadz Barbarych told Radio Liberty.

Detentions and physical violence of the police against journalists during street rallies have become quite common in Belarus.

Several civil activists were also detained on 26 April. Short-term detentions were aimed at preventing activists of a Belarusian ecological and anti-nuclear movement from participating in the rally. Three more activists were detained after The Chernobyl Way; one of them, Ihar Truhanovich, was  beaten by the police. Iryna Arahouskaya and Aksana Rudovich, journalists of the Nasha Niva newspaper, who were filming the beating of Truhanovich, were also detained for about an hour, but later released.

“The authorities of Belarus keep demonstrating its brutality. They act with impunity for citizens of Belarus to keep living in fear. Such illogical and unnecessary violence serves as a signal to the society that even if the government sanctions events, they don’t endorse them, and people should be afraid to participate in any oppositional street actions,” says Uladzimir Matskevich, the Chair of the Coordination Committee of the Belarus National Civil Society Platform.

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There are some fears that the funeral procession of Margaret Thatcher tomorrow could turn into a debacle of protest and arrest.

The Observer reported on Sunday that Commander Christine Jones, the police officer who will be in charge on the day, “warned” that police officers will have the power to arrest protesters under Section 5 of the Public Order Act on the day.

This isn’t exactly unusual; after all, the police always have the law at their disposal.

But it’s worth noting how problematic Section 5 of the Public Order Act can be, particularly in situations like tomorrow’s.

The section makes it an offence to engage in language (including writing on a placard) or behaviour “within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby”.

This has led to problems for free speech and free protest in the past, from the arrest of Christian preachers to the conviction of Al Muhajiroun poppy-burner Emdadur Choudhury.

Considering the mix of Thatcher fans, tourists and events junkies who will line the route of the funeral cortege tomorrow along with the expected protesters, it is conceivable that any protest could be construed as likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” to someone. The issue is whether that likelihood alone enough to cause the police to intervene? Or should the deployment of the Public Order Act be limited to times when there are genuine threats to public order?

Tomorrow’s funeral, while not a “state funeral” as such, is most certainly a public event.

And being a public event, it will be open to protest: the police officers on duty tomorrow will need to bear in mind that they have a duty not just to safeguard the funeral proceedings, but to safeguard free expression too.

Padraig Reidy is senior writer at Index on Censorship. @mePadraigReidy

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Against a backdrop of heavy austerity measures in Greece, free speech and the right to protest are being both challenged and undermined. The policies are the result of agreements between the government and the so-called troika, made up of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. Since 2010, steps taken to restore fiscal balance have led to the impoverishment of large segments of society and unemployment has reached new highs: 26.8 per cent in October 2012. At the same time, the rise of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, with an agenda of targeting immigrants, homosexuals and “dissidents” of all kinds, has created palpable social tensions. Police repress protests and political activity by a range of groups, including anarchists and leftists, a fact that has been widely documented. These tactics have been regarded by many as evidence that the government is adopting an authoritarian stance when it comes to criticism and dissent.

The current government, run by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s conservative New Democracy Party, took office in June 2012. In a report published in July 2012, Police Violence in Greece: Not just “Isolated Incidents”, Amnesty International stated:

The failure of the Greek authorities to effectively address violations of human rights by police has made victims of such violations reluctant to report them. … Between 2009 and the first months of 2012, numerous allegations have been received regarding excessive use of force, including the use of chemical irritants against peaceful or largely peaceful demonstrators, and the use of stun grenades in a manner that violates international standards.

In the report, Amnesty made “urgent recommendations to the Greek authorities”, urging them to ensure that police “exercise restraint and identify themselves clearly during demonstrations” and calling for them to improve “safeguards for those in custody and creating a truly independent and effective police complaints mechanism”. The mainstream media — owned mainly by business leaders seen as having a cosy relationship with politicians — have censored or fired journalists who have attempted to speak out about the costly bailout agreements with the troika.

Those who have reported on allegations of police brutality, such as Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi of the Greek state-owned public radio and television broadcasting corporation ERT have also been targeted. On 9 October 2012, Thanos Dimadis, a correspondent for Greek TV and radio station SKAI, reported that bailout payments had been only “partial” and carried out “under a regime of strict economic surveillance”. Later that day, he received instructions from SKAI TV news director Christos Panagopoulos not to include that information in the afternoon and evening news reports. The text of his story was removed from SKAI TV’s website. Dimadis’s report was annoying for the government, which was keen to prevent details about the bailout from becoming public. Payments from the troika had been suspended since June, after a partial tranche was released. The authorities were worried that the public would believe that payments were conditional on even more stringent austerity measures. Dimadis complained to SKAI’s news directors, threatening to resign if they did not back up his report. He eventually quit.

Dimadis told me that senior management at SKAI argued that the reason they withdrew his report was that the prime minister’s office had dismissed it as false. Moreover, Dimadis’s reactionwas described by SKAI as “over the top”.

Censoring the news

The government’s modus operandi is best illustrated by the Kostas Vaxevanis case. Vaxevanis, an investigative journalist and publisher of Hot Doc magazine, was arrested on 28 October 2012 for publishing the names of over 2000 Greek citizens who held Swiss bank accounts, dubbed the “Lagarde list”. The story focused on alleged tax evasion by wealthy Greeks during a time of economic crisis.

“A few months ago, before the release of the ‘Lagarde list’ and my aggressive arrest, there was an organised attempt to destroy my professional reputation: a publication presenting a fake receipt attempted to incriminate me as being on the payroll of the National Intelligence Service (EYP). I realised I was under heavy surveillance and one night I was ambushed by strangers at my home,”Vaxevanis told me in an interview.

During our discussion, on 26 December 2012, Vaxevanis said free speech in Greece was coming under attack yet again: “It’s not something new. When you have ongoing dealings between politicians and businessmen who own media groups, then it comes as no surprise that journalists are driven to self-censorship. Take a look, for example, at the non-existent coverage of the Reuters story on the Piraeus Bank case. You have such a big story, but what you see in the newspapers instead is an advertisement by the bank.”

On 1 November, Vaxevanis was acquitted and cleared on changes of violating privacy laws. But two weeks later, the prosecutor’s office ordered a retrial, claiming the original verdict was “legally flawed”. He could face up to two years’ imprisonment if he is sentenced. In April 2012, Reuters reported on an investigation into documents, including financial statements and property records, relating to Michalis Sallas, executive chairman of Piraeus Bank, and his wife, Sophia Staikou. The press report said “the couple may also be emblematic of the lack of transparency and weak corporate governance that have fuelled Greece’s financial problems”.

But according to journalist Apostolis Fotiadis, no major national or international media outlet reported on the lawsuit filed by Piraeus Bank against Reuters, though the New York Times anda couple of independent journalists attended the trial, including Fotiadis. The ruling is still pending.

On 29 October 2012, a popular morning talk show on the Greek state broadcasting corporation, ERT, was suddenly suspended, following a decision by ERT’s general director of news, Aimilios Liatsos. Shortly before the show was dropped, Kostas Arvanitis, co-presenter of the programme, and his colleague Marilena Katsimi had made comments on air about the minister of public order’s response to an article published in the British newspaper the Guardian written by Helena Smith.

Arvanitis told me:

I’ve been working as a journalist for 25 years. I’ve never experienced anything like this — not to this extent and with such intensity, at least. I consider what happened as aggressive meddling by the political system. It’s becoming more and more clear: every question that is different, every perspective that is different is considered provocative. You can understand what’s happening if you take a careful look at the media coverage of strikes.

Influential columnists and unsigned editorials very often neglect the reasons lower and middle working classes decide to go on strike. Instead of shedding light on their requests, these outlets prefer to present the strikes as instances of “abusing the public space” or “disturbing public peace”. This is the typical official government response as well. In the broader context, of course, this approach fails to report on the growing pressure on workers — on those who still have a job but with reduced salaries, and on those without one.

A Guardian article written by Maria Margaronis was published on 9 October and mentioned allegations of police brutality against protesters. It also referred to and confirmed an earlier article,published on 28 September, written by Helena Smith, that quoted ‘analysts, activists and lawyers’ as saying that the “far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group”.

Margaronis also wrote:

Fifteen anti-fascist protesters arrested in Athens during a clash with supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn have said they were tortured in the Attica General Police Directorate (GADA) — the Athens equivalent of Scotland Yard — and subjected to what their lawyer describes as an Abu Ghraib-style humiliation. If it hadn’t been for the Guardian stories, it is highly unlikely that Golden Dawn’s purported connection with the police would have reached a foreign audience — or the Greek public. The fact that these claims never made the Greek press and that Arvanitis was censored for simply commenting on one of the articles shows just how prevalent censorship is in Greece today.

Dimitris Katsaris is a lawyer for four of the protesters who alleged that they were tortured in GADA after they were arrested during the 30 October protest. He says the way the situation has been handled is a clear “indication of censorship … interviews with the anti-fascists took place in a climate of terror; at the end, the policemen tried to grab me and push me away while I was complaining to them. All of this has been recorded.” However, the censorship didn’t stop there.

Ignoring the truth

Minister of Public Order Nikos Dendias claimed on SKAI TV talk show New Folders on 16 October that the Guardian report on police brutality was false, and threatened to sue the British paper if no proof of torture was found. He questioned the source of the photographs in Margaronis’s article — which showed an injured protester — and claimed that since the anti-fascists hadn’t gone on record with their names and reports, and hadn’t filed a lawsuit against the police, the Guardian was not justified in publishing the story.

Dendias also denied assertions that the arrested protesters were afraid to go on record because they had been threatened by police or extremist Golden Dawn supporters. According to Katsaris, although SKAI and the New Folders’ presenter Alexis Papahelas were already in possession of the photographs indicating police brutality at the time they interviewed Dendias, they did not report on the evidence or broadcast the photographs; had it not been for SYRIZA MP Dimitris Tsoukalis’s intervention on the show, the photos wouldn’t have been shown on air. “From the moment the Guardian’s report was published,” Katsaris says, “I was in contact with New Folders’ editor-in-chief. A week before the show I was providing him photos and evidence that proved torture by the police.” Katsaris says he called the editor-in-chief and asked him to intervene, but after many calls, he was told there was “‘no sufficient airtime” to provide the other side of the case. “So I could not contrast the ministers’ claims. I even asked them, given the material they had, to question the minister in a fair journalistic manner. They didn’t.”

It seems that every time a story about political actions by anti-fascist protesters unfolds, the censorship machinery of the government and Golden Dawn is set in motion. Niko Ago, an Albanian national who had been working as a journalist in Greece for 20 years, faced deportation after publishing a report about alleged criminal activity by Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, who is a member of parliament. Ago revealed that Kasidiaris was facing charges for allegedly participating in a 2007 attack on a postgraduate student and for illegal possession of a firearm .Since then, Ago has been receiving threatening emails containing defamatory and racist comments, some of which he published, including one that said ”Fuck you, Albanian … all you fucking Albanians are going to get what you deserve.”

Muzzling grassroots dissent

A great deal of pressure has also been brought to bear on independent, non-corporate media collectives or individuals who offer grassroots coverage. On 20 December 2012 and on 9 January 2013, police operations were carried out at the Villa Amalias squat in Athens, which has been an important meeting place for alternative political movements for the last 23 years, and at the Radiozones of Subversive Expression, an Athens-based radio station at the University of Economics and Business (ASOEE). Anarchists, leftists and political dissidents used both sites to organise labour, anti-fascist and antiracist rallies. As part of the operations connected with the ASOEE raid, in late December, anti-riot squads and police targeted immigrant street vendors originally from Nigeria, Morocco and Bangladesh who were selling pirated CDs and wooden animal figurines, as well as those who were regarded as supposedly condemning Greece to an economic decline, as the Radiozones website put it. The government, as well as Golden Dawn, tends to regard the economic activities of immigrants as detrimental to the national economy and as a threat to local workers.

Last October, during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Greece, nearly 100 arrests took place, as Avgi newspaper reported. During the 6-7 November general strike, a group of parliamentarians from SYRIZA denounced the massive presence of undercover police on the streets of Athens. According to the coalition, they were both acting as provocateurs among peaceful protesters and arresting people who simply looked “suspicious”. The policy of  pre-emptive arrests has been repeatedly called unconstitutional by human rights organisations, including the Hellenic League for Human Rights.

Tomasz Grzyb/Demotix

During the annual Athens’ Polytechnic School rally on 17 November, dozens of pre-emptive arrests were reported on the website of the weekly political newspaper Kontra and activist websites documented many individual complaints. Indymedia Athens, the local collective of the international grassroots and activists network, published two complaints from citizens arrested on the day of the rally. In both cases, individuals were detained before the demonstration and were kept in custody for five hours without being allowed to contact a lawyer.

Mainstream media failed to report the events, while the government officially ignored complaints. Most news on the events came from blogs and free expression activists.

Online censorship

This systematic abuse is also taking place in the online environment. After posting a Facebook page that ridiculed a well-known Greek Orthodox monk, in late September 2012, a 27-year-old man was arrested on charges of‘”malicious blasphemy and religious insult”. Many online activists and commentators reflected that the page, called Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian (which intentionally combines the name of the monk with a popular Greek food), angered members of Golden Dawn, who called for the man’s arrest under Greece’s anti-blasphemy laws. Free expression advocates responded, with the hashtag #FreeGeronPastitios trending on Twitter, and a petition addressed to parliament calling for the immediate release of the Facebook user was circulated online Vassilis Sotiropoulos, a lawyer and blogger specialising in internet legislation, writes:

“The legislature refuses to address the issue of internet censorship, thereby allowing law enforcers (prosecutors, police officers, judges and lawyers) to freely interpret and utilise the existing legal tools. This phenomenon has sometimes led to misunderstandings, which restrict individual rights of freedom of expression and privacy. Sotiropoulos added that the case of Elder Pastitsios provided perhaps the first example in Greece of an internet company disclosing information to the government in order to identify an individual accused of ‘alleged offences relating to religious satire’.

When considering freedom of speech as a universal human right, it is important to comprehend the social and economic context of our times. Currently, the political and economic elites, in Greece but elsewhere in Europe as well, are repositioning themselves within a capitalist system that is undergoing a continuous transformation.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, William I Robinson, Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued that we are currently living through a phase of capitalism where “nation-state constraints” no longer apply. He stated that the “the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s”, are now being effectively and successfully undermined.

Historically, during periods when there have been attempts to devalue the working class, there have also been challenges to the fundamental right to voice dissent, which has had a direct impact on efforts to improve living conditions. The current economic crisis, then, fits this model; it can also be used as an effective tool for the far right and those using fascist rhetoric to attack immigrants and workers.

Freedom of speech and protest in Greece must, then, be seen in very specific terms. The right to free expression is being systematically and effectively challenged by formidable political and economic agendas. It is crucial that activists, journalists and those being censored and abused continue to make their voices heard.

Christos Syllas is a freelance journalist in Athens. He tweets from @csyllas

This article appears in Fallout: free speech and the economic crisis. Click here for subscription options and more.

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Government officials, as well as members of different political societies were represented at the first meeting on Sunday.

Bahrain’s King Hamad re-opened the door for dialogue in January this year, calling on “representatives of the political societies and independent members of the political community.”

The fresh round of talks, however, has been met with scepticism from some activists.

“The level of distrust between the rulers of the country and the people is so vast, the history of broken promises, and the false pledges of reform make it very difficult to take any state initiative seriously,” campaigner Ala’a Shehabi told Index.

Bahrain has previously made elaborate promises to reform, through initiatives like the Bahrain Independent Commission for Inquiry (BICI), an independent commission initiated by the king to investigate human rights violations following the start of unrest in 2011.

Such efforts, however, have been condemned by rights groups and activist for being more about repairing Bahrain’s shattered international reputation — tarnished by a brutal clampdown on dissent — than it is about an actual interest in reform. Making it no surprise that a renewed call for dialogue has not quelled plans to protest on 14 February.

Maryam Alkhawaja, acting head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights

Acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (which won an Index on Censorship Free Expression Award in 2012) Maryam Alkhawaja told Index that she worries that the dialogue will be used as a PR move, when “there’s going to be a heavy crackdown on the anniversary or before the anniversary.”

Abdulhadi  AlKhawaja and Nabeel Rajab of BCHR are both currently serving jail sentences for their part in protests against the regime.

According to a report released by the Project on Middle East Democracy, only three of the BICI report’s 26 recommendations have been fully implemented.

Ali Al Aswad, a former member of Bahrain’s parliament and member of opposition party Al-Wefaq party, told Index that “the country will not be stable without real reform”, and emphasised the importance of the government putting into place “confidence building measures.”

Shehabi said that “a serious dialogue would be preceded by the release of political prisoners”, and would involve the removal of the country’s Prime Minister (who has been in power for more than 40 years), as well as “the dissolution of Parliament” in order to “discuss how to form a representative body to write a new democratic constitution.”

Al Aswad emphasised that the results of the dialogue “shouldn’t only be an agreement on paper it should also be reflected in the constitution”. He also said that any constitutional changes should be voted on with a referendum.

Still, human rights violations, according to local human rights organisations, are still ongoing in the troubled gulf kingdom. BCHR says that there have been 87 deaths at the hands of security forces since the start of unrest; compared to the initial 30 documented in the BICI report.

For Alkhawaja, human rights “should not be seen as a part of the negotiation” emphasising that human rights “should not be used as a bargaining chip at all”,

While human rights groups will not be a part of the dialogue, US-based organisation Human Rights First emphasised that “Bahrain’s ongoing crisis must be anchored in full respect for human rights”.

According to the state-owned Bahrain News Agency, meetings will be held twice a week, and no high-level government officials have been named as participants in the process.

Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin.

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Russian police raided private apartments and office premises of human rights activists in the city of Voronezh — 500 kilometres south of Moscow — on Wednesday, Index learnt from direct accounts of the episode.

Early in the morning, anti-extremism police forces (known as “Centre E”) and investigators from Moscow entered and searched the private homes of six local activists, who were later taken to police facilities and interrogated. Computer equipment, leaflets and books were confiscated from their flats.

Later, also on Wednesday, eight plain-clothed police officers broke into the Human Rights House-Voronezh, headquarters of several local human rights NGOs. Their visit resembled a “gang raid” — said one witness to Index — rather than a legitimate search by a law enforcement agency. The officers refused to identify themselves or present a legal search warrant. They forced Victoria Gromova, director of the Youth Human Rights Movement, out of her office, blocked several activists in one of rooms, and locked themselves inside another, where they rummaged through documents and files. The raiders did not allow in an attorney the activists called during the incident. They left together with two computers, hard disks and USB drives they confiscated.

The official line on the busts was the investigation following the criminal case against three Russian opposition leaders, Sergei Udaltsov, Leonid Razvozzhaev and Konstantin Lebedev. They stand accused of plotting mass riots in Moscow in May 2012, in the context of the protests against the rigged elections that saw Vladimir Putin elected the president of Russia for the third time.

Andrey Yurov, a human rights defender and a member of the Presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, told Index:

It looks like certain groups within the authorities try to ‘mix’ human rights defenders with political opposition. They want to show we are the same; that we are involved in political activities and struggle for power, while in reality we fight for rights and try to preserve political neutrality. Those groups in power just don’t want any neutral mediators to exist in the society, so it is ‘black and white’ and it is easier ‘to fight enemies of the state’.

Yury Dzibladze, the president of the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, is convinced the latest events mark a new level of the Russian authorities’ war against civil society of the country:

The government certainly sees more and more people in Russia become politically involved; they go out in the streets to protest, they share their views online, they got involved with civic activism in different forms. This broadening activism and protest movement scared the authorities, who are willing to preserve power. This is exactly the reason why several repressive laws were adopted in Russia within last months that changed the very fundamental principles of functioning of the state and its relations with civil society.

The new legal framework that has an impacting on civil society includes regional laws that ban “propaganda of homosexuality”, for example, and restores criminal liability for libel.

However, the most notorious amendments include new rules on assembly, demonstrations and non-governmental organisations activities; those who receive foreign funds for their activities are expected to register as “foreign agents”.

Exactly at the same time when human rights defenders in Voronezh were searched by the police, the State Duma — the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament — adopted in the second reading a new repressive law, already dubbed the “anti-Magnitsky act”. It further deteriorates the legal framework for civil society organisations, as it provides, for instance, for suspending of activities of NGOs “involved in political activities” or “threatening Russian Federation’s interests.” Despite these terms not being legally defined and being clearly political, the State Duma is expected to adopt the draft law in the third, final, reading this Friday.

The laws are not only being adopted, they are implemented against activists that feel direct repressions,” Yury Dzhibladze says. “This is not a ‘cold war’ anymore; this war the authorities of Russia declared to civil society is becoming more and more real.”

Andrei Aliaksandrau is the Belarus and OSCE Programme Officer at Index; he tweets @aliaksandrau

The picture shows the mess left after the police raided Human Rights House-Voronezh. Photo Victoria Gromova’s Facebook page

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Today marks the second anniversary of rigged presidential elections in Belarus, which resulted in a severe clampdown on civil society, independent media and political opposition.

Two years ago, tens of thousands of Belarusians gathered in the centre of Minsk to protest against election fraud that helped the country’s authoritarian ruler Alexander Lukashenko — in power since 1994 — become the president for the fourth consecutive time. The peaceful demonstration was brutally dispersed by the police. More than 700 Belarusian citizens were detained and served administrative arrests; hundreds of protesters, journalists and even accidental passers-by were beaten up by the police.

Seven opposition presidential candidates (out of nine running) were later charged with organising of mass riots; most of them received sentences of imprisonment. One of them, Mikola Statkevich, is still in prison as well as the political activists Paval Seviarynets and Vasil Parfiankou. Two more activists, Zmitser Dashkevich and Eduard Lobau, were arrested in Minsk on the eve of 19 December 2010, and are in prison as well. So is Ales Bialiatski, a prominent human rights defender, whose organisation, Human Rights Centre Viasna, has been one of a key civil society groups that helped victims of repressions after the clampdown.

For the past two years Index has been campaigning for releasing the jailed political prisoners in Belarus. Through targeted social media, news articles, blogs, protests and events, Index together with its partners — such as Belarus Free Theatre and Free Belarus Now campaign — brought the situation faced by ordinary Belarusians to the attention of the international community. Luminaries signed petitions; banks operating within Belarus were targeted to stop selling government bonds. As a result of this pressure, several political prisoners, including high-profile opposition leader, Andrei Sannikov, were released in April 2012.

Kirsty Hughes, CEO of Index on Censorship said:

On the second anniversary of Belarus’ rigged presidential elections, Index calls on the Belarus government to release all political prisoners and to respect its citizens’ fundamental rights. The European Union including all its member states must increase their pressure on the Belarus government to respect fully human rights within Belarus.

Andrei Aliaksandrau is the Belarus and OSCE Programme Officer at Index

photo by photo.bymedia.net

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