– Journalist and human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine From the anthology, Fleeting Words, edited by Naziha Rjiba, published in cooperation with PEN Tunisia and Atlas Publications, with the support of Index on Censorship and IFEX.

Photo: fbioche / Demotix

During the next few months, the National Constituent Assembly (NCA) will present its final draft of Tunisia’s new constitution, a document that has seen many changes of emphasis since the NCA was founded in November 2011. A second draft in December 2012 offered new guarantees for free speech rights and barred prior censorship. Yet the ill-defined and repressive legal framework created by former President Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali to silence dissident voices is still in place, and free speech advocates remain concerned over Islamist vows to criminalise blasphemy.

Although Ben Ali’s autocratic rule ended almost two years ago, his legacy remains on the books. Ben Ali-era laws represent a serious threat to free speech. The public prosecutor’s office used Article 121 (3) of the Tunisian Penal Code to charge Nessma TV boss Nabil Karoui for broadcasting the animated film Persepolis and newspaper director Nasreddine Ben Saida, the publisher of the Arabic-language daily Attounissia, for publishing a photo of German-Tunisian football player Sami Khedira embracing a naked model.

The article prohibits the distribution of publications “liable to cause harm to the public order or public morals”. Supporters of free expression in Tunisia will have to wait until a third and final draft of the constitution, due in Spring 2013, to see if the NCA can find the will to amend or abolish this article and other anti-free speech laws, journalists, bloggers and artists risk facing more “public disorder” and “morality” charges.

The revolution raised urgent need to fundamentally reform the media sector in Tunisia and accordingly the interim government prepared new, progressive, if imperfect, media legislation in 2011 to replace the restrictive laws inherited from the Ben Ali regime. However the proposed legal guarantees were stonewalled by the government of Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali, Ennahda’s Secretary General.

Decree-law 116 requires the creation of an independent high authority to regulate broadcast media. But this decree has been resisted by the interim government which instead has continued to make its own political appointments to senior media management posts.
To date the government has declined to implement the decree, or a parallel decree-law, 115-2011, on the print media. Months after the ousting of Ben Ali, distrust remains deep in the media sector, while resistance to reform prevails.

“The failure to abide by decrees passed under the former transitional government and run by the official gazette thus far is alarming,” said Kamel Labidi, a veteran journalist and human rights defender, who led the National Authority to Reform Information and Communication (INRIC), an independent body tasked with reforming the media sector after the revolution.

“It is shocking to see the government inclined to yield to pressure groups which were close to the country’s fugitive dictator and unwilling to conform to international standards for media broadcasting regulation.”

Attacks on the media and the rise of ‘Sacred Values’

Over 2012, street attacks on free speech in the name of religion increased dramatically, a trend that can only increase, given the apparent indifference of police and level of impunity enjoyed by the attackers. Tunisia’s current government routinely expresses condemnation of violence and its commitment to free speech. Yet the seriousness of that commitment is constantly questioned as officials turn a blind eye to the perpetrators and blame the victims.

Police brutality against journalists did not take long to resume after the fall of the regime either. As early as May 2011, journalists, bloggers and photographers were targeted while covering demonstrations and this pattern of abuse by law enforcement has continued to this date. On 24 March, Al-Jazeera journalist Lotfi Hajji was attacked while reporting from a meeting organised by supporters of the former Interim Prime Minister Béji Caid Essebsi.

Many observers saw the April 2012 statement by Ennahda leader Ghannouchi raising the possibility of “taking radical measures in the news media domain including, possibly, privatising the public media,” as giving tacit sympathy to the violent anti-media protests.

When Islamist ‘salafist’ extremists attacked the Tunis Printemps des Arts (Spring of Arts), a modern contemporary art fair in June, Tunisian Minister of Culture, Mehdi Mabrouk, was quicker to condemn the targeted artists before the attackers and vowed to take legal action against the fair’s organisers.

Previously three Islamists accompanied by a bailiff and a lawyer had toured the Palais El-Abdellia gallery and demanded that two artworks they deemed “un-Islamic” be taken down. It was the last day of the ten day event, but after the gallery closed the salafists came back in larger numbers, broke in and destroyed a number of artworks.

Two exhibitors were charged: Nadia Jelassi for her sculpture depicting a veiled woman surrounded by a pile of rocks and Ben Slama over a work showing a line of ants streaming out of a child’s schoolbag to spell ‘Allah’. Prosecutors used Article 121.3 of the Tunisian penal code which makes it an offence to ‘distribute, offer for sale, publicly display, or possess, with the intent to distribute, sell, display for the purpose of propaganda, tracts, bulletins, and fliers, whether of foreign origin or not, that are liable to cause harm to the public order or public morals’.

Bloggers Ghazi Ben Mohamed Beji and Jaber Ben Abdallah Majri were also jailed under Article 121.3 for publishing online satirical writings about Islam. Majri was detained and tried, while Beji, who fled to Europe, was convicted in absentia. During an appeals hearing on 25 June 2012, the court upheld Majri’s prison sentence, while Beji’s case was not heard on appeal.

The attacks echoed violence in the preceding year, when protesters forced their way into the Afrikart Cinema in downtown Tunis in June 2011 to protest its screening of a documentary entitled Laïcité Inshallah (“Secularism, if God wills”). And in April 2011, an unknown assailant hit film director Nouri Bouzid with a metal bar, shortly after he told a Tunisian radio station that he supported a secular constitution for Tunisia and that his next film would defend civil liberties and criticised religious fundamentalism.

Other attacks carried out by Salafists have targeted artists, including a theatre group performing on Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis in March and academics, notably from Manouba University in north-eastern Tunisia, and journalists as well as media personnel and institutions. The targets included Nessma TV after the showing of Persepolis, for which station boss Karoui was later arrested, tried and fined. Karoui’s home was also firebombed. The film had earlier appeared in Tunisian cinemas with few complaints but when broadcast in October it was dubbed into a Tunisian Arabic dialect, which enraged the Salafists.

The increasing violence surrounding artistic and cultural expression deemed ‘blasphemous’ came as the ruling Islamist Ennahda Movement, which controls 40 per cent of the NCA’s seats, vowed to “legally protect the sacred” and filed a blasphemy bill. Though Ennahda later agreed in principle to drop an anti-blasphemy clause from the draft constitution after negotiations with the other two parties in the ruling coalition, the Congress for the Republic and the Democratic Forum for Work and Liberties, it is by not likely that Islamists will give up their efforts to seek legal authority to criminally ‘punish’ the blasphemous.

The discussion surrounding the proposed amendment of Tunisia’s Penal Code to criminalise violations of sacred values, would impose broad restrictions on freedom of expression far beyond that permitted under international conventions in particular by seeking to protect “sacred values” and “symbols” that do not enjoy their protection.

The draft was vague, according to an Article 19 study, leaving the law, if adopted, open to overly broad interpretation and possible abuse. “What are sacred values?” asked the organisation. “Who determines them and how? What constitutes a violation?” The proposed law also ran counter to the view of UN human rights bodies that laws criminalising defamation of religions and protection of symbols and beliefs contradict rights to freedom of expression. The UN also concluded such laws can be counter-productive in that they are prone to abuse, sometimes at the expense of the religious minorities that they purport to protect.

State attempts to influence the media condemned

Meanwhile, the government continued to appoint the directors of major public media unilaterally, without consulting media professionals, and in the absence of transparent employment processes. The appointments brought the objectivity of the process and the appointees’ own merit and competence into question.

Amidst strong protest, the government had made its own choice of staff to lead the national news agency TAP, Tunisian TV and the country’s leading press house, Société nouvelle d’impression, de presse et d’édition (SNIPE) on 7 January 2012. Though most of these appointments were later revoked after protests organised by the National Union for Tunisian Journalists (SNJT), the trick was repeated in July and August with the appointment of new directors of public radio and a new CEO of Tunisian Television.

On August 21, the government fired Samari Kamel, a well-known human rights activist, as director-general of the influential newspaper group Dar Assabah. He was replaced by Lotfi Touati, a former regime-era police commissioner and government sympathiser. In 2009, Touati was identified as the prime architect of a Ben Ali regime inspired takeover of the leadership of the country’s National Union of Journalists. The Dar Assabah media group is the oldest media house in the country, established in 1951, and Touati’s appointment stirred much controversy.

The SNTJ denounced the government’s move. And Labidi said the government had made the appointments, not based on any media experience or criteria, but because of their alignment with the ruling Ennahda party.

Days after his appointment, Touati withdrew an article due to be published one of the group’s dailies that was critical of his approach. He also fired one of the three top editors at the Arabic-language daily Assabah and published a short list of people authorised to write editorials, the reports said. The chairman of the board of Dar Assabah, Mustapha Ben Letaief and another board member, Fethi Sellaouti both resigned in protest and on September 11, Dar Assabah staff went on strike to protest his appointment.

Touati continued to draw controversy. On September 13 his speeding car injured one of his own reporters, Khalil Hannachi, as he waited outside the group offices to interview him. The journalist lost consciousness and was taken to a local hospital with head and ear injuries.

In general the state of both printing and distribution of independent newspapers is still highly problematic. While many new titles emerged when restrictions were lifted in 2011, few were sustainable, as no proactive policy promoting the emergence of a professional, free, independent and pluralistic press was put in place.

Newspapers also have been facing turmoil and hardships, with individuals close to the old regime still active in the industry. “Rather than transform the public media into free, independent and professional institutions after it had served for years as merely a tool in the hands of the Ben Ali regime, the government’s appointments have honoured Ben Ali’s men in the media sector by awarding them key posts in the public service media,” journalist Fahem Boukadous of the Tunisian Centre for Freedom of the Press (CTPJ) told mission members.

“Many have perceived these appointments as the authority’s attempt to instate individuals it can control in its effort to domesticate the media.” Also the allocation of institutional and public service advertising between media still lacks transparency despite the winding down of the Tunisian External Communication Agency (ATCE), which had used its power of advertising budget patronage to bring the Tunisian media to heel during the Ben Ali era.
Reforming the regulation of Tunisian media

Observers both inside and outside Tunisia have concluded that proposals for the regulation of the country’s media do not meet international standards. Draft clauses in the original text of the new constitution called for the establishment of an “independent media regulatory body,” but chosen by the National Constituent Assembly (ANC).

This raised fears that the government’s past bad practice in appointing staff and pressurising the media would simply be enshrined by the new body. All regulatory powers over the media, including the governing bodies of public media, must have guaranteed independence.

In frustration at the practices of government Labidi and his fellow members of INRIC decided to end its activities on 4 July, having waited in vain for a response from the government since 30 April, when it released its final report and recommendations. A commission of human rights experts on the independent Committee for the Achievement of the Revolution, Political Reform and Democratic Transition (HIROR) followed suit on 24 August.

Another reason for Labidi’s resignation was a draft amendment proposed by a minor political party to the Decree 115-2011, designed to act as a new press code. The code, which is supposed to ensure freedom of press, has been approved by parliament but not yet implemented. The proposed amendments would introduce jail time for insulting sacred icons and public figures, among other restrictions.

Meanwhile, the Internet remains partly free in practice but the repressive legal framework governing web usage under Ben Ali remains. In May the Minister for Human Rights and Transitional Justice Samir Dilou told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that “the Internet was a partner in the revolution so the government would not punish it.” The reality has been a little less straightforward.

The Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI), the web censor under Ben Ali, was ordered by a military tribunal in 2011 to filter five Facebook pages criticising the army. In early 2012, despite the objections of the new ATI leadership, there were calls for a blanket ban on access to pornographic websites, eventually overruled by Tunisia’s highest court.

The existing 1997 Telecommunications Decree and ‘Internet regulations’, make Internet Service Providers (ISPs) liable for third-party content without exceptions – in breach of international conventions. They also require ISPs to monitor and take down content considered contrary to public order and ‘good morals’.

ISPs were still required to submit a list of subscribers on a monthly basis and ban use of encryption tools without prior state approval. The proposed press code – with its powers to bring criminal defamation charges and overly broad penalties for ‘hate speech’ – can be applied to online publishers as well. However, as the cases of bloggers Ghazi Ben Mohamed Beji and Jaber Ben Abdallah Majri illustrated, ordinary public order law from the Ben Ali era can suffice to silence critical opinion.

Under the former regime, ATI used to use online censorship, but in an interview with ATI CEO Moez Chakchouk, he said the technology, installed in 2006, had not been extended or updated since 2011 and had been essentially abandoned in the face of a 50% increase in online traffic in Tunisia during that year.

“If the state wants to draw red lines for net freedom, it should first establish an independent authority to regulate the internet. Internet legislation should not be drafted without a regulation authority that creates balance, between public and individual interests. The state has the right to protect and eliminate defamation, but citizens have the right to freely express themselves. So we need balance, and if the government cannot create such balance, a conflict of interests will occur.”

Constitutional reform

The Tunisian National Constituent Assembly (NCA) is currently preparing a third version of the draft constitution, expected in the spring of 2013. The current version, published at the end of 2012 carries several articles that threaten human rights in general, raise questions about the Tunisia’s commitment to international conventions long ratified by the country and lack of sufficient guarantees for the independence of the judiciary. It also carries some improvements, such as the removal of articles that threatened freedom of expression by criminalizing “normalization” with Israel and clearer language to preserve equal rights for women in Tunisia.

The draft lacks – and would significantly benefit from – a defined section to serve as a Bill of Rights, and placed at the heart of the new Constitution. The constitution must provide a clear right for people to hold opinions and that right should not be subject to any restrictions.

The bill should define freedom of expression broadly and including the historic international right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, while ensuring that this guarantee covers all types of expression and all modes of communication. The only legitimate restrictions on free expression must be determined by law and are necessary only when respecting the rights or reputations of others and for the protection of national security, public order or public health.

The constitution also should provide a legal mechanism to ensure that there is a right to freedom of information and there must be clear guarantees for freedom of religion for all people.

The constitution draft also fails to address the worst abuses of the Ben Ali regime in its relations with the judiciary. The guarantees for the independence of the judiciary are too limited; there is lack of clarity over the right for judges’ security of tenure and too much government authority over the definition of the conditions under which a judge can be dismissed.

An independent judiciary is key to institutionalising free expression in Tunisia and preventing people from being harassed or jailed for exercising their right to free expression,” said Riadh Guerfali, a co-founder of the participatory website Nawaat, a partner of Index on Censorship. “Ending impunity for those who attack free expression is critical as well.”

Some observers have raised questions about Article 15, which suggest that international conventions that Tunisia has ratified are only compulsory if they do not “contravene the constitution” in an unspecified way.

Under the Vienna Convention, when an international treaty had been ratified or approved it will become binding in domestic law. But the language as it stands may tempt judges and legislators to disregard these treaties on the pretext that they contradict the new constitution, Human Rights Watch said.

The importance of an independent judiciary was underlined by Guerfali, himself a lawyer. “Beyond formal guarantees of the right to freedom of expression and information in the Constitution and international instruments, what is key in today’s democracies is the case law.

“Indeed, in front of notions as vague as public morals, national security and public order, precedents established over decades have enabled the protection of fundamental rights. Yet, in Tunisia, such positive case law is lacking. There is no doubt that legal instruments should be set to prevent vague notions to undermine otherwise protected fundamental rights, including that to freedom of expression.”

– Reported by Rohan Jayasekera, Ghias Aljundi and Yousef Ahmed

World Press Freedom Day

European Union: Is the European Union faltering on media freedom?
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Brazil: Press confronts old foes and new violence

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Tuesday’s expected declaration of Tunisia’s election results will say much about the main players in its great adventure in democracy building. But it won’t reveal much about what those players plan to do with with their unique mandate. For that you’ll need an independent Tunisian media, in print, on air and online.

In turn that means a new legal and institutional framework based on freedom of expression, swifter development of the broadcast and print media sectors and protections for the the internet against the resurgence of censorship.

Tunisia’s Sunday elections will establish a 217-member constituent assembly to draft a new constitution and give legitimacy to an interim government ahead of full parliamentary elections.

The extraordinary turnout, estimated at an astounding 90 per cent, gives both authority and diversity to the new assembly. It increases the chances that the assembly will allow space for women, rural and inland industrial communities and a proportional voice for minorities — a priority of the Ben Achour Commission that led the election’s organisation.

It also finally gives some kind of true measure to Islamist political influence and brings members of the old regime still in politics out of the shadows.

The stage is set for a complex debate that will test the Tunisian media and its capacity to communicate the works of the new assembly. But despite solid efforts by the country’s post-revolution National Authority to Reform Information and Communication (INRIC) — the media landscape evolution has been slow.

To meet the challenge the new assembly must promote strong constitutional and legal guarantees for freedom of expression rights and access to information. There will need to be a properly supported successor to INRIC, an independent regulatory body that can effectively promote the independence and growth of the media.

The new body and the regulations that it implements will have to guide public service broadcasting as well as private, commercial and community broadcasting and empower and protect journalists dedicated to quality journalism that can serve and inform the public at large.

Just voted, photo by ze_dach on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

These points were raised this month by the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), currently chaired by Index on Censorship.

Based on the results of a two-day strategy workshop of Tunisian media and legal experts held in Tunis on 27 and 28 September, its report also calls for the promotion of a digital culture, by supporting blogging, online activism and citizen journalism.

It’s not clear how the assembly will handle new legislation, or how it will deal with current draft decrees that will have force of law but in the case of the print and broadcast sector have proven highly contentious in their drafting.

An increasingly heated debate between Islamists and secularists in Tunisia led to a street protest by thousands of liberal demonstrators the week before the vote. On 9 October, over 300 pro-Islamists tried to attack the HQ of Nessma TV after a showing of the film Persepolis, which takes an acerbic view of Islamists in Iran.

That was followed by the filing of a claim signed by 144 lawyers alleging breaches of the still valid pre-revolution media law by Nessma TV head Nabil Karoui and articles 226 and 226 (b) of the criminal code prohibiting offences against religion and public decency.

Sami Ben Abdallah, a Tunisian blogger resident in France, was banned from leaving Tunis airport in September and questioned for allegedly sending insulting SMS messages. His family told Reporters sans Frontieres they linked the harrassment to his investigations into a businessman close to the former regime.

These and other incidents suggest that the rights of the independent media in Tunisia is built on much less stable foundations than its citizens expect and demand, especially given its responsibilities in the months to come.

Click here for tweets, links and features from the opening hours of the 23 October constitutional assembly elections in Tunisia on Storify.

Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor at Index on Censorship, which currently chairs the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring group of free expression advocacy organisations.

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Conversation was limited to exchanges over faked allegations quickly traced back to black propagandists in Tunisia. One, that Index was campaigning against an-Nahda over the false claim that it had issued death threats to Tunis writers; two, that an-Nadha had targeted Index on Censorship over some contribution to the Danish cartoons saga.

After both falsehoods were quickly attributed to former president Zine el-Abidene Ben Ali’s secret police, we hung up on each other. Years have passed. Ben Ali has fled to Saudi Arabia and an-Nahda’s leader Rachid Ghannouchi is preparing to fly home to Tunisia after years in exile in London.

He’s planning, Ghannouchi told the Financial Times, “to be involved in contributing alongside others to the dismantling of the dictatorship and to help in the process of taking Tunisia from the dictatorial system to a democratic one”.

He’s welcome, former dissident Najib Chebbi, now development minister in Tunisia’s interim government, told the BBC. “I think, this is my personal point of view, that moderate political Islam has a place in the new Tunisia.”

The movement says it equates conventional democracy with traditional Arab systems of shura (consultation). In his FT interview Ghannouchi spoke positively about freedom of conscience and the significant rights of women enshrined by Tunisia’s progressive Personal Status Code.

They make regional parallels. Ghannouchi compared an-Nahda with Turkey’s ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). “Look to Morocco,” said Chebbi, “they integrated moderate political Islam and they get stability.”

The Party of Justice and Development (PJD), an Islamist group, has sat in the Moroccan parliament since 1997. An Algerian Islamist party, Ennahda, led by Sheikh Abdallah Djaballah, is also allowed to participate in political processes. And like both, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood similarly manages its relationship with the regime with care, restricting the numbers of its candidates and moderating its criticism.

To veteran French analyst Olivier Roy, author of The Failure of Political Islam, Western fear of radicalism helped Arab despots stay in power. Yet today, he writes, “everywhere in the Arab Middle East, the generation that is leading the protest against dictatorship does not have an Islamist character”.

It’s not completely without it, judging by YouTube film (here and here) of Islamist protesters in Tunisia, feeding a great deal of scepticism. One scary “exclusif” feature on the French language Maghreb Intelligence website, warned of a secret an-Nadha plot to take over.

Under this stratégie de conquête, the movement would bide its time rebuilding party networks in-country after years of appalling repression, ignore an unwinnable (for them) presidential election, and concentrate instead on the expected parliamentary and local municipal elections to follow. The shocktroops leading the surge, allege Maghreb Intelligence, will be the regenerated General Union of Tunisian Students (UGTE) in which Ghannouchi’s key leaders cut their political teeth years ago.

“I am no Khomeini,” he told the FT. “My age does not allow me to consider such aspirations. I am nearing 70 years old and there are new generations inside (an-Nadha) more able, more suited to political activism.”

Though official corruption and lack of democracy was a key motivator, the Tunisian uprising had its roots in crippling unemployment among a generally well educated youth. By 2005 a fifth of all Tunisians were aged between 15 and 24, by 2007 unemployment rates for some of them had reached 40 per cent.

Tunisian youth are a prickly bunch, with as little time for the opposition as they have for the government. Their free expression can have a hard edge, going by last December’s spat between Tunisian rapper Mohamed El Jandoubi and liberal female artists. El Jandoubi’s raps denounced Tunisian intellectuals for distancing themselves from Islamic values, including women artists like Sawssen Maalej and Olfa Youssef, both targets of conservative Islamist ire in recent years.

A number of progressive activists condemned him for fostering extremism. “I’m an artist who reflects what he sees in our society,” El Jandoubi told magharebia.com. “I consider the art of rap to be a mirror of society, and that what I said in my song is the opinion of that society, and is not necessarily my own opinion as a person.”

The comments at the end of magharebia.com’s piece are illuminating, and indicate how far El Jandoubi’s supporters in Tunisian society are prepared to reinterpret his message into something else entirely. The same problem may apply to Ghannouchi.

Almost exactly six years ago (January 2005) Index on Censorship interviewed the former editor of the Movement’s banned weekly news magazine al-Fajr, Abdallah Zouari. Then exiled to the far south east of the country, separated from his family and placed under house arrest and constant surveillance, he spoke fluently about the importance of both media and internet in keeping the movement alive.

Banned in Tunisia, in the years that followed the movement cultivated good relations with the Islamist-sympathetic London based Tunisian satellite channel al-Hiwar and Zouari and others did much as they could with the internet.

Even the recreation of the weekly al-Fajr, banned in 1991, or its rumoured recreation as a daily paper in Tunis will leave the movement with a long way to catch up in the world of “new post-Islamist politics in the Middle East”.

An extraordinary flowering of independent media, print, online and broadcast is coming to Tunisia. It will quickly dissect the motives of an-Nahda’s October 18 alliance of political parties and civil society groups — including Chebbi’s Progressive Democratic Party and the Tunisian Communist Workers Party — and plumb the depths of the movement’s Islamist convictions.

Zouari’s website is currently hacked by a group claiming to be pro-opposition, and a hoped-for relaxation of controls on imams, allowing them to preach the movement line in mosques, will not fill the communication gap.

Ghannouchi says the alliance was founded two simple demands: to call for freedom of expression and association for everyone and to recognise the rights of all parties. How his followers defend that freedom for all will be its lasting test.

Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor at Index on Censorship, which currently chairs the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring group of free expression advocacy organisations.

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Mindful of the lazy analysis that gave social media undeserved credit for fomenting Iran’s Twitter revolution that wasn’t, there was no rush to be fooled twice by the wave of chatter under the #sidibouzid hash tag that had followed each new development in Tunisia.

Sidi Bouzid was the town where a despairing jobless ex-student set himself alight in December, killing himself and setting off weeks of violence that culminated in Friday’s flight of despot president Zine el Abidene Ben Ali.

Al Jazeera satellite tv was relentless in its coverage, even as Tunisia’s own media stayed resolutely silent. Twitter and 3G phones played their parts and to fill the rest of the information gap left by the pro-state press, Tunisians used well honed circumvention skills to read websites blocked by one of the region’s most advanced web censorship systems.

But Tunisia is a well networked country at a human level too. Young, highly educated, technically savvy, every sector of society has its own community of articulate, engaged critics of the regime. Actors, lawyers, musicians, teachers, trades unionists, most of whom ignored the official press and were unimpressed by state sanctioned broadcasters.

These loosely networked groups were countered by gaggles of made-up organisations founded and funded by the regime to give thin support to its works, wryly named GONGOs or Government Organised Non-Governmental Organisations.

Independents who tried to turn their networks into active civil society groups were prevented from legally registering and thus effectively banned. Those few already registered — such as the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH), the Middle East’s oldest human rights group — or the country’s journalists’ union, found themselves organisationally shackled by a series of arcane legal challenges.

Denial of the right to freedom of association was enforced by the denial of another right, that of a fair hearing before an independent judiciary. Defying international practice, the president’s representatives handpicked judges, punishing those who failed to deliver regime-friendly verdicts with banishment to minor circuit courts the other side of the country.

Yet walking through Tunis’ Palace of Justice last month with independent lawyer Mohammed Abbou, a man jailed, beaten and publicly reviled by the state for years, we could hardly pass for scores of colleagues happy to be seen talking, hugging or kissing him. All under the eyes of the plainclothes police trailing him and us in an intentionally obvious intimidatory manner.

Even in a chamber as firmly controlled as the Palace of Justice, you wondered where the regime was, not least because Ben Ali’s mantra had been that the opposition was  just a tiny minority, funded by hostile governments and manipulated by foreign activists.

Everywhere you went you met well educated and connected people talking, complaining, speculating, sharing banned information.

Ben Ali’s men worked hard to to manipulate the media or sell it off to his friends and family, then assiduously targeted bloggers and social media leaders. Then in his last throw of the dice the night before the collapse, Ben Ali did a bizarre u-turn on live tv, unblocked banned websites and promised media reforms.

It was testimony to the regime’s belief in the significance of free expression. It believed the key to remaining in power lay in stopping Tunisians from talking, by hacking and deleting their e-mail accounts, bugging their phones, bringing trumped up criminal charges against them, or if all else failed, ordering a couple of thugs to give them a vicious kicking.

In the end the message they shared was that the emperor had no clothes. The debate goes on as to whether Twitter played the little boy to point that out first. Whatever, things will not be as they were.

People have been given a voice and they will not readily give it up. Those tweeters and photo sharers who worked hard to document the fall of the old regime will be doubly inspired by Friday’s triumph to track attempts by the new one to obstruct reform.

The system was bust before and is still bust, with or without Ben Ali, and still needs fixing.

Special circumstances apply in Tunisia that tend to rule out the weekend’s events as a model for revolutions anywhere, let alone as a harbinger of a Twittered Arab Spring.

The regime’s heart was unusually hollow, even by the standards of the region. Unlike Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali did not buy up a broad core of support to keep him in power, but kept the ill-gotten gains of staggering corruption in the hands of a small coterie of friends and family.

The recent WikiLeaks release of a handful of secret diplomatic cables detailing the depth of this corruption was not news to Tunisians. What seemed to bite deeper was the fact that the US ambassador to Tunis treated it as a tolerable fact, no matter for concern.

Maybe that finally broke the Tunisians of the oft-cited Arab “habit” of living in denial about their problems, and inspired them instead to look among themselves for answers.

It at least raises the possibility that the Arab world’s social networks might yet do more than just be on hand to lubricate a stalled engine for change, driven by economic inequality and fuelled by opportunity.

Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor at Index on Censorship, which currently chairs the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring group of free expression advocacy organisations.

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A wave of protest and sometimes violent repression is spreading across the country from its trigger point in Sidi Bouzid, in southern Tunisia, where jobless 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight on 17 December in protest against unemployment. Bouazizi is since reported to have died.

What little news that escapes the country’s censorship regimes and isn’t buried by a compliant pro-government press comes via a loose and limited network of citizen journalists online. This has made them a prime target for the state.

“The police aim to break into the accounts of users to know who communicates with whom and on what subject,” blogged Astrubal, the Tunisian co-editor of the independent www.nawaat.org website, “with the end objective of dismantling the citizen journalist networks that formed spontaneously after the Sidi Bouzid protests.”

Monitoring by Index on Censorship and others has found that independent journalists in Tunisia — print, online or on air — are routinely persecuted. New applications for independent newspaper licenses or radio frequencies are ignored. State control of the judiciary ensures that appeals are refused and political critics jailed on trumped-up charges.

Private broadcasting is controlled by the friends and family of Tunisian president Abidene Ben Ali. All five licences issued since 2003 have gone to them, most recently, Radio Shems and Radio Express, launched in the autumn by his daughter Cyrine Ben Ali and Mourad Gueddiche, son of his private physician.

Journalists have been repeatedly dragged to courts, like Mouldi Zouabi of the beleaguered Radio Kalima, or harassed like Taoufik Ben Brik, Lotfi Hajji, Slim Boukhdhir and Lotfi Hidouri.

Last year an amendment to Article 61a of the Penal Code promised up to five years in jail for Tunisians in “contact with agents of a foreign power or a foreign organisation” who could harm Tunisia’s “economic security”. The aim was to cut off stringers working for foreign media and silence protestors who want the EU to demand human rights guarantees from Tunis in exchange for “advanced” trading status.

This systematic stifling of independent opinion over the years has turned many Tunisians to the internet for news denied by the mainstream press, keeping the Tunisian online censor, popularly nicknamed Ammar 404, particularly busy.

Tunisia was the first Arab state to embrace the internet, and to no-one’s surprise, the first to systematically repress it.

Five years ago, against the advice of free expression groups, including Index on Censorship, the UN chose Tunis to host the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), established to lead states towards “concrete steps to establish the foundations for an Information Society for all, reflecting all the different interests at stake”.

Today Tunisia is pioneering new methods to slander or silence dissidents and nip opposition in the bud online, stepping up pressure after the 28 November release of a selection of 17 secret cables from the US embassy in Tunis to Washington DC.

Tunisian activists at the nawaat.org portal set up a website — Tunileaks — within an hour. The government responded just as quickly, blocking the site as it has blocked several others over the years — including at times, Index on Censorship’s own webpages. More threateningly they also tried to block the secure encyrpted HTTPS version of the site by blocking the Google Apps engine that runs the Tunileaks site.

Email accounts and Facebook friend lists are prime targets for hacking, as the state tries to identify the leaders of the protests, driven by a social movement initiated by lawyers, journalists, and trades unionists, but energised by a general sense of frustration over unemployment and corruption in Tunisia.

This state-directed hacking directly parallels the rival attacks organised from abroad by the “hacktivist” group Anonymous. Tagged on Twitter as #optunisia, the attacks on Tunisian state-run websites, included the president, prime minister, the stock exchange and several ministries.

“This is a warning to the Tunisian government,” Anonymous stated. “Attacks at the freedom of speech and information of its citizens will not be tolerated. Any organisation involved in censorship will be targeted and will not be released until the Tunisian government hears the claim for freedom to its people.”

The conventional wisdom is that the alternative communications links offered by the internet and social networking on the web will have a limited effect on change in Tunisia. CNN’s Octavia Nasr considers that despite the fact that the internet is longer and more broadly established in Tunisia than in most Arab countries, its online activists are not so well personally connected.

But with national media either repressed or full square behind the state, it remains the main conduit for news of any kind from Tunisia, especially for foreign media, chief among them al-Jazeera, which has given substantial coverage to the protests, even though its operations in the country are strictly limited, requiring it to rely on video content and updates from social networking sites.

“There have been complaints from bloggers about this silence but in a way it’s refreshing not to have the likes of Fox News, Bernard Lewis and Glenn Beck telling us what should be done,” commented Middle East observer Brian Whitaker. “In any case, the Tunisians — so far at least — seem to be getting on quite well with their uprising by themselves.”

Individual acts of protest are going on, such as this poignant spelling out of “Free Tunisia” by students, but they are not yet getting the numbers of viewers needed to trigger an Iran-style global media focus. Inside Tunisia, the internet’s contribution is a long way even from convincing the majority, if not to support change, at least not to oppose it.

But the internet is also a tool of youth. As @weddady, one of the most diligent tweeters of news from Tunisia put it: “Someone do the math: Ben Ali has been in power for 23 years, 54.3% of tunisians r under 30 #sidibouzid #Tunisia.”

Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor at Index on Censorship, which currently chairs the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group

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When WikiLeaks turned from publishing battlefield reports to secret US State Department cables, the initial effect of seeing state-to-state relations shorn of traditional diplomatic obfuscation was electric. The lasting effect was more like reading your teenager’s Facebook page, initially shocking but ultimately predictable, and for those with the right experience, actually pretty familiar.

Again, there were fears about exposure and endangerment. The Atlantic magazine even alleged that WikiLeaks had exposed Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to treason charges by revealing his views on sanctions, as if Robert Mugabe had ever felt that he needed “evidence” to jail someone.

Some regimes are passing laws to extend the meaning of treason to cover economic “attacks” as well as military or political ones. In that particular hall of mirrors simply voicing sympathy for a tourism boycott can get you bundled into the back of a van.

And any association with the US looks bad to a lot of people in some parts of the world, especially when done in private. WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange hardly helped this week by telling al-Jazeera TV that many officials visiting US embassies are “spies for the US in their countries”.

Generally though, the diplomats and politicians named and shamed (and sometimes praised) in the WikiLeaks cables tended to escape chastened but safe from the experience.

The risk is far greater for the many ordinary human rights defenders and civil society activists who have risked a visit to US embassies in their home countries. They come, often in suprisingly large numbers, to make advocacy cases to what they hope are sympathetic US ears, and until WikiLeaks, away from the dictators’ prying eyes.

Mercifully, it seems — though Assange now suggests otherwise, to al-Jazeera at least — the rights defenders have been saved from being cited in US embassy CIA staff reports.

Intelligence officers have a reputation for boosting the significance of their reports by making more out of routine contact with dissidents than the exchanges actually deserve. But the CIA removed them all from the SIPRNET digital shoebox of US diplomatic cables that alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning drew from.

But the risk remains, as I was firmly told by a US embassy political attache in an Arab state this month. A veteran human rights campaigner had already warned that many local rights activists expect more support from US diplomats than they will actually get; in the vault-like security of a typical US embassy they speak more freely than they possibly should.

The embassy attache was adamant. It was only a matter of time before a human rights defender was exposed by WikiLeaks, and jailed or killed as a result. “Then in that case,” he said grimly, “you may ask Mr Assange exactly what he thinks he has done for ‘transparency and human rights’”.

Weirdly, almost on cue, Wikileaks released a cable that might have proven his point, in which the name of the source — a public critic of a particularly reprehensible head of state — was redacted by WikiLeaks. However the redactor, presumably unfamiliar with the dissident’s work, failed to recognise a giveaway clue cited in the cable’s title.

Even with the redactions, anyone with reasonable knowledge of the country concerned could have guessed who was being quoted giving off-the-record, publicly unatributable, deep background information — or so he thought — to US diplomats about top-level state corruption.

Again, dictators don’t need evidence to jail people, and the key equation at the heart of the work of free expression defenders supported by Index on Censorship is simple: risk balanced against effect.

The risk posed by exposure by WikiLeaks is one more fresh edge to the multi-faceted threat they, their families and friends already face.

But WikiLeaks is supposed to be helping, no?

Redaction of data was never meant to be WikiLeaks’ prime duty, so it should be no surprise that they do it unwillingly, and when they do, that they can do it badly or obscurely. Index on Censorship raised the issue of the giveaway clue in the title of the otherwise redacted leaked cable with WikiLeaks directly.

They replied sympathetically, but noted that the redacted name was already out there as author of a critical book about the head of state. “…(S)o we feel that too much redaction is futile,” said the reply. “However, we do feel it is better to be safe than sorry and so have redacted the title…”

Well, OK, but the root of the question is the same as that raised everywhere, very specifically at an Index on Censorship debate between WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and UK journalist David Aaronovich at London’s City University this year.

Since WikiLeaks decided to take editorial responsibility for selecting, redacting and publishing the content, what editorial criteria do they apply, what process is followed, what in-house oversight is there of their work and what qualifies for redaction under its “harm minimisation procedure”?

WikiLeaks itself said this was a problem, solved by opening up the data in advance to selected international publications, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times among them. That relationship has since splintered over coverage of Julian Assange’s personal issues, but the relevance of adding external expertise to the process — expertise that WikiLeaks doesn’t have — still stands.

Assange repeatedly maintains that “(WikiLeaks) must protect our sources at whatever cost. This is our sincere concern”. But while he says his organisation presently releases files in a “responsible” manner, he fears extradition to the US and makes a clear threat to everyone involved, willingly or otherwise. “If I am forced we could go to the extreme and expose each and every file that we have access to.”

It’s easy to underestimate how much time US embassy staff spend talking to dissidents, opposition leaders, human rights and civil society activists. Hundreds could be named in the WikiLeaks collection of diplomatic cables still unreleased. It might be helpful to provide advance warning to dissidents about to get their moment in the WikiLeaks sun, and prepare the various organisations charged to defend them.

The WikiLeaks core principles, at least as they were when Index on Censorship honoured the organisation in 2008, are good ones. But surely it’s possible to bring together independent groups of advisors, or draw on the advice of local human rights defenders. Maybe just three experts, easy to find, who before redacting or not redacting a name, will have at least read one of the redactee’s books or are more personally acquainted with the threats he or she faces?

Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor and Deputy Chief Executive of Index on Censorship

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This year’s edition — the 12th — weighs in at and 194 full-colour pages. Foreign Secretary David Miliband came straight from the airport and a plane from China to launch its publication in London on Wednesday.

As expected this year’s report carried a few qualified defences of suspect policy, such as the UK’s decision not to “fully endorse” the Goldstone Report on Gaza and its failed bid to resist publication of seven-paragraphs of a judgment of an account of Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohammed’s torture in order to protect “intelligence sharing” with the US.

But mostly, the Annual Report is a concise account of the world’s human rights ills and an accounting of the government’s efforts to address them. And the report still retains the ambition of clarity and focus that was Robin Cook’s own wish for the Foreign Office.

A good part of that focus is due to the report’s singling out of “countries of concern” — 22 in 2009. This prioritisation is more than just about pagination. When the reports first started publication, this focus on certain countries over others — as frustrating as it was for rights activists concerned for nations off the UK’s list — noticeably improved the working ways of the entire Foreign Office.

UK embassy staff in the target countries were expected to significantly raise their game. They and desk staff in London got more resources and clearer mandates for rights advocacy. The habit of looking for areas of intervention where UK diplomats could contribute most effectively also fostered greater cooperation with journalists, experts and NGOs.

Yet today the Foreign Office seems more concerned with clarity of political message than effectiveness of partnership. It was once usual practice to ask free expression groups for a list of individual cases of prisoners of conscience that embassy staff could concentrate on. In recent years that focus has tended to be lost to a broad-brush approach that bows to the dogma of reactive “strategic communications”.

Much of the hand-in-hand work with free expression groups Index on Censorship would expect from the FCO a decade ago has given way to fairly superficial engagement and sharing of general policy documents. Government ministers stopped attending meetings with free expression groups and the number of briefings by and for NGOs visibly reduced.

This recently led William Horsley and Colin Bickler of the UK National Commission for UNESCO’s Communications & Information Committee to pen a forthright 2,300 word email to the Foreign Office, co-signed by Index on Censorship chief executive John Kampfner and more than a dozen other individuals and organisations. They urged the Foreign Office to “press governments worldwide to live up to their formal commitments to protect freedom of expression and the safety of journalists and others who exercise that right.”

The message called for a re-energising of the FCO’s Free Expression Panel, which in the days of Robin Cook and a few years thereafter was the key forum for engagement between experts, activists and the Foreign Office. “We ask you to restore the practice of addressing detailed work with lists of journalists or others in need of support from the UK government and civil society,” advised the email.

A “flood of resolutions and texts” had often proven ineffectual in the face of “a relentless rise in the number of killings and violent attacks against journalists worldwide”. More effort was needed to “set a real example of coordination between government and active civil society and expert non-governmental organisations.”

The email made a strong case for the UK to act through the world’s UN and intergovernmental organisations and ensure that cases of violence and persecution of journalists are prosecuted in all jurisdictions.

Stronger words from the UK on international bodies — particularly against impunity for murderers of journalists — are essential, especially ahead of the International Red Cross’s policy-setting Conference in 2011 and, with an eye to Russia’s murderous record on free speech, the UK’s chairing of the Council of Europe in 2011-12.

There is also a much missed level of openness in relations these days. Whatever former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray’s later disputes with the FCO, it was Whitehall diplomats working through the Free Expression Panel that provided a copy of his October 2002 speech that controversially attacked US tolerance of torture in Tashkent, specifically for Index on Censorship to publish.

But the real effect of the FCO’s contribution is felt where the focus directs action from Whitehall to the embassies themselves. The UK ambassador to Nicaragua’s persistent interest in the case of persecuted women’s rights activist Patricia Orozco last year, or embassy level funding support for free expression advocacy NGO Article 19’s expert advice to Nepal’s constitutional drafters, are two good examples.

David Miliband promised more such practical help to meet specific needs. “That means funding projects to give a greater voice to civil society in places such as Vietnam and Pakistan…

“Condemning the oppression of journalists in Russia, human rights campaigners in Belarus, opposition politicians in Syria, trade unionists in Colombia, and gay rights activists in Uganda, Burundi and Malawi. These are all small steps. But each one matters.”

But to cite one example, the right of human rights advocates to travel freely and without harassment is effectively raised and defended at international and regional level, and strongly communicated to repressive governments. Yet sometimes the key step is to back the diplomatic words up by simply sending an embassy official down to the airport to see the advocates in question safely catch their plane.

Austrian diplomats once did all that — including the airport wave-off – in response to Index on Censorship and other groups’ raised concerns about Tunisian harassment of travelling dissidents. Time for the UK Foreign Office to routinely show that kind of accessibility, adaptability and engagement in human rights on the ground.

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The word McCarthyite is all too easily tossed about these days, but it’s hard not to apply it to what’s happening in Sri Lanka, as President Mahinda Rajapaksa prepares to follow his snap re-election with a blitz parliamentary vote and a ruthless crackdown on political critics and independent media ahead of it.

Rajapakse’s January re-election and last year’s military victories over separatist Tamil Tiger insurgents have not slowed his habit of publicly denouncing his critics without evidence; fully aware that his words put his targets at risk from gangs of armed supporters.

“This is clearly a politically motivated practice of making accusation of disloyalty or treason without proper regard for evidence,”says journalist and rights activist Uvindu Kurukulasuriya. Brad Adams, Asia Director at Human Rights Watch describes it as “a carefully coordinated witch hunt… extremely dangerous and irresponsible in a country where journalists and activists have often been threatened and killed.”

With less than a month to go before parliamentary elections, Kurukulasuriya tells Index that the main aim is simple censorship. “It is a psychology of fear through abductions, killings and other form of pressure that is brought in,” he says. “It’s not so much about what is written, but what you should not write. For instance, we are asked not to refer to this and that, or to the President, or to the Secretary of Defence. Media in Sri Lanka certainly (suffer from) a certain censorship, but this is beyond the norm.”

Since the January 2010 presidential election, the government has engaged in a campaign to silence and discredit journalists and non-governmental organizations, a trend that reached a peak with the publication on March 3 of an apparently leaked government surveillance list of more than 30 journalists and activists.

Two of the names high up the list, Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) Executive Director Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu and J.C. Weliamuna,  Executive Director of Transparency International, Sri Lanka (TISL) warned there are reasonable grounds for fear about the physical liberty and safety of those named.

“There has been no justice or punishment served by recourse to the criminal justice system in the numerous cases of killings, enforced disappearances and abductions,” they wrote to Rajapakse this week, “and the entrenched culture of impunity, arbitrariness and the ineffectiveness of law enforcement have only encouraged further abuses.”

“There is a fundamental misconception that opposition to specific actions and policies by the government is equal to support for the opposition,” said Saravanamuttu and Weliamuna. “It is not only a fundamental democratic principle but also part of the fundamental rights declared and protected by the constitution that Sri Lankans are entitled to the freedoms of thought, conscience, opinion, expression, association and occupation.”

“This smacks of retaliation for reporting on violations during the presidential election,” says Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director. “Despite the elections and the end of the war against the Tamil Tigers, the government seems to have a hard time getting rid of the habit of repression.”

Both the CPA and TISL played a key role in monitoring the January presidential election, reporting on electoral violations and the government’s misuse of state resources to campaign in favor of incumbent Rajapaksa.

Dozens of journalists and activists have fled the country and am atmosphere of impunity and intimidation that has worsened since January. Journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda of Lanka eNews disappeared on January 24 and remains missing, despite calls for a serious investigation. On March 9, the parliament voted to extend emergency regulations, widely used to target activists, until after April’s elections.

“In the run up to the legislative elections slated for April, the Sri Lankan government is clearly trying to divert criticism from itself after the egregious violations perpetrated against the press and other opposition candidates during the recent presidential election,” said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of US based free speech group Freedom House this week. “This is yet another example of the government acting with impunity and trying to discredit voices of dissent.”

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The country’s media is standing firm against a government call not to broadcast reports of violence on election day, charging that it violates their constitutional rights. Kabul fears that voters will be scared away from polling booths by the reports.

Fahim Dashti, the editor of the English-language Kabul Weekly newspaper, told Associated Press that the demand was “a violation of media law” and a constitution that protects freedom of speech.

But the pressures on the media in the run up to the vote have exposed several threats to the media’s constitutional rights to report. The increasingly re-ascendant religious establishment in Afghanistan is managing the likelihood of a Hamid Karzai win on Thursday by pressing for deeper commitments to their agenda, and for places for their chosen men in the next administration.

Given the recent growth in their influence in the last year, this could be an even more ominous prospect for the country’s media, which is already finding its freedoms sharply curtailed by a combination of militant threat and political intervention.

Two Afghan journalists were killed and more than 50 attacks and kidnappings were reported in 2008. Three more have died this year so far. The media itself has become more partisan as lack of income has driven them to financial reliance on political and ethnic factions.

Current information minister Abdul Karim Khurram has tended to respond to this situation, not by reinforcing Article 34 of the Afghan Constitution’s protections for freedom of expression, but instead falling behind the Article 3 requirement that “no law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of Islam”.

This has driven Khurram’s ministry, Karzai’s office and, reportedly, Afghanistan’s domestic intelligence agency (NDS), to issue a series of vaguely worded warning messages on so-called “appropriate content” and the dangers of “foreign influence”.

Many of these draw strongly from the conservative opinions of the country’s Ulema Shura, a government sponsored council of religious scholars.

The trend will be measured in the short term by progress in two cases. Firstly, a new mass media law passed in September 2008, despite Karzai’s earlier attempt to veto it, is still waiting to be formally enacted. The sticking point is the bill’s intention to reassert Afghanistan’s national Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) broadcaster’s independent public service role.

A consensus between Karzai, Khurram and the parliament on the media’s right to independence in general and RTA’s public service mandate in particular would send a powerful message to the country’s journalists.

RTA was praised for facilitating an open debate between Karzai and challengers Ashraf Ghani and Ramzan Bashardost on 16 August, but also criticised by the country’s media commission for its bias in favour of Karzai.

According to a commission study of RTA news bulletins between 6-28 July, President Karzai dominated 67 per cent of the coverage, followed by independent candidate Dr Abdullah Abdullah, who received less than 10 per cent of air time, and Sayyid Jalal Karim, at three per cent.

The second test case focuses on Sayeed Parvez Kambakhsh, charged with offending the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed by circulating an Internet article on women’s rights and Islam, whose death sentence was commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment on appeal to the Supreme Court in February 2009.

With a few honourable exceptions, Afghan media workers and civil society activists have been nervous of associating themselves with his case. Here, international pressure has proven more telling, encouraging Karzai to start preparing his ministers and the Ulema Shura for a possible presidential pardon for Kambaksh.

Progress on both these issues will be just a start on addressing what is a much deeper crisis of confidence in the right to free expression here, but a much needed boost to the country’s independent minded media after the election delivers a result.

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