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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos: Shutterstock

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Forced evictions of India’s marginalised Dalit community in Delhi have been carried out by the country’s government

All over the world today, both in developing and developed states, liberal democracies and less free societies, there are groups who struggle to gain full access to freedom of expression for a wide range of reasons including poverty, discrimination and cultural pressures. While attention is often, rightly, focused on the damaging impact discrimination or poverty can have on people’s lives, the impact such problems have on free expression is less rarely addressed.

We are not talking about the classic examples of challenges to freedom of expression where repressive regimes attempt to block, limit and inhibit across a population as a whole. Rather we are looking at cases where in both more and less free societies particular groups face greater barriers to free expression than the wider population. Such groups can often be denied an equal voice, and active and meaningful participation in political processes and wider society. Poverty, discrimination, legal barriers, cultural restrictions, religious customs and other barriers can directly or indirectly block the voices of the already marginalised. How much do these barriers and lack of access to freedom of expression matter? A lot – as the examples below tell us.

Why is access to freedom of expression important? Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It also underpins most other rights and allows them to flourish. The right to speak your mind freely on important issues in society, access information and hold the powers that be to account, plays a vital role in the healthy development process of any society.

The lack of access to freedom of expression is a problem that particularly affects the already marginalised – that is, minorities facing discrimination both in developed and developing countries, from LGBT people in African countries, to disabled people in Western Europe. While the scale of their struggles varies greatly, the principle is the same: within the context of their society, these groups face greater barriers to freedom of expression than the majority. If they are unable to communicate their ideas, views, worries and needs effectively, means they are often excluded from meaningful participation in society, and from the opportunity to better their own circumstances. In other words, discrimination is one of the core elements of unequal access to freedom of expression.

Access to free expression is also vital both to support the development process and as a development goal in its own right. The connection was perhaps most famously put forward by Amartya Sen in his widely cited book — Development as Freedom — where he argued that expansion of freedom is both the primary end and the principal means of development

It is striking to note the way in which cultural and religious customs are sometimes used to clamp down on various minorities’ rights to expression and assembly in many countries around the world. Human Rights Watch’s latest world report states that “traditional values are often deployed as an excuse to undermine human rights.” One example of this is the caste system still in place in countries including India, Nepal and Pakistan. This is culturally-based discrimination on a major, systematic scale. A significant proportion of the Dalits, (lower-caste people, or “untouchables”) are barred from participation in public life and have a limited say in policies that directly affect them. In May 2008, the Dalit community in the Nesda village in the state of Gujarat attempted to stage a protest after being excluded from the government’s development funds allocation, by refusing to fulfil their historic “caste duty” of disposing of dead animals. The dominant caste in the region promptly blocked the protest through a ‘social boycott’, forbidding any social or economic interaction between Dalits and non-Dalits. This is only one example of Dalit’s being barred from having a say in development matters directly relating to them. When they attempted to stage a peaceful protest, they were only further marginalised, and their weak economic, social and political position further cemented. It’s a vicious cycle.

Another major area where discrimination has a knock-on effect on freedom of expression, is with regards to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people across the globe. They are discriminated against for traditional, especially religious, reasons, with countries like Malaysia and Jamaica claiming that homosexuality is simply “not in our culture” when clamping down on LGBT civil rights. The right to express one’s sexuality is an aspect of the right to freedom of expression both in itself (as an expression of identity) but also because in countries where LGBT rights are not respected, the cultural expression of such rights is often also a political act. Cultural events organised by the LGBT community, such as pride parades, find themselves banned from exercising their right to freedom of assembly and expression, which happened last October in Serbia and Moldova. LGBT-themed art is also often times censored. One example reported by Index took place in Uganda, where a play about a gay man was banned, and its British producer, David Cecil, jailed and later deported. Countries also adopt laws that ban or circumscribe the discussion of homosexualty. In Russia, the Duma recently voted in favor of a draft law to ban “homosexual propaganda”. The amendment, passed by an overwhelming majority, prohibits the “propaganda of homosexuality” (in a practical sense, the discussion of homosexually) to protect children. The bill would in effect seriously curtail the right to freedom of expression of LGBT people.

Full access to freedom of expression is difficult to achieve in the absence of universal education and literacy. Around the world, illiteracy and inadequate (or non-existent) education hits the poorest hardest – both because education is often private, and because in poor countries where it is provided by the state, the standard of education can be low. Women and girls in the developing world are the groups most affected by illiteracy. There are a number of factors contributing to this, including higher levels of poverty among women, with culture and tradition also playing a significant part. There are still a number of societies around the world where it simply is not accepted that girls should receive education at all, and certainly not higher education. While the gender gap in education has been decreasing over time, in 2009, there were still around 35 million girls out of primary education, compared to 31 million boys. Lack of education is still the single biggest contributing factor to high and persistent levels of illiteracy — making it the most basic barrier to freedom of expression. It stops people from effectively participating in society, as it hinders them from being able to read, write and share written information, and thus fully engage with a range of issues or debates. Women make up the majority (64 per cent) of the nearly 800 million illiterate people in the world today. UNHCHR resolution 2003/42 identified this as a contributing factor to constraints on women’s rights to freedom of expression.

As well as the impact of poverty, discrimination and religious and cultural factors, governments and local authorities often put in place more formal mechanisms which result in significant restrictions on access to freedom of expression for minority groups. This can come in the form of restrictions on minority languages, such as Kurdish in Turkey, or barriers to political participation, such as the Bosnian constitutional ban on Jews and Roma running for high office.

Refugees are one of the hardest hit groups of people in terms of facing significant and basic restrictions on freedom of expression. A report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees on the political rights of refugees stated that they, “…like other aliens, are entitled to the same freedom of expression, association and assembly as citizens.” However, a 2005 report investigating the state of Italian immigration detention centres showed that those detained in Italy were given few opportunities for communication with the outside world. Similarly, allegations of arbitrary deprivation of liberty in Greek detention centres are to be examined by independent experts selected by the UN Human Rights Council later this year. These are only a few examples of fundamental barriers on refugees’ access to fully express themselves. This, of course, cannot be separated from the wider discrimination as outlined above. Refugees constitute a group which often face prejudice and racism. Research from Cardiff University has for instance shown that they do not have the platform to counter the overwhelmingly negative way in which they are portrayed in the UK media. Refugees have universal rights like all other people around the world — states must recognise this and must act to tackle discrimination in all forms.

The barriers to free expression discussed here show why exercising our right to free expression is not as simple as living in a democratic society that broadly respects rights. Barriers that block or inhibit access to freedom of expression exist all over the world, in various forms and to varying degrees. Through being denied a voice, these groups are being denied a fundamental right, are facing barriers to their active participation in society, and, in many cases, are facing additional limits on their ability and opportunity to play a part in improving their own lives. Tackling the barriers from poverty to discrimination to laws that limit access to freedom of expression is vital.

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 After two executive editors of Turkey’s Taraf newspaper resigned last month the media furore that followed was so intense that there was hardly a conversation between Turkish journalists in the ensuing days that didn’t include the word “Taraf” in it.

Indeed, since the furore, the newspaper’s circulation has grown from 50 thousand copies to 65 thousand a day.

The paper was established in November 2007 and was initially edited by a trio of authors and journalists: Ahmet Altan, a popular novelist, columnist and public intellectual stood alongside Alev Er, whose stature among journalists may be said to equal that of Alan Rusbridger in England. Yasemin Çongar, previously the Washington correspondent of the mainstream Milliyet came to Istanbul to contribute to the project and helped hire journalists.

Alev Ar had resigned from the paper in 2009 but it was Ahmet Altan and Yasemin Çongar’s resignations last month that created the real controversy. Altan said he wanted to write his new novel and that his resignation was planned before he even began working for Taraf. No explanation was offered for Çongar’s resignation.

In its five years, Taraf has divided opinion between those who praise its courage and integrity, and others who find grave fault with Taraf’s machinations.

The main theme of Taraf’s journalism had been its ardent anti-militarism — something welcomed by many of those placed in the opposite ends of the political spectrum. In an era where generals rebuked, sued and criminalised journalists who dared question issues sensitive to the General Staff, and Kurdish, Islamist and leftist newspapers, and news magazines could be closed in the course of a few days, simply because an official had filed a complaint, Taraf was seen as a welcome voice among establishment newspapers which largely succumbed to the militarist line.

Indeed, part of the motivation behind the foundation of Taraf may be said to be the publication of the so-called “coup diaries” of a retired marine corps general by Nokta magazine, where the later-imprisoned journalist Ahmet Şık worked as a reporter. The general who was claimed to have written the diary, called Nokta’s cover story a fabrication; according to his defence team Nokta had collaborated in a conspiracy against Turkish military.

Fourteen days after it ran the story, the police raided Nokta’s offices, confiscating all its computers. On 19 April 2007, merely a fortnight after it published the diaries, the final issue of Nokta was published.

The last editor of Nokta was Alper Görmüş who was imprisoned for his journalistic work in 1995. Görmüş later became a contributor at Taraf, where he has had a column since the paper’s inception. When I asked him whether Taraf had contributed to the extension of freedom of expression in Turkey, he said the paper was a living example of “how it is impossible to achieve freedom of expression without a fight.”

Görmüş praised Altan and Çongar’s journalism and said theirs was an example of journalistic courage which brought an end to the conformity among many high profile figures in the Turkish media. “Five years ago there was a consensus among journalists that certain stories were not allowed to be reported. This confederacy of silence created a comfortable setting for journalists who didn’t do their job properly,” he said. According to Görmüş, it is the task of the journalist to expose secrets, and state secrets for that matter.

“Many writers feared the might of authorities and so they imposed self-censorship,” he said. “So, when Taraf exposed state secrets, its editor Altan was quickly labeled as a ‘traitor’ in mainstream media.”

When I spoke to Taraf columnist Yıldıray Oğur, previously an editor at the newspaper, he mostly agreed with Görmüş’s views. He described Taraf as Turkey’s first truly liberal newspaper. “In its five year long history, the contributors of the paper had included liberals, Islamists, socialists, social democrats, Kurds, headscarved women, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Americans, Germans, theologians, transvestites and an eighteen year old girl. This is something unprecedented in the history of Turkish journalism,” he said.

However, not everyone is a Taraf fan. Esra Arsan, an associate professor of journalism at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, said Taraf’s initial support for freedom of expression had waned in time. Arsan said the paper remained silent when court cases following Nokta’s and Taraf’s exposés of coup diaries extended to journalists and media workers. “When you look at how they behaved when Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener were arrested, it must be said Taraf has a regrettable record,” she said. “They didn’t sufficiently criticize the government when it arrested journalists en masse. Instead they went along with the argument that problems about due process of law were an extension of Turkey’s law system. They published transcripts which were illegally obtained by the police, which is not ethical.”

According to Arsan, Taraf should have been more careful in its exposés of secrets, especially in cases when the material used in its pages violated privacy of the accused individuals. She also said Taraf contributed to the legitimisation of abuses of individual freedoms because it collaborated with state prosecutors and police officers while reporting on the coup cases.

Lately it wasn’t only the generals implicated in the coup trials who found fault with Taraf’s editorial line: prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself became the focus of Taraf’s intense criticism. In his daily articles, Altan portrayed Erdoğan as a figure similar to Vladimir Putin.

Altan’s criticisms were so passionately written and so hectoring in their tone, that when he announced his resignation, saying he wanted to write a new novel, there were articles in the Turkish press that argued Erdogan had lost his greatest, and most talented, critic.

Amberin Zaman, The Economist’s Turkey correspondent, wrote a eulogy for Taraf where she claimed Altan’s pieces had functioned as a lightning rod for other writers who found it much easier to write articles critical of Erdogan after Altan led the way.

“From now on, the most minuscule of criticisms against the state will be problematic,” she wrote.

But according to Oğur, after Taraf’s five year long history of journalism, it is no longer possible for either politicians or generals, to be immune from the scrutiny of the press. “Taraf had torn apart the curtain which protected the state apparatus,” he said. “And there is no turning back.”

Kaya Genç is a journalist and novelist

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In 2011, Tunç, an Index on Censorship Free Expression prize winner, stood an independent parliamentary candidate for Labour, Democracy and Freedom Bloc. During a speech in Tunceli, where he was standing for election, he referred to three political figures, İbrahim Kaypakkaya, Mahir Çayan and Deniz Gezmiş, whose “revolutionary spirit” he announced to have shared in his own political struggle.

These long-deceased political figures have become symbols for some of Turkey’s socialists over the last four decades. Their images often appear on t-shirts, souvenirs and Istanbul’s walls in the form of graffiti. All waged an armed war against Turkish state and were captured and executed as a result. But they have little following in society (radical left parties rarely get more than 0.1% of votes) and like Che Guevara, their names often stand for youthful romanticism, rather than hard politics.

But according to the Malatya court, the enunciation of their names is a direct reference to the outlawed Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP). Tunç has now been convicted of propagandising for the group.

The singer has said he will appeal and his lawyer, Ercan Kanar announced they would bring the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

The verdict pushes a believer in parliamentary politics to the outlawed margins of radicalism. Tunç, after all, had every intention to become an MP in the parliament and accordingly trusted the political system.

While the outlawed MLKP, which was founded in the 1990s, and is in part a continuation of İbrahim Kaypakkaya’s TKP/ML party, sees all political process as “bourgeois deception” against which its militants should fight using military means, Tunç believed in the system and wanted to represent the people of Tunceli in the capital Ankara.

“The MLKP has boycotted my constituency during the elections,” he said: “had they not done so, I would be in the parliament today. So how can I be accused of propagating for an organisation that effectively prevented my being elected to the parliament?”

The case provides a textbook example of the systematic marginalisation of Turkey’s dissident figures, who find themselves behind bars when they seek to take part in political processes.

The prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself suffered from Turkey’s draconian laws that restrict freedom of expression when he was imprisoned in 1998 for a speech he made a year previously, where he recited a poem of Turkish writer Ziya Gökalp. Erdoğan’s case was seen by many as a pseudo-legal attempt by the secular establishment to prevent religious conservatives being represented in parliament.

The sentencing of Tunç, whose campaign to become a parliamentarian seems to have ended, at least for now, with a two-year prison sentence, carries the potential of further alienating sectors of society whom the parliament in Ankara should represent.

Kaya Genc is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul

http://kayagenc.blogspot.co.uk/

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