Driven by the deaths of 600 journalists over the past decade, this year’s conference — a series of panels, workgroups and ceremonies — is devoted to the theme of promoting safety and ending impunity for journalists, bloggers and everyday citizens who cross red lines to speak their minds. The gathering also honours journalists who have been attacked, imprisoned or died for their work. Of the 600 killed, only in 10 percent of cases have those responsible been punished.

This year’s theme is on promoting safety and ending impunity for journalists, bloggers, media workers and everyday citizens who cross red lines to speak their minds. The annual 3 May conference is a series UNESCO hosts a series of panels, workshops and ceremonies to evaluate global press freedom and to honour journalists who have been attacked, imprisoned or died for their work. 

Journalists gathered in Costa Rica to mark World Press Freedom Day. Photo: Brian Pellot / Index on Censorship

Most of the first day’s sessions provided analysis of the dangers journalists face.

In societies where journalists feel unsafe or where attacks against them go unpunished, a culture of self censorship often emerges. Javier Darío Restrepo, a journalist and writer from Colombia, said journalists self censor to survive, but in doing so they cease to be a voice of the powerless in their societies. Building on that point, OSCE’s representative on freedom of the media Dunja Mijatović described the right of journalists to carry out their work without fear — an important prerequisite for media freedom in society.

One common reference on day one of the conference was the recently published UN Plan of Action on Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity – which Index on Censorship contributed to. The plan calls on UN agencies, member states, NGOs and media organisations to work together in promoting the safety of journalists and raising awareness of the primary threats they face.

Adnan Rehmat, executive director at Intermedia Pakistan, said the main issues facing press freedom in his country are that attacks on journalists are not recognised as attacks on freedom of expression. One positive development he mentioned was the establishment of a Pakistan Journalist Safety Fund to provide assistance for journalists in distress.

In the same discussion, Andrés Morales, executive director of La Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa in Colombia, cited a recent attack on noted Colombian investigative journalist Ricardo Calderon as indicative of the wider problems facing journalists in the region and around the world. Colombia has seen a markeddecline in the number of journalists murdered in the past decade, which he attributes in part to a protection programme for journalists but also to self censorship. Many journalists believe that if they don’t write about sensitive issues, they won’t be punished for their words.

In a panel devoted specifically to freedom of expression in Costa Rica, local journalist Mauricio Herrera Ullola outlined some of the greatest obstacles media professionals face in his country today. By some measures, Costa Rica’s press can be considered free. But “crimes against honour” are still prosecuted criminally and carry a penalty of up to 100 days in prison if someone feels personally insulted by a journalist’s story. Herrera Ullola said that media ownership is very concentrated, self-censorship is common, and current laws around slander and libel can be chilling in Costa Rica. He also said the country needs freedom of information laws to promote greater transparency and access to public records.

Several speakers described great improvements for the rights of women, indigenous populations, youth and sexual minorities across Latin America in recent decades, but agreed that many countries in the region still have work to do to ensure full freedom of expression. Colombia and Mexico are both on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ top 10 list of deadliest countries for journalists, a clear sign that freedom of expression remains under attack in the region.

In a poignant moment during the conference’s first day, one delegate asked whether journalists dying on the job is an occupational hazard; an unavoidable price society must pay for good journalism and ultimately for the truth. Adnan Rehmat from Intermedia Pakistan responded: “The price of journalism should not be more than feeling tired after a long day’s work.”

Brian Pellot is Index on Censorship’s Digital Policy Adviser. UNESCO’s three days of events for World Press Freedom Day in Costa Rica complement dozens of local and regional events around the world. Follow Brian on Twitter @brianpellot (along with the hashtags #wpfd and #pressfreedom) as he reports on the rest of the conference, and read the full programme of events in Costa Rica here.

European Union: Is the European Union faltering on media freedom?
Tunisia: Press faces repressive laws, uncertain future
Egypt: Post-revolution media vibrant but partisan
Brazil: Press confronts old foes and new violence

The post Journalists’ safety key focus for World Press Freedom Day conference appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The conference declaration said: “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.” It went into considerable detail about what this means for women.

However the Vienna Declaration said very little about free expression. Nor was this omission rectified in the Beijing Declaration on Women’s Rights in 1995. The year before, after serving as founding chair of the International PEN Women Writers Committee, I had become President of a new organisation, Women’s WORLD (Women’s World Organisation for Rights, Literature and Development).

Women hold a banner to ‘Save the Girl Child’ during a 2012 International Women’s Day rally in Agartala

Women’s WORLD was set up to investigate and advocate against gender-based censorship, both formal and informal, and to defend feminist writers. We prepared a document for Beijing called The Power of the Word: Culture, Censorship and Voice, emphasising the importance of voice and thus of women writers to the struggle for women’s equality:

“The subordination of women is basic to all social systems based on dominance; for this reason, conservatives hate and fear the voices of women. That is why so many religions have made rules against women preaching or even speaking in the house of worship. That is why governments keep telling women to keep quiet: ‘You’re in the Constitution,’ they will say, ‘you have the vote, so you have no right to complain.’ But having a voice is as important, perhaps more important, than having a vote. When censors attack women writers, they do so in order to intimidate all women and keep them from using their right to free expression. Gender-based censorship is therefore a problem not only for women writers, but for everyone concerned with the emancipation of women.

“Women writers are a threat to systems built on gender hierarchy because they open doors for other women. By expressing the painful contradictions between men and women in their society, by exposing the discrepancy between what society requires of women and what they need to be fulfilled, woman writers challenge the status quo…[and] make a breach in the wall of silence. They say things no one has ever said before and say them in print, where anyone can read and repeat them.”

As President of Women’s WORLD, I produced an analysis of the Declaration and Platform for Action that came out of the Beijing Conference. While recognising the Platform of Action was a huge step forward in translating women’s issues into the language of human rights, I concluded that it fell short in the area of free expression, for these reasons:

•  The Platform of Action did not consider the centrality of voice to female emancipation. It did not mention censorship nor recognise that women’s right to free expression is jeopardised in many parts of the world, and that the silencing of women is a barrier to both development and democracy.
• With the exception of indigenous women, who were seen to have a culture and the right to develop it, the Platform of Action framed culture in negative terms, as something that limited women’s rights rather than as something women make, transmit, and shape.
• The Platform of Action’s main concern with media was in terms of harmful portrayals of women, with some slight emphasis on the need for women to have access to the new electronic media. Nowhere did it mention that free expression is not only a right but the means to protect other rights, nor the social contributions women could make if their voices were not continually suppressed.

Our paper for Beijing said, “While there is no question that indigenous and colonised peoples are under particular cultural assault, all women need cultural rights. We need the time and space and access to means of cultural expression to be able to articulate our own social values. Without attention to culture, sustainable development and real democracy are not possible, because profound changes must necessarily be culture-related. Women’s silence is thus as serious a problem as poverty itself, and is both a cause of poverty and its effect.”

In the years after 1995, Women’s WORLD struggled to raise issues of voice but kept running up against a narrowing of women’s human rights to the issue of violence against women, while we were striving for a more inclusive vision that would connect this violence to culture, religion, economics, power politics, censorship and war. Our work was also affected by a separation within the human rights movement between groups that deal mainly with free expression and the big mainstream multi-issue groups.

This same separation was reflected in the global movement for women’s human rights. For instance, when the Women’s Human Rights Defenders International Coalition released a global report in 2012 on dangers facing feminists in various regions, it did not even think of drawing on the many years of experience of groups that defend writers and journalists, many of whom are women.

In the last few years, the global women’s movement has found itself stonewalled by the rise of religious fundamentalism to the degree that many activists now oppose moves for another UN conference on women, fearing that the gains of the 90s will be undermined.

The UN Council on Human Rights has been a battleground over issues of culture, with a newly religious Russia forming a bloc with many African and Muslim-majority countries, to support a resolution calling for the application of the “traditional values of humankind” to human rights norms. Such “traditional values” are, of course, invoked whenever women, sexual minorities, or religious minorities want equal rights, including the right to free expression.

In the darkness of this backlash against women’s human rights, the UN’s 2009 appointment of Pakistani feminist Farida Shaheed, first as an independent expert and now as the special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, was one of the few rays of light. In her 2012 report, Shaheed flagged ways in which fundamentalism impinges on women’s exercise of their cultural rights, as when “solo female singing has been banned and restrictions have been placed on female musicians performing in public concerts.”

She linked culture to violence against women, pointing out that when women try to deviate from the dominant culture of their communities or interpret and reshape them, “they often confront disproportionate opposition, including different forms of violence, for acts as apparently simple as choosing who to marry, how to dress, or where to go.”

She has taken a proactive approach to women’s cultural production, shifting the perspective from seeing culture as an obstacle to women’s human rights to ensuring that women have equal cultural rights. Hopefully her work as special rapporteur will help turn back the proponants of the “traditional values of mankind,” and encourage a wider recognition that freedom of expression is critical to equality for women.

MMeredith Tax, an American writer and activist, is Chair of the Board of the Centre for Secular Space, a new thinktank based in Londonhttp://www.meredithtax.org/

The post Why free speech is a feminist issue appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The post Thailand : UN joins lèse majesté fight appeared first on Index on Censorship.

As journalists are jailed and fined for reporting on the rape of a human rights campaigner, Abdelgadir Mohammed Abdelgadir reports on press freedom in Sudan

Sudanese journalist, Fatmah Ghazali, has been sentenced to a month in jail after she refused to pay a fine for her reports on the alleged rape of female opposition activist, Safia Ishag. The Sudanese Authorities have now moved Ghazali to Omdurman women’s prison.

Saad el-Din Ibrahim, editor at the Sudanese daily Al Jarida, has also been charged and will face the same decision between a 5, 000 Sudanese or a month in prison. Last month nine other journalists, from a variety of newspapers, were also charged with defamation and “publishing fake news”. Their reports all dealt with the alleged rape of Ishag by three members of the National Intelligences and Security Services (NISS).

In a number of reports, journalists had called for the authorities to begin an investigation into the rape case and bring those accountable to justice. All of  the journalists essentially published their own opinions, but have been now been charged with “publishing fake news”.

By 26 June the independent newspaper Ajrass Al-hurriya had been barred from circulation five times in that month and nine times since the beginning of the year.

On 3 July Abuzer Ali Al-Amin, deputy editor of Sudanese opposition daily Rai Al-Shaab, was moved from Kober Central Prison into the custody of the State Security Prosecution after spending 18 months in jail. He faces fresh charges of “publishing fake news”, “attacking the state” and injuring a NISS agent. These charges could carry a possible life sentence or the death penalty.

This attack on free media and journalists seems to be part of a new phase of the media crackdown in north Sudan, and comes before south Sudan’s separation.

After the south gains independence, the situation in the North is likely to become even more difficult. The government insists that they will cancel the interim constitution of 2005 and return to Shari’a law and the United Nations Mission In Sudan (UNMIS) has been directed to leave the north after 9 July, the date when south Sudan will become the newest country in Africa.

Abdelgadir Mohamed Abdelgadir is a freelance journalist and  human rights defender.

The post New media crackdown prior to South Sudan split appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The Special Rapporteur reiterates the call to all States to decriminalize defamation. Additionally, he underscores that protection of national security or countering terrorism cannot be used to justify restricting the right to expression unless it can be demonstrated that: (a) the expression is intended to incite imminent violence; (b) it is likely to incite such violence; and (c) there is a direct and immediate connection between the expression and the likelihood or occurrence of such violence.

The post UN rapporteur calls for end to criminal defamation laws appeared first on Index on Censorship.

I want to start by looking at two events which I think marked a turning point for free speech — and global attitudes towards it. Both happened last year — coincidentally at the same time.

First, in March, the UN Human Rights Council redefined the role of its special rapporteur on freedom of expression –– declaring that he should monitor abuses of the right to free expression when they form an act of racial or religious discrimination. This has insidiously turned the rapporteur into a potential enemy of the very human right he is supposed to defend: someone whose job is no longer simply to monitor abuses to free speech, but to consider that human right as itself an abuse. At the same time, the council passed a resolution, condemning what it called a ‘campaign of defamation of religions’ and calling on governments to take action.

That very same month, in fact just the day before the resolution on the special rapporteur, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders released his film Fitna online. Wilders — for those of you lucky enough not to know him –– is a platinum blond provocateur — who has made a reputation for himself attacking Islam. He wants Muslim immigration to the Netherlands to be stopped. ‘Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe,’ he told the Dutch parliament in 2007. ‘If we do not stop Islamification now, Eurabia and Netherabia will just be a matter of time.’ His film Fitna was a crude piece of propaganda –– equating Islam with violence. No Dutch public broadcaster screened it. Although the Dutch Muslim Broadcasting Association did in fact offer to show it –– if they could view it first for illegal content and if Wilders would take part in a debate. But Wilders turned down that invitation. And the Dutch press centre offered too –– but wanted Wilders to pay for security costs. Again he refused.

There were, at the time, apocalyptic predictions of another outcry of Danish cartoons proportions –– but that scenario failed to materialise. The film was a damp squib. Nevertheless, the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban ki-Moon weighed in to the row and described it as ‘offensively anti-Islamic’ — adding for clarity ‘the right of free expression is not at stake here’.

All of this was made all the more pointed by the timing. Last year was the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But here was the global guardian of these rights undermining them. So entrenched has the notion become that that there is a right not to be offended, that neither the secretary general nor the council seemed to feel any need to argue for or justify their position.

And our government, just two weeks ago, reinforced that position when they banned Geert Wilders from coming into the country. I must say though that I was puzzled by Lord Pearson inviting him over now to show the film, nearly a year after the event. I have my suspicions that the Lords may not have known how to watch YouTube.

But the UK government’s reasons for keeping Wilders out –– that his opinions threaten community security and therefore public security –– is also becoming a common refrain when it comes to critics of religion –– a justification for limiting free speech and a powerful argument for censorship.

We saw the same argument, again last year, when Random House dropped The Jewel of Medina. A historical romance about the Prophet Mohammed’s relationship with Ayesha. In a statement, the publisher said that ‘the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment’ –– as a result, they would not be publishing the book ‘for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel’. Now I wouldn’t of course dispute the fact that these are serious considerations that have to be made, but the irony is that it’s this pre-emptive censorship (whether it’s deciding not to publish or to ban someone from coming into the country) which serves to inflame the situation –– because of the publicity that comes with the ban.

But it is the Random House or UN Human Rights Council view that now prevails: potentially offensive speech is so dangerous that it cannot be given a platform. Our liberty is better served by deploying censorship rather than protecting the right to free speech.

This is the Alice in Wonderland world of human rights. Where you the best way to exercise your rights is by having them denied.

One of the most astute writers on this issue, Kenan Malik, has observed that a profound shift has taken place in our attitude to free speech. He has written that it is no longer seen as an inherent good, necessary for expressing moral autonomy, maintaining social progress and safeguarding our other freedoms. It’s come to be seen as damaging: as a problem. And, I would add, it is the voices who want to limit free speech that are now occupying the moral high ground –– not the human rights defenders.

We published a special issue of Index on Censorship last year marking the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. And we asked one of the most distinguished international defenders of free speech, Aryeh Neier, to write a piece for us. Neier was for many years executive director of Human Rights Watch. And is now president of the Open Society Institute. Neier was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Yet as head of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 70s, he took a controversial stand on one of the most famous free speech battles of the past 60 years –– the right of neo-Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood –– a neighbourhood not just of Jews, but of Holocaust survivors. In looking back at that storm, he wrote for Index: ‘Ensuring that all may speak freely, no matter how repugnant their views, prevents the authorities from using the pretext that they are blocking hate speech as a means to censor expression that actually disturbs them for other reasons.’

Standing up for repugnant views can put you in a very uncomfortable position. At Index on Censorship over the past year we’ve had to stand up for racists and Holocaust deniers. My colleague Padraig Reidy was somewhat disturbed to get a Christmas card from one of the leading Holocaust deniers, with a most delightful photograph of Hitler’s favourite apologists at the notorious conference on the Holocaust in Tehran three years ago. And a free DVD with David Irving on the cover in handcuffs. And I’ve had the honour of being described as charming by the BNP.

They think we’re their friends.

We’re not.

But we do know that the discomfort this entails is necessary for a free and open society –– a society that acknowledges the universal right to free speech and doesn’t cut the cloth of human rights to fit the preoccupations and politics of our time.

The post Modern Liberty: free speech must be for all appeared first on Index on Censorship.