3 Aug 2009 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Olga Iris Mencia Barcenas
In the aftermath of the coup against elected-president Manuel Zelaya Rosales, whose mandate was supposed to end in January 2010, press freedom in Honduras has been seriously restricted. The 28 June coup took place as a non-binding referendum was scheduled to be held on possible changes to the constitution. A victory for Zelaya would have paved the way for an additonal referendum on constitutional reform to be held in November together with the presidential election. The opposition and armed forces argued that the real aim was to strengthen the president’s hold on power and remove the one-term limit on the presidency stated in the constitution.
The Supreme Court ruled that the consultation was illegal and Zelaya was forced to flee the country, still in his pyjamas. Roberto Micheletti, a little-known businessman, was hailed as the new head of state and proceeded to temporarily suspend constitutional and individual guarantees, persuading the population that this measure was necessary in order to restore calm and stability. So the coup was accomplished and civil liberties virtually suspended. Freedom of speech stands out among violated rights.
On the day of the coup Allan McDonald, a cartoonist for the newspaper El Diaro was arrested. He was later released and immediately fled the country. The state-run television channel Canal 8 was soon taken off the air. The same happened to Canal 36, owned by the pro-Zelaya journalist Esdras Amado Lopez, who had been running a pro-referendum campaign. Canal 26 presenter Osmand Danilo Corea, journalist Jorge Orlando Anderson and Colon-district reporter Nahum Palacios were also arrested.
Radio Globo, the only broadcaster to report critically on the coup, is now back on the air, thanks to the pressure of honest district attorneys and protection offered by groups linked to the opposition. Its owner was arrested, the building ransacked and employees were attacked. Its editor in chief, David Romero, jumped from a window to escape the soldiers, while presenter Luis Galdamez was arrested.
A few days later Gabriel Fino Noriega, who worked for a local radio station, was shot dead by unknown individuals on the way to his studio.
The only independent magazine, the monthly El Libertador, didn’t even print its June edition due to repeated threats to its editor, Jhoni Lagos. The highly respected Radio Progreso was shut down on several occasions and its presenter Romel Alexander Gomez jailed.
The Committee of Families of those Detained-Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) saw its regular show cancelled by the state-channel that used to host it. This followed a COFADEH report that detailed 1,161 cases of human rights violations perpetrated under Micheletti’s rule.
The repression of opposition media reached its peak on 12 July, when a crew of Venezuela’s Telesura TV were detained and interrogated in their hotel for five hours. They were later escorted to the border and ordered to leave the country.
Many journalists keep on working despite the risks, which have become even greater since Pesident Zelaya clearly stated his intention in coming back and reclaim the power.
With the overwhelming majority of private media supporting the coup, a frightening silence is obscuring whatever happens in this small Latin-American country. The media still in place is censored, journalists are persecuted and self-censorship is their daily bread.
Translation by Giulio D’Eramo
Read ARTICLE 19’s Agnes Callamard’s analysis of media in Honduras here
3 Aug 2009 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
On 2 August it was reported that Moroccan magazines Telle Qu’elle and Nichane were confiscated after publishing a survey about how Moroccan’s view the monarchy. The government has promised to carry out the same action on any paper or magazine which publishes the survey. This is despite the fact that the monarchy was seen as “positive or very positive” by 91 per cent of Moroccans, according to the survey. The Minister of Communication, Khaled Nasseri, said: “The Moroccan monarchy is not a debatable subject.”
Read more here
3 Aug 2009 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Canadian-Iranian filmmaker Maziar Bahari was among over 100 protestors, activists and journalists who appeared in court in Iran on Saturday, 1 August. Index on Censorship has been campaigning for his release with Newsweek, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. Maziar Bahari has not been allowed to see a lawyer since his detention on 21 June.
(more…)
31 Jul 2009 | Uncategorized
Now that the missing report on last summer’s Kingsnorth climate camp has finally been published, it is becoming clear why Kent police were so keen to bury it. From the force’s perspective, the report is both revealing and embarrassing. But the story of how it was hidden for four months raises new questions about the ability and willingness of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) to challenge the police.
I described in May how a report by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) about the controversial police tactics at the Kingsnorth demonstration had been airbrushed from history. After it was delivered, Kent police commissioned a new report from South Yorkshire police. Both the police and the Home Office answered enquiries about the first report by reference to the second one. For a while it looked as if the original report would remain buried, as I wrongly predicted last week, after Kent police told me that they were only publishing the second one. But — perhaps because of the publicity or perhaps under pressure from the Home Office — the force has now published both documents.
While both reports were strongly critical of Kent police, the NPIA report also contains evidence of a cover-up. The document’s properties show that it was last amended on 5 March. This suggests that Kent police already had the final version of the report when they refused to hand it to the IPCC, claiming that it was unfinished.
On 12 March, the Liberal Democrats published a report on Kingsnorth, produced by the Climate Camp legal team. Kent police then referred this to the IPCC, whose regional commissioner, Mike Franklin, and its regional director then met with Kent’s chief constable Michael Fuller to discuss it. According to the IPCC, Franklin was aware of the NPIA report and asked the police to bring it to the meeting. But, it says, “Kent police told the Commissioner that they had asked for additional work to be done on the report and that they would share it with him when it was complete”. Earlier this month, the IPCC told me that its position remained the same and that Franklin “expects to see the report when it is completed”.
Following their meeting, the IPCC and Kent police released near simultaneous statements stating that the issues in the Liberal Democrat report were mainly outside the IPCC’s jurisdiction and that it had been agreed that Kent police would ask the NPIA to look into the issues it raised. Neither organisation referred to the existing NPIA report. Despite knowing that the NPIA had already produced a report that he had not seen, Franklin declared that “the NPIA can play an important role in reviewing the operation”.
But Kent police’s press release on the same day provides evidence that the NPIA had already declined to carry out the new review. It stated that it had asked the NPIA to carry it out and that this would be undertaken by a senior officer from another force. Although Kent police continued to portray the new review as an NPIA process, the NPIA’s role amounted to little more than saying that someone else — South Yorkshire police — should do it. The published report merely states that it was commissioned by Kent police “in consultation with” the NPIA.
So it appears that Kent police misled the IPCC not only about the status of the original report but about the extent of the NPIA’s involvement in the new review. As Liberal Democrat Norman Baker said last week, the new review was actually the police investigating themselves. Baker has now called for the IPCC to carry out a new review.
A few days after declining to follow up the Liberal Democrat report, the IPCC was criticised for being too ready to accept the Metropolitan Police account of the circumstances surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson at April’s G20 protests.
So what were Kent police trying to hide by suppressing the first report? It is a mixture of criticism and praise of the force’s handling of the protest. The criticism included comments from junior officers that “the senior command of the force did not fully engage in their understanding and realisation” of what such a huge operation involved. It was also revealed that the operation’s “Gold Commander”, Kent’s assistant chief constable Allyn Thomas, was not appropriately qualified for the role.
But, more significantly, the report was critical of Kent police’s use of stop and search powers at a time that the force was trying to fight off claim for a judicial review of this very issue. It notes that the “Silver Commander… made it clear that officers would use their power under Section 1 Police and Criminal Evidence Act to carry out any searching. This instruction was interpreted by officers that they were required to carry Section 1 searches on everyone.”
A member of the Climate Camp legal team has told me that these comments are very significant in the context of the judicial review and would have been at the time. They undermine in the force’s claim that the Section 1 powers were used not as a blanket policy but on the particular circumstances of 8,000 individual cases. The report itself comments that “this approach to search does raise issues surrounding the lawfulness of this practice”.
There is another significant revelation in the report, but one that says as much about the mindset of the NPIA as that of Kent police. One of the things that “went well” was that “the inclusion of a roads policing strategy as part of the overall policing plan delivered a very effective disruptive tactic towards protesters”. The revelation that the force sought to disrupt “protestors” is at odds with its claim that one of its main objectives was to facilitate lawful protest.
The report explains that police “very effectively deployed Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) Interceptor Teams along the strategic road network leading to the Camp which worked extremely well”. This seems to confirm fears that ANPR will be used to track and harass protestors. Climate Camp say that police harassment of drivers trying to get themselves, other demonstrators, food supplies and camping equipment to the protest reached unprecedented levels at Kingsnorth.
In defence of its comments, the NPIA has told me that it believes in people’s right to peaceful protest. It says: “ANPR is a valuable operational tool which gives police early warning of people who are likely to disrupt peaceful protests. It enables the police to redirect resources where they are most needed so that protests can pass off safely and peacefully for both the public and protestors.”
Three weeks after Kent police received the NPIA report, Thomas made the same distinction between peaceful protestors and those with criminal intent, acknowledging that “most of those attending were clearly well intentioned and law abiding”. But both reports show that the police largely failed to make such a distinction. As the South Yorkshire police report said of the blanket use of stop and search powers, the “post event reality” was different from the theory. All protestors were subject to intrusive search, harassment and disruptive tactics. Whether by accident or design, sometimes those most likely to disrupt peaceful protest are the police themselves.
