11 Oct 2010 | Index Index, minipost
A protest against a gay pride march in Belgrade on Sunday ended in violence and looting. Riot police attempted to protect participants from protesters throwing petrol bombs, bricks, and shouting “death to homosexuals.” Once police pushed protesters back, violence continued even after the march ended in other parts of the capital as rioters smashed windows, looted stores. Protesters also attacked the Austrian embassy, the state television station building, and headquarters of the Democratic party, the current ruling party, along with the headquarters of its coalition partner the Socialist Party.
Sunday’s event was the first gay pride march since 2001, which was disrupted by a similar protest. Around 110 police officers were reported injured in the incident, while more than 100 people were arrested.
11 Oct 2010 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
The former editor-in-chief of Playboy Indonesia has begun a two-year prison sentence for publishing images of women in underwear. Erwin Arnada was found guilty of violating indecency laws during a closed trial at the Supreme Court in August, overturning the acquittal decided by South Jakarta District Council in 2007. Islamic hardliners launched legal action against Arnada in 2006, attacking Playboy Indonesia offices shortly after the magazine’s launch. Spokesman for the Islamic Defenders Front, Soleh Mahmud, said that the case shows “pornography has no place in Indonesia”.
11 Oct 2010 | Asia and Pacific, China
One of China‘s best-known dissidents Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday night. Liu is currently serving an 11 year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power” after the former litarture professor circulated Charter 08, a petition calling for greater freedom in China. He has been in and out of prison since he took part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests but on the mainland the Chinese language media have ignored the prize. Instead Xinhua, China’s official news agency, released an English-language statement later recycled by China Daily and the Global Times, detailing the Foreign Ministry’s angry response.
Those who have talked about the prize have come under sharp state scrutiny. The nobel laureate’s wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest on Friday.
Last night she tweeted:
Brothers, I am back; I’ve been under house arrest since the 8th; I don’t know when I’ll be able to see everyone; my mobile phone has been ruined; I have no way of making or receiving calls. I saw Xiaobo; the prison told him on the 9th the news that he’s been awarded the prize. Later matters we’ll talk about in time. Please help me [re]tweet. Thank you.
Popular netizen Secretary Zhang was celebrating on Friday. Now he finds himself under house arrest with shifts of guards watching his home. Zhang is behind an invitation only internet forum for liberal leaning people, 1984bbs.com, which today put up a notice today warning users to backup their files as the website stops operating tomorrow due to official pressure. On his Twitter page, Secretary Zhang thanks those who have supported his forum, including artist Ai Weiwei, and records his day under surveillance.
Other intellectuals have also been harassed but this hasn’t deterred internet users from talking about the event by using abbreviations and circumlocutions for “Liu Xiaobo.” They know using the full name would trip internet filters, drawing the attention of the censors who patrol microblog and blog sites deleting suspect posts.
9 Oct 2010 | Uncategorized
If more evidence was needed of the peculiar concept of justice now playing in Tunisia’s law courts, it was laid out for all to see this week, with one persecuted journalist’s lawyers walking out in protest at the judge’s handling of his case and another reporter – jailed on similarly trumped up charges – left seriously ill by lack of care in prison.
The authorities continue to use the courts as a means of repression against journalists, as the case of journalist Mouldi Zouabi, a journalist with independent Radio Kalima demonstrated this week.
After he was physically attacked in April, police decided not to charge the attacker. Bizarrely, weeks later they chose to charge Zouabi, the victim, with “violent behavior and committing actual bodily harm” against his assailant.
The case was referred to a higher court on 6 October, and he now faces up to two years in jail. His lawyers walked out of the last hearing in protest at what they say are multiple breaches of due process. Tunisia’s politicised judiciary is being used to silence free speech by giving credence to often ludicrous charges and suspect evidence, with dire effects on both journalists and their families.
This week there were renewed concerns for another victim of Tunisia’s politicized judiciary, Fahem Boukaddous, jailed for reporting public demonstrations against unemployment and corruption in the mining town of Gafsa in 2008.
Boukaddous, whose health has sharply deteriorated in prison, is serving a four year jail term following his conviction in March for “forming a criminal association liable to attack persons”.
“We are very concerned about Boukaddous who needs urgent medical treatment unavailable to him in prison,” said Aidan White, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) General Secretary. “Boukaddous has already been denied his freedom as punishment for his independent journalism. Without immediate action his long term health is under threat.”
The International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), a coalition of 20 IFEX members, currently chaired by Index on Censorship, has raised repeated concerns about the lack of independence shown by Tunisia’s magistrates and the abuse of the system to target journalists like Mouldi and Boukaddous.
A recent mission by the IFEX-TMG to Tunisia concluded that for nearly a decade the Tunisian state has worked to prevent the establishment of an impartial and independent judiciary, “for the purposes of reinforcing its grip on public dialogue and limiting peaceful critical discourse”.
The state strategy came out in the open in July 2001, when Judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui called on the Tunisian president, in his capacity as Chair of the Superior Council of Magistrates, to recognise that obstructions to an independent judiciary were damaging freedom of expression and democracy in Tunisia.
The independent Tunisian Association of Magistrates (AMT) took a similar line, but when it called for a reform of the law to tackle the issue of judicial independence, its elected nine-member Board, including three women magistrates, were deposed and some reassigned against their will to new courts far away from their homes in Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG group has called on Tunis to cease political interference in the work of the Superior Council of Magistrates, supposed to impartially and independently run the country’s judicial system.
