14 Aug 2011 | Uncategorized
Many of the modern issues that Index on Censorship tackles are what I call the shades of grey. From Wikileaks to privacy to hate speech and phone hacking, free expression comes hurtling against other rights or perceived rights. Rarely do absolutes prevail in this more complex and technological world.
It was therefore salutary for me to be reminded of the black and white which still confronts us: journalists and activists murdered, imprisoned or threatened for trying to hold the powerful to account and expose wrongdoing.
The British theatre group IceandFire transport audiences into the worlds of five crusading reporters and photo-journalists as they risk their lives for the sake of their stories. Several of these real-life cases have been followed and documented by Index. One of them, Lal Wickrematunge, Editor of the Sri Lankan newspaper Sunday Leader was reportedly threatened by his country’s president by telephone only a week ago. His brother, Lasantha, was murdered by the authorities in 2009.
The travails of Lydia Cacho, one of the world’s most fearless journalists, were movingly portrayed. Only six weeks ago Cacho says she received anonymous death threats for her continued campaign to expose corruption and criminality, particularly the role of senior politicians in sex offences and trafficking. From the work of a brave Israeli journalist working inside the West Bank, to an American defying the US military’s largely successful attempts to sanitise the Iraq war, the play brings home not just the bravery, but also the doubts and dilemmas faced by a small but determined group of reporters. The episode most familiar to me personally was the newsroom at Novaya Gazeta, for long a beacon of fearless journalism in a Russia where the attacks on free speech have remained constant over the past 20 years, long after the collapse of Communism.
Within 20 metres of leaving the theatre, in Hackney in east London, I came across three riot police vans. It was, at first glance, a shock. The officers were lounging around, eating Macdonalds. The city was still reeling from riots and looting. Yet amid all the gloom and self-doubt that has beset Britons, and only a month after the height of the phone-hacking scandal, it was worth remembering that, there are still many countries grappling with troubles on an altogether different scale.
John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship
13 Aug 2011 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Robin Tudge
The Facebook page of a touring musical comedy show, an “epic tale of violence, greed, and cheap sofas” about middle-class rioting in an IKEA store in 2005, has fallen victim to the kind of blanket censorship that David Cameron is planning for any further urban tumult.
The page, titled “Riot in Edinburgh”, which since mid-July had given information about the Edinburgh Fringe showing of ‘Riot’, was taken down by Facebook on Wednesday, August 10. ‘We received no warning’ about the removal, said Helena Middleton, part of The Wardrobe Ensemble company behind the show, which was first shown at the Bristol Old Vic in June. As of yet, the page, which included an IKEA catalogue image of a plate with meatballs and a knife, has not been put back up, said Middleton.
The censoring appears to be Facebook’s own work, as the Ensemble was sent the following message: “The event “RIOT in Edinburgh” has been removed because it violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, events that are hateful, threatening or obscene are not allowed…Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled”.
The one-hour show retells the riot of 10 February 10, 2005, when over 6,000 customers overwhelmed the midnight opening of a new IKEA store in Edmonton, that promised massive discounts. Customers punched and kicked their way to £45 sofas, others were crushed, five shoppers were hospitalised and one man was stabbed with an IKEA knife.
The show has been blessed with remarkable timing. As debate swirls about whether the recent English riots were a violent underclass taking their extreme materialist cue from corrupt MPs and bankers, the play shows how cheap MDF shelves can lure the middle-class into mindless mob violence. And in 2005 the police were overwhelmed. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said at the time: “It was something that the Met Police were as taken by surprise by as the IKEA management.”
The Facebook page disabling also shows the potential mindlessness and indiscriminate criminalisation of the potential wholesale shutdown of social media platforms, amid any further unrest or legitimate protests, that the UK government suggested last Thursday.
Riot is on daily at 1.15pm until August 29 at the ZOO Roxy, 2 Roxborough Place Edinburgh. www.bit.ly/riotplay
13 Aug 2011 | News and features
Belarus’s president “pardons” nine of 41 political prisoners on 11 August, the same day when US toughened economic sanctions against his regime. Olga Birukova reports
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12 Aug 2011 | Uncategorized
Anthony Morelli, a 42-year-old divorced father in Pennsylvania embroiled in a bitter custody battle with his former wife, insists that he didn’t create a blog to badmouth the mother of his children. That explanation is roundly at odds with his now-famous URL: thepsychoexwife.com.
Morelli comes across as a brute on the blog, referring to his ex-wife as “Jabba The Hut, with less personality,” while intimately – albeit anonymously – disclosing bitter details of her alcoholism and their fight to co-parent their two sons. You’d think few people would cue up for this theatre, for an inside look at someone else’s rancorous child custody case. But, at its peak, Morelli claimed the site was getting about 200,000 visitors a month, many of them fellow divorcés looking for a community to vent.
All of that was, anyway, before a family court judge told Morelli to take down the four-year-old site this summer. That decision has pleased Morelli’s critics (and his ex-wife), and a lot of media commentators have wondered why Morelli needed a court order in the first place to tell him to do something that seems fairly obviously in the best interests of his children.
The problem, though, is that requiring him to shutter thepsychoexwife.com is likely unconstitutional, violating Morelli’s First Amendment right to free speech. And regardless of what anyone personally thinks of the guy, to borrow from the assessment of one local lawyer, “there is no doubt that his right to be an unmitigated ass has been infringed upon.”
Morelli now has two legal disputes on his hands: one over the custody of his children, and the other over a free-speech question that is now attracting the attention of First Amendment scholars and national media. Does a divorced dad have the night to publicly plaster invective about his ex-wife all over the Internet (where, among other people, his 10- and 12-year-old children might see it)?
“That strikes me as a pretty clear First Amendment violation,” blogged First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh, in posting the judge’s ruling on his own popular website. “Whatever the scope of family courts’ authority to protect children’s best interests might be, it can’t extend to criminalizing one adult’s public speech about another adult.
Diane E Gibbons, the judge in the case, obviously disagreed.
“This is about children,” she said in court. “You may say anything that you would like to say. You may publish it. You may put it on a billboard. But you will not have your children, because that is abusive.”
Morelli is now appealing the decision, and while thepsychoexwife.com has gone dormant, he’s now directing people to a new site: savethepsychoexwife.com, where he doubles down by now writing about both the ex-wife and the judge. Morelli is collecting donations on the site to pay legal fees that he says have reached $116,000 in seven years. And the next round of court rulings, he argues, could effect just about everyone.
“We are asking for help in this defense because it is an issue that faces any parent that is divorced. Imagine a judge telling you that you cannot talk about your children on “any public media” – which would include things like Facebook updates, Twitter, or your personal blog – or you will lose custody. Imagine the far-reaching consequences for bloggers everywhere if orders such as this one are left unchallenged? There goes your online support group. There goes your Facebook and Twitter updates. Your website, personal OR commercial – ordered gone under threat of incarceration and having your beloved children removed from your custody. This order flies in the face of our civil rights, and your civil rights, too!”
It’s hard to escape the impression that Morelli has forgotten about his children as his court case has reoriented itself to a free speech fight (under the headline “What I’m Really Fighting For,” Morelli explains that it’s to “prevent our support group – and every other one out there – from being silenced”). He also seems like a particularly unlikely leader for the 21st century cause of free speech on the Internet (he expresses fundamental naïvté about the medium when he writes that his original blog “has no affect on his children. It would forever remain so, provided both parents monitor the children’s computer usage as any good parent should.”)
But, like the military funeral protesters and the violent video game venders before him this year, Morelli reminds us that free speech is so valuable in the US because the courts usually wind up extending it even to unmitigated asses.
