1 Dec 2011 | Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Uncategorized
In an horrific story that brings to mind the Soviets’ reworking of history, Yenesew Gebre, an Ethiopian citizen, a 29 year-old Ethiopian school teacher and human rights activist set himself ablaze outside a public meeting hall in the town of Tarcha located in Dawro Zone in Southern Ethiopia. He died three days later from his injuries. Later his sister and his father both claimed he had mental health issues (although no record exists of medication or treatment), and no-one was allowed to visit him in hospital. The death certificate, which was not signed by the official hospital coroner (who refused to sign it) stated blood poisoning as the cause of death. There are allegations that this was a faked death certificate.
Yenesew walked out of a public meeting on 11 November , saying the words “I want to show to all that death is preferable than a life without justice and liberty and I call upon my fellow compatriots to fear nothing and rise up to wrest their freedom and rights from the hands of the local and national tyrants.” He then set fire to himself. Yenesew was one of about 50 young men from the area who were protesting the reworking of civil boundaries, and were taking their case to federal courts, in the capital Addis Ababa.
President Meles Zenawi’s immediate response was to send in a reinforcement of some 300 police officers, and to impose a complete news blackout and seal off the town. Telephone services to the town were cut prevent all news of Yenesew’s sacrifice from spreading throughout Ethiopia. Yenesew was buried by police without his family being allowed to attend. Presumably the intention of preventing a public funeral and burying Yenesew in an unmarked grave was to divert attention from the young man’s actions.
This action takes place within the context of Ethiopia’s extremely poor human rights and freedom of expression record. After Eritrea, it is the area where most journalist alerts originate, according to International Federation of Journalists.
In addition to the six journalists held in custody without bail since June 2011, on 14 November, 24 people, including senior opposition politicians and an outspoken Internet journalist, were charged with with plotting terrorist acts to create public chaos. They are accused of violations of Ethiopia’s harsh anti-terrorism law, which has been criticised by human rights and press freedom groups.
30 Nov 2011 | Leveson Inquiry
A former police officer told the Leveson Inquiry today that his bosses at the Information Commissioner’s Office warned him the press was “too big” to take on over private investigators.
Alec Owens, who was a senior investigator in Operation Motorman, an ICO-led investigation into allegations of data protection offences by the British media, revealed he had found notebooks in private investigator Steve Whittamore’s home with 17,500 entries identifying each reporter and newspaper who had commissioned a task. The “Pandora’s box” of information also included invoices to and payments from newspapers, criminal record checks, car registration checks and ex-directory telephone numbers.
Owens said, “we could identify the newspaper, the journalist, Whittamore, who he used, the blaggers, the corrupt people, and we had a paper chain right the way up and down.”
However, a “shocked” Francis Aldhouse, the then deputy information commissioner, told Owens the press were “too big” to take on.
Owens said that no journalists had been questioned or charged in Operation Motorman, adding, “I wish we had the opportunity to look at all this.” He contended that the evidence found was “strong enough to stand on its own” to prosecute journalists, noting that some were using Whittamore 300 or 400 times.
Owens also revealed that the mobile phone number of abducted schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family’s ex-directory telephone number were featured in Whittamore’s notebooks, as well as the names of other victims of phone hacking at the News of the World.
Operation Motorman, carried out in 2003, investigated the use of a private investigators by the media to obtain personal information. In 2004, Whittamore was arrested and given a conditional discharge. In September of this year, Owens gave a disk of his files on the operation to the Independent newspaper, revealing previously unpublished details of the scale of the press use of private investigators. Just weeks before coming to the Inquiry, Owens’s home was raided under a warrant by Cheshire police, in an operation he described as a “fishing trip.”
Earlier in the day, former Number 10 director of communications Alastair Campbell called for media reform, labelling the British press “putrid”.
In his three-hour testimony, Campbell described a “culture of negativity”, with the Daily Mail being the most “relentless” for its crime and health scares. He said parents whose children have had measles should blame negative coverage over the MMR vaccine, and cited social workers as only ever being defined negatively in the tabloids, which he said impacted on recruitment, morale and the services they provide. He said the press’s treatment of the Dowlers and McCanns was “not atypical” but rather something that happened to anyone who became a “news commodity”.
He went on to say the paper was “utterly the product of one person”, and questioned editor Paul Dacre’s assertion that he had never published a story based on illegal information. Campbell argued that editors may genuinely not know “that the law is being broken left, right and centre”.
Of journalists, he said, “they are the spin doctors. They are the ones deciding what the line is…The line then gets reported as public opinion.”
While stopping short of accusing the Mail of phone hacking, Campbell said he was “unprepared” to say the paper had “never done anything untoward”.
He said that during his time at Downing Street he was “very concerned” about how many stories about Cherie Blair and her life coach Carole Caplin were getting out to different parts of the press. While admitting he had no evidence of hacking, Campbell said in his witness statement that it was “at least possible” that this is how stories were revealed.
Campbell claimed that those who argued loudest for freedom of the press were “terrified” of regulation, but that the majority of journalists had nothing to fear. Those who were terrified, he said, were scared of losing “the ability to do this sort of journalism they have been doing over the last decade or so.”
He agreed with Guardian journalist Nick Davies that a public interest advisory body should be introduced to help guide reporters. He also argued in favour of a new regulatory body that would not have current media representatives sitting on it. He advocated a US-style system of fact-checking on newspapers as well as league tables to see which papers adhered to the code of practice.
Also speaking today was Mark Lewis, a solicitor for victims of phone hacking. He described the surveillance carried out on him and his family by News of the World private investigators as “truly horrific.” In an impassioned testimony, he went on to say that News International sought to “destroy” his life and “very nearly succeeded”.
Lewis also refuted claims in a dossier compiled by NI lawyers that he had leaked information to the Guardian, accusing solicitor Julian Pike and News of the World lawyer Tom Crone of “complete arrogance and idiocy”.
The hearing continues on Monday, when we will hear from Francis Aldhouse, the former ICO investigator on Operation Motorman, solicitor Charlotte Harris and author Peter Burden.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson.
30 Nov 2011 | Leveson Inquiry
Speaking at the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press on Tuesday, Paul McMullan, the former deputy features editor at the News of the World, said this:
“In 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never actually come across anyone who’s been doing any good. Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in …Privacy is evil; it brings out the worst qualities in people … Privacy is for paedos; fundamentally nobody else needs it.”
You can almost hear the horrified gasps as this heresy sank in. But ask yourself: at moments in your life when you’ve most fervently desired that something about you should remain private, wasn’t it often the case that this was because you thought — or thought others might think — that there was something disgraceful there?
It is no different with public figures, celebrities, politicians — the class of individuals that, for all the focus that there’s been on Milly Dowler’s family, occupy 99 percent of the media’s intrusive attention.
When an MP I felt very strongly about my privacy as an (undeclared) gay man; but I remain unconvinced that my constituents had no right to know about this; I was happy enough to tell them about the happy, shiny parts of my personal life — my marathon running, etc.
It’s my firm belief that one of the drivers of reform of the laws on homosexuality, and one of the motives that drove many MPs into the Equality lobby — and indeed one of the reasons many have chosen to come out of the closet — was precautionary: they supposed the media would eventually find out. How sure are you that this was to be regretted?
Matthew Parris is a journalist and a trustee of Index on Censorship
