30 Nov 2011 | Europe and Central Asia, Index Index, minipost
A young photographer was stabbed to death in Kiev on Monday night. Vitaly Rozvadovsky, a photographer for the Ukrainian weekly 2000, was stabbed at around 11pm and died in hospital around four hours later.
The murder of the 30-year-old is being treated as “murder with premeditation” but it is not believed that the attack relates to Rozvadovsky’s work. Mikhail Denisenko, editor of 2000 said that the photographer had not recently covered any sensitive stories, and he was unaware of Rozvadovsky receiving any threats.
30 Nov 2011 | Middle East and North Africa
Index on Censorship joins a coalition of seven rights groups in calling for the convictions of the “UAE 5” activists to be expunged
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30 Nov 2011 | Uncategorized
The web has been awash with outrage this week after video emerged of a woman engaged in a racist rant on a tram in Croydon.
The woman has now been arrested for a “racially aggravated” Public Order offence. The specific charge falls under section 4a, “Intentional harassment, alarm or distress”. Convictions can carry a prison sentence of up to six months.
Let’s leave aside for a moment the problematic nature of the Public Order Act, which it can be argued has its practical uses (allowing police to arrest people before violence breaks out), but can be used to censor “offensive” behaviour such as preaching or protest.
There were two things that were fascinating and troubling about the whole “My Tram Experience” experience.
The first is that the woman seems quite unwell. This does not necessarily excuse her behaviour, but in the rush to condemn her behaviour there seemed to be a hell of a lot of opprobrium and very little sympathy.
The other element was the fact that this was filmed and released on YouTube at all.
I tried to imagine how an incident like this would have played out 10 years ago, pre YouTube, pre Twitter. The woman may or may not have been kicked off the tram. People would have got off the tram and told a few people about the weird woman on the bus. That would probably have been the end of it.
Remember when everyone used to worry about CCTV cameras? It was at the height of paranoia about the Labour governments “authoritarianism”, when campaigners such as No2ID warned that the UK’s state surveillance apparatus was worse than that of the Stasi.
That panic seems to be over, perhaps due to many who made the argument being willing to give the Liberal Democrats a chance on civil liberties.
But it’s also perhaps due to a change in thinking. In the age of cameraphones and YouTube, do we now take it for granted that someone’s filming? Are we willingly becoming a citizen Stasi, happy to record and report each other’s behaviour?
30 Nov 2011 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
A TV journalist in Pakistan was shot and critically injured during a riot on Sunday. Ehsan Kohati, a senior reporter for the Waqt News TV channel was wounded in the chest and abdomen whilst reporting at a rally than turned violent in Karachi on November 27. Kohati was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he remains in a stable condition. Seven other people were injured and two were killed in the attack on a rally of Shiite Muslim mourners on the first day of the Islamic calendar month of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar.
