7 Oct 2011 | Uncategorized
Will the arrival of elected police commissioners politicise how officers respond to popular concerns about unpopular issues? If artistic expression sparks controversy how will newly accountable police chiefs manage the already fraught competing demands of keeping the electorate sweet, and meeting the requirements of human rights legislation?.
With the arts — some like them, some don’t. Some walk away from things they don’t like, others exercise their right to protest. The threat to public order, potential or actual, is a core policing issue.
Thus Birmingham police prevented the screening of Penny Woolcock’s film One Day about local gangs; Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti, dealing with tensions within the Sikh community, was cancelled after protests turned violent and police could not guarantee the safety of theatre staff; police upheld concerns by some members of the Somali community that music is un-Islamic and banned a musical performance in Bristol.
These and many other similar cases in recent years illustrate the police’s an unprecedented role as arbiters of freedom of expression in the arts. A proposed “heavyweight” independent review of policing inEnglandandWalesled by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens should address this.
Elected commissioners must manage the tension between the popular expectations that put them in post and the unpopular causes that police are sometimes expected, even required, to defend.
Yet currently there’s no clear practice. When the Belgrade Theatre Coventry premiered Bhatti’s follow-up play Behud – Beyond Belief, an imaginative response to the cancellation of Behzti, the theatre was initially asked to pay £10,000 in policing costs, the local force applying rules designed for commercial sports events, to public art.
This is problematic political, legal and cultural territory. Beyond fulfilling their core duties — to maintain law and order, to prevent and detect crime — the Human Rights Act imposes on the police a qualified obligation not to interfere with the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and protest — and a positive obligation to take appropriate steps to protect those rights.
Case law advises: “In determining whether or not a positive obligation exists, regard must be had to the fair balance that has to be struck between the general interest of the community and the interests of the individual, the search for which balance is inherent throughout the Convention.”
When “taking those appropriate steps” means the police supporting an unpopular, minority interest — enabling a play to go ahead rather than sending officers out detecting crime, protecting property — it is a tough call as things stand.
With elected commissioners in place, especially when resources are limited, supporting an individual artist’s right to freedom of expression could look like a real vote loser.
After the riots in August David Cameron made the case for elected police commissioners as part of the solution “to mend[ing] our broken society…they will provide that direct accountability so you can finally get what you want when it comes to policing.”
Following up later that week in the Sunday Express newspaper, under the headline “Rights in my Sights”, Cameron talked of “scoring a clear line between right and wrong through every neighbourhood and backing it up with the full force of the law”.
By challenging the rights agenda in the name of a moral crusade, Cameron set alarm bells ringing for free expression. The right to freedom of expression is about the rights of the minority, and artists are always the minority.
Cameron’s claim that “our reforms mean that the police are going to answer directly to the people” runs the risk of setting up misleading expectations and empowering those who can put the power of numbers behind their sense of cultural offence.
It is important that any “contract” between an elected commissioner and his or her electorate includes the understanding that the police will do things that the majority may not like, in the interests of democracy and in the interests of a vibrant and provocative culture.
This means more freedom of expression, not less, reinforced by better information about our rights and responsibilities. We need artists to be free to discuss even the most uncomfortable truths and now more than ever to speak truth to power, to call authority to account.
7 Oct 2011 | Middle East and North Africa, Uncategorized
Dear Anna Politkovskaya,
I am well aware that this honor, which bears your name, is not merely awarded to me personally but rather to the sons and daughters of Syria, and the 3,000 whose blood was spilled over the past 7 months by the same criminal exclusionary mentality that spilled your own blood.
I am aware that your passion for truth and the defense of human dignity, for which you gave your life, is but a link in a chain that stretches across the world, through individuals and entire peoples, all of whom believe in everyone’s right to live free of oppression, humiliation, and subjugation.
Nonetheless, bestowing this honor on me personally out of all other Syrians assumes another dimension, as it comes on the fifth anniversary of your death. It means a lot to me to receive an award in your name, Anna, as a Russian citizen — even as the Russian government continues to support the Syrian regime, which has been committing crimes against humanity for several months now; crimes that have been documented by international human rights organizations.
This vividly exemplifies that what we share in humanity transcends languages, nationalities, and borders, just as tyranny and corruption share the same essence although they differ in details.
For this very reason I believe the battle for freedom, being fought by Syrians for months now, would bring comfort to your soul: because each step forward towards peace and justice in any part of the world benefits all humanity.
I am aware, Anna, that it would have hurt you deeply to see the passage that my country is going through to rid herself of a regime that perfected criminal behavior for several decades. Under this regime tens of thousands have perished in the dark dungeons of its security apparatus, or died in massacres and were buried in mass graves. Hundreds of thousands have suffered the silent and lonely years of detention, forced to express and recite phrases of false loyalty to their hangman, day in and day out. And after all this, the regime was inherited, like a royal heirloom, from father to son, in an act unprecedented in a republic. All this occurred amidst deafening Arab and international silence, and a level of complicity rarely seen before.
The oppressed people, meanwhile, were blamed for the crimes of the tyrant.
When the Syrian people decided last March to tear down the wall of fear and stand up against the violence and humiliation imposed on them by the security apparatus, they did it alone. They did it bearing nothing but the scent of freedom that breezed from Tunisia and Egypt, and the vision of a new homeland that does not steal their being, their future, and the dreams of their children.
Since then the security apparatus has been killing unarmed civilians, whose commitment to peaceful protest has stunned the world for months. As of today, according to the Center for the Documentation of Violations in Syria, there have been 3,031 martyrs, including 192 children and 85 women and girls. These figures do not represent the actual number of martyrs, as we continue to discover mass graves and learn of the disappearance of thousands of prisoners of this revolution.
Tanks have besieged our cities and towns, military forces have bombed homes, and tortured dozens of people to death, disfiguring them and stealing their organs. Hamzeh al-Khatib, the 13-year-old boy, who was arrested, whose dead body was savaged, and whose genitals were mutilated, was but one of many similar cases.
Peaceful protesters have been arrested and killed in cold blood. Ghiath Matar, the non-violent activist, a young man of 26, died under torture 3 days after his arrest. The regime offered him death after he offered them roses and water in one of the demonstrations he was leading.
Family members of activists have been kidnapped, tortured, and executed as a form of punishment — and no one is excluded. Zeynab Al-Husni, 19 years old, served as an example of what might befall the families of activists and protesters: she was kidnapped by the security forces, tortured and killed a few days after they murdered her activist brother.
Security forces carry out mass executions day after day, we find new bodies buried in unmarked graves.
Just as we are proud, dear Anna, that you found loyal friends who kept your name alive to remind us of who you were, and what you sacrificed for the sake of truth and human rights, I wish I could recite the names of all our martyrs, one by one. And I wish I could recite the names of the tens of thousands who were, and continue to be, subject to arrest and torture.
All of them: children, women, young men, and the elderly, they all deserve to have their names honored and immortalized. For they have opened the door to freedom. They have opened a door that was closed for decades, so that we might follow them on the road ahead together and behind them.
And I would like to remind the world that the Syrian people, who were victims to all those crimes yet still patient and persistent, are people who deserve much more than complicit silence, or timid criticism from those who have failed to refer this regime to the International Criminal Court despite acknowledging its crimes.
All those activists, some of whom we know and others that we don’t, are creating a new history for their country and their region. They are creating a homeland and a future from the ashes of the violence carried out by one of the most notorious authoritarian regimes in the world.
And so, Anna Politkovskaya, we continue. We continue in your memory, and in the memory of all the other symbols of truth and freedom in the world, until freedom, justice, and democracy prevail in our Syria and the entire world.
Razan Zaitouneh is the winner of the RAW in WAR Anna Politkovskaya Award 2011.
