6 Jan 2012 | Uncategorized
Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets. Ding! Dong! The Obscene Publications Act is dead (or at least exceedingly poorly). But just as the death of one evil and malignant creature in the Wizard of Oz heralded an even nastier arrival, in the form of the Wicked Witch of the West, so some more perceptive commentators are already moving on to the next challenge: what will come after?
The glad news, for those who believe that grown-ups should be allowed the freedom to gain their erotic pleasures how they will, so long as no-one else is abused in the process, emerged from Southwark Crown Court at around 1pm this afternoon.
Police and Crown Prosecution believed that DVDs featuring activities such as fisting, sado-masochism and urination for sexual purposes were obscene.
Their distributor, Michael Peacock disagreed and, unusually, was prepared to resist their assertions in court. The jury agreed with Mr Peacock.
So it’s a victory for free expression? Perhaps. Although, giving the OPA a good kicking is a little like playground bullying: its not nice; and after a while, one does start to feel sorry for the poor put-upon law.
In purely legal terms, this verdict makes little difference. The result is not binding on other courts. It does not, as the CPS were already spinning in advance, set any sort of precedent. However, to view the effect of a law purely — or even mostly — in terms of how many successful prosecutions it brings in is to miss the point.
The OPA was launched in 1959 amid claims that it was a stake in the ground: a sticking up for standards. The failed prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover just four years later, demonstrated just how misplaced that theory was.
In the years since, its direct use has been slowly but surely whittled away: first by the Protection of Children Act 1978, which introduced the idea that possessing indecent images of children was a crime in its own right. The Video Recordings Act whittled some more, as did laws on incitement to race hatred. “Extreme porn” laws, introduced in 2008, were probably the final straw, as it became clear that prosecution for possession of things like bestial material were a “slam dunk” under this later legislation —while remaining quite difficult under the OPA.
Thus, the number of successful prosecutions under the OPA has dwindled and dwindled, until last year, the CPS owned up to being aware of just 71 prosecutions nationwide under this law.
So it has next to no impact on the life of the nation? Not at all. For over the years, the police have made extensive use of powers of seizure under the OPA to pick up material that they deemed to be obscene: to hold it for months, years even; and then, after giving serious consideration to the matter in hand, releasing it back to its owner. This was a tactic, possibly a slightly underhand tactic, designed to disrupt the trade in pornographic material and while police activity may have been legally questionable, most porn merchants did not have the inclination — or budget — to challenge the police.
Too, the OPA is entwined with a whole raft of semi-official bodies — such as the British Board of Film Classification — who have argued in the past that they will ban films if they cross the line into territory that the Police and CPS advise “would be likely to be found obscene” in front of a jury. Film-makers are well aware of this approach, and so many films that might fall foul of the BBFC in this way just don’t get made. Again, because the film producers haven’t the budget to take on the authorities.
No: this case sets no precedent. But with approximately half of the CPS’ “likely to be found guilty” checklist just booted out of court — literally — it will be hard, now, for the BBFC (and other bodies, such as the Internet Watch Foundation) to hold the line.
Expect loads of fisting and urination in porn films in 2012: and expect the Daily Mail to get very hot under the collar about the moral degeneration that this represents.
So its back to the beginning, with joy ful dancing in the streets? Not necessarily. As one highly cynical observer suggested, just minutes after the verdict was in: “I wouldn’t be surprised if this is exactly what the authorities wanted.”
Because although the OPA did exert a major influence on what got made, film-wise, it was also hard to prosecute under. And that, for many of its more reactionary critics, was the main problem. They much prefer the newer-fangled laws which are strict liability and don’t mess about with all that namby-pamby subjective stuff about whether something could be considered to “deprave and corrupt”. They like their law hard and thrusting. Like the “extreme porn” one.
And if the OPA fails, then, they argue, the case for replacing it with something much stricter, much more draconian becomes inevitable.
Apres lui, le deluge: and it won’t be a golden shower!
Jane Fae is a writer and campaigner on issues of the law and sexuality. She is one of the UK’s leading experts on the recent workings of the Obscene Publications Act, having been an expert witness in the Girls Scream Aloud case – and will be presenting a paper on the evolution of the OPA at the Obscenity Research Conference, taking place in April of this year
6 Jan 2012 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
Europe’s last dictatorship is clamping down on online activism, with a new law effectively requiring everyone to be a state spy. Mike Harris reports
As of this morning, the internet in Belarus got smaller. A draconian new law is in force that allows the authorities to prosecute internet cafes if their users visit any foreign sites without being “monitored” by the owner. All commercial activity online is now illegal unless conducted via a .by (Belarusian) domain name, making Amazon and eBay’s operations against the law unless they collaborate with the regime’s censorship and register there. The law effectively implements the privatisation of state censorship: everyone is required to be a state spy. Belarusians who allow friends to use their internet connection at home will be responsible for the sites they visit. Some have tried to defend the law, stating all countries regulate the internet in some form – but the Belarusian banned list of websites contains all the leading opposition websites. The fine for visiting these sites is half a month’s wages for a single view.
The Arab spring has been a wake-up call to the world’s remaining despots. The internet allowed images of open dissent to disseminate instantly. As Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak found out, once you reach a critical mass of public protest you haven’t got long to board your private jet. It’s a lesson learned by Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and Europe’s last dictator, and also by the Belarusian opposition.
Lukashenko attempted to destroy the political opposition after the rigged 2010 presidential elections. Seven of the nine presidential candidates were arrested alongside thousands of political activists. The will of those detained was tested: there are allegations that presidential candidates Andrei Sannikov and Mikalai Statkevich have been tortured while in prison. The opposition is yet to recover; many of its leading figures have fled to Lithuania and Poland.
Within this vacuum of leadership, the internet helped spur a civil society backlash. After the sentencing of the presidential candidates, a movement inspired by the Arab spring “The Revolution Via Social Networks” mushroomed into a wave of protests that brought dissent to towns across Belarus usually loyal to Lukashenko. As the penal code had already criminalised spontaneous political protest with its requirements for pre-notification, the demonstrations were silent, with no slogans, no banners, no flags, no shouting, no swearing – just clapping.
“The Revolution Via Social Networks” (RSN) helped co-ordinate these protests online via VKontakte (the biggest rival to Facebook in Russia and Belarus with more than 135 million registered users). RSN now has more than 32,000 supporters.
RSN splits its four administrators between Minsk and Krakow to keep the page active even when the state blocks access to the page, or the country’s secret police (hauntingly still called the KGB) intimidate them.
The protests were so effective at associating clapping with dissent that the traditional 3 July independence day military parade was held without applause with only the brass bands of the military puncturing the silence. As lines of soldiers, trucks, tanks and special forces paraded past Lukashenko and his six-year-old son dressed in military uniform, those gathered waved flags in a crowd packed with plain-clothed agents ready to arrest anyone who dared clap or boo.
The internet has kept the pressure on the regime in other ways. Protesters photograph the KGB and post their pictures online in readiness for future trials against those who commit human rights violations. A Facebook group “Wanted criminals in civilian clothes”, blogs and Posobniki.com all help to expose those complicit in the regime’s crimes. The web has also helped spread the stories of individuals who have faced brutality by the regime.
It’s this effectiveness that has made the internet a target for Lukashenko. The law enacted in July 2010 allowed the government to force Belarusian ISPs to block sites within 24 hours.
The new measures coming into force today merely build upon these restrictions. The official position of the Belarusian government from the operations and analysis centre of the presidential administration is: “The access of citizens to internet resources, including foreign ones, is not restricted in Belarus.” Yet, in reality the government blocks websites at will, especially during protests. Just after Christmas, the leading opposition website Charter 97 (which works closely with Index on Censorship) was hacked, its archive part-deleted and a defamatory post about jailed presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov published on the site. The site’s editor, Natalia Radzina, who has faced years of vile death and rape threats and escaped from Belarus after being placed in internal exile last year, says she has “no doubt” that the government was behind the hack. This is one of a series of attacks on Charter 97, which include co-ordinated DDoS (denial of service) attacks orchestrated by the KGB through an illegal botnet of up to 35,000 infected computers worldwide.
The regime has even darker methods of silencing its critics. In September 2010, I flew to Minsk to meet Belarusian civil society activists including the founder of the Charter 97 website, Oleg Bebenin. The day I landed he was found hung in his dacha, his leg broken, with his beloved son’s hammock wrapped around his neck. I spoke to his closest friends at his funeral including Andrei Sannikov and Natalia Radzina. No one believed he had committed suicide, all thought he had been killed by the state. Bebenin isn’t the only opposition figure to have died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances under Lukashenko’s rule, a chill on freedom of expression far more powerful than any changes in the law.
Today marks yet another low in Belarus’s miserable slide back to its Soviet past. Clapping in the street is now illegal. NGOs have been forced underground and their work criminalised.
Former presidential candidates languish in jail. The internet is the last free public space.
Lukashenko will do all he can to close down this freedom. In Europe, the battle has opened between the netizens of Belarus and its government. Who wins will be a matter of interest for us all.
Mike Harris is Head of Advocacy at Index on Censorship.
This article originally appeared on Comment is Free on 6 January.
6 Jan 2012 | Americas, Index Index, minipost
Dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez has appealed to Brazil’s president to help her leave the Caribbean island. A strong critic of the country’s Communist regime, Sánchez has been accused by authorities of conducting a “cyberwar” against the government. Sánchez’s video appeal to Dilma Rousseff follows her invitation to Brazil to attend the screening of a documentary about press freedom in Cuba and Honduras in which she features. The blogger said she did not expect to be able to leave Cuba without “high-level intervention”. Migration rules that require Cubans to receive government permission to travel have prevented Sánchez from leaving the country since 2004.
6 Jan 2012 | Digital Freedom, Index Index, Index Reports, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
Police in Iran have begun a heavy clampdown on internet freedom ahead of parliamentary elections in March, as tighter regulations on internet cafe use are introduced. Under the new rules, cafe owners will have to take the forename, surname, paternal name, national identification number, postcode and telephone number of each customer, along with the date and time of internet use and the addresses of sites visited. Newspaper reports have also suggested plans to launch a national internet network are underway, prompting fears that Iranian web users could be cut off from the World Wide Web.
