10 Feb 2012 | Uncategorized
Somerset lay preacher Michael Overd has been cleared of charges of Intentional harassment, alarm or distress (Section 4A of the Public Order Act).
Overd had been charged after it was alleged he had told two gay men that they would “burn in hell” while preaching in Taunton town centre in July. Reports claim he had an altercation with the same two men in October 2010. Police spoke to Overd on that occasion.
The complaint apparently came from Overd’s preaching from 1 Corinthians. The specific verse complained of was 1 Corinthians 6:9
6:9 Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, passive homosexual partners, practicing homosexuals, 6:10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, the verbally abusive, and swindlers will not inherit the kingdom of God.
(Note, reader, the delicious reference to the “verbally abusive”).
Overd’s lawyers maintain that the two men became abusive and threatening towards the preacher, but no action had been taken about this.
The Public Order Act has been used far too often to curb free expression, but in this case the court has got it right. Overd is entitled to his Bible-bashing, and people are allowed to disagree. The Public Order Act should only be invoked when there is a genuine threat of a disruption of the peace.
The government is currently examining the wording of the Public Order Act, and will report by the end of March (Index on Censorship has submitted its views). We should hope that it will take the lesson of this verdict into account. it is a positive step.
10 Feb 2012 | Asia and Pacific
“I believe a journalist can change the world,” says exiled Sri Lankan journalist Sonali Samarasinghe, “if not why are we here then”. Sonali is one of three exiled journalists, from the minority Tamil and majority Sinhalese communities, whose stories are told in a new Norwegian film, Silenced Voices, by Beate Arnestad previewed last night at the Fritt Ord Foundation in Oslo.
All three paid an enormous price for that faith in the power of a journalist. Sonali is the widow of murdered Sinhalese journalist Lasantha Wickrametunga, who is famous for having penned his own obituary just before he was killed in January 2009 at the height of his country’s civil war. She’s shown in the film, alone in a tiny bedsit in New York, starting a news website, persevering in her profession, trying to interview a top army general over allegations of war crimes who’s now posted to the Sri Lankan mission to the UN. The scenes of the man dodging and fobbing her off will be familiar to any reporter, but this is very personal to Sonali since she still wants answers about who killed her husband in broad daylight in the capital. They’d only just got married and she could easily have been sitting next to him when he was killed.
Bashana is a Sinhalese journalist living in Germany, responsible for exposing war crimes committed by Sri Lankan soldiers from his own majority community. His organisation, Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, obtained the horrific video broadcast by Channel 4 of naked, bound prisoners being executed by men wearing Sri Lankan army uniforms. While waiting for his asylum application to be processed, Bashana and his wife lose their home and are shown rolling out sleeping bags on the floor of a human rights office where they’re allowed to sleep at night. Some of the saddest scenes in the one hour film are of Bashana’s wife, Sharmila, who pours all her feelings of loneliness and sadness into beautiful but desolate photographs of frozen ice and empty winter landscapes. She says how much she just wants to go home.
Bashana’s extraordinary friendship with a Tamil journalist who worked for the pro-rebel news site, Tamilnet, is central to the film. They didn’t meet in Sri Lanka, but from exile Bashana helped Lokeesan apply for scholarships abroad, translating all the necessary documents. There are tense scenes when the film maker, Beate Arnestad, visits Lokeesan in southern India only to find out that Indian intelligence are watching her and she may have put Lokeesan at risk. He quickly goes into hiding elsewhere and she takes the next flight out. Months later Lokeesan escapes and finally meets the Sinhalese man who had helped him. Lokeesan told me he had never spoken to a Sinhalese civilian all his life, because he’d grown up in rebel territory in northern Sri Lanka and the only Sinhalese around were staring down the barrel of a gun at him.
Lokeesan and Bashana sit together in exile watching appalling footage that Lokeesan shot from inside the war zone in 2009, as hundreds of thousands of civilians were shelled and bombed by the advancing army. A young woman’s dead body is sprawled on the ground and by her side a little girl howls, asking why she’s left them all alone to wander the world as orphans.
As Silenced Voices plays out in public for the first time to a packed house in Oslo, Lokeesan cannot control himself as he watches the footage he took of dead bodies and government shell attacks. He’s inconsolable, sobbing with his face hidden in a checked handkerchief, unable to relive the tragedy he saw repeated again and again as a reporter in those dreadful months of war. Quietly Bashana, who’s also teary eyed, puts a hand on his leg in a quiet restrained gesture of human comfort that doesn’t intrude or interrupt the grief spilling out, three years later. Across the ethnic divide, they’ve stretched out the hand of friendship. It’s an example to the Sri Lankans in the audience some of whom come and thank the journalists for their sacrifices.
Silenced Voices is a very powerful film that tells the story of the invisible misery of scores of journalists forced into exile for just thinking they could change the world.
Frances Harrison’s book about the civil war in Sri Lanka Still Counting the Dead will be published by Portobello Books in the summer
10 Feb 2012 | News and features, Uncategorized
Two journalists were arrested by Palestinian Authority officials on 31 January after making comments against Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO.
Rami Samara, an editor with local news agency Wafa and radio station Ajyal, told news agency AFP that he was detained by plainclothes security agents at the Muqata, Abbas’ headquarters, following a comment that he had posted on Facebook. Underneath an article which blamed Israel rather than the PA itself for the failure of the Palestinian Executive Committee to meet in Amman last month, he wrote: “seriously, members of the central committee of the sole representative of the Palestinian people, was this decision worth the meeting in the Muqata [compound] and the heating and the electricity and the tea and coffee.”
Samara told AFP that he was held for four hours and shown “about 100 pages of comments I made on Facebook, mostly criticising the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.” Questioned by agents from both Military and General Intelligence agencies, he reported that they told him he would be released on agreeing to sign a confession that he had been the organiser of an anti-government demonstration of a group within the PLO that is critical of Abbas. Despite refusing, Samara was eventually released later that day.
In a second case, Yousef Shayeb, a journalist with the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad was reported being detained by Palestinian intelligence officials for eight hours. Officials questioned him regarding a series of stories that he had written about corruption within the Palestinian diplomatic mission to France. According to Shayeb, those interrogating him demanded that he reveal his sources, which he refused to do. Government spokesman Ghassan Khatib told AFP that Shayeb was questioned in connection with potential libel charges, in order that security services could decide whether to file charges against him.
Both journalists are members of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, a majority Fatah organisation, meaning that the political crossover between the organisation and the Palestinian Authority itself resulted in limited action being taken against the arrests by the head of the PJS, Dr Abdel Nasser Najjar.
Although a press release by the PJS stated that it would “spare no effort to defend journalists,” with Dr Najjar quoted as saying that it is “the responsibility of the Association to follow up the issues of journalists,” it is unclear what if any steps were taken by the PJS to protect the reporters concerned. Compared to the outcry in October 2010 when Hamas occupied the offices of the PJS in Hamas-controlled Gaza, it would seem that there is little political gain to be had in reacting to the arrests in a manner that was more than cosmetic. Attempts to contact Wafa and the PJS directly to discuss the cases were also ignored.
Despite local media outlets having an obvious vested interest in press freedom, coverage of the arrests was extremely limited. Wafa, the agency where Samara works, published a very short report which was also republished by the Palestinian News Network, citing its source very clearly. Bigger news agencies such as Ma’an, who have reported extensively in the past week of journalists’ detained by Israeli forces in Nablus and Bethlehem, were silent about Samara and Shayeb.
In Reporters Without Borders’ annual Press Freedom Index published last month, the Palestinian Territories ranked 153rd out of 179 countries, dropping three places lower than last year. Although the drop was due to the Hamas takeover of the PJS Gaza office, both parts of the Territories examined as one received a lower placement than Afghanistan or Iraq.
Ruth Michaelson is a freelance journalist based in Ramallah. Follow her on Twitter @_Ms_R
10 Feb 2012 | News and features, Uncategorized
Despite changes in political power and public trust in government and a technological revolution that in many ways changed how people expect to get information, the basic framework of the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has withstood the test of time. The hallmarks of the US FOIA are a presumption of the public’s right to records of government and the ability of requesters to challenge the government’s decision to withhold information. Because the law is based on the premise that people have a right to information about what the government is doing and why, an agency must rely on one of the law’s nine exemptions in order to withhold requested information from the public. The US FOIA’s 9 Exemptions permitting or requiring non-disclosure of records cover:
1) properly classified information; 2) agency management records; 3) information barred from disclosure by another law; 4) trade secrets or other confidential business information; 5) inter- and intra- agency information protected by legal privileges; 6) information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s privacy; 7) information compiled for law enforcement; 8) federal government records of banks and other regulated financial institutions; and 9) information about the location of oil and gas wells of private companies.
A requester who believes that an agency has inappropriately used exemptions to withhold information has a statutory right to file an administrative appeal to the agency. If a requester is unsatisfied after the appeals process, or if the government does not meets its statutory obligation to respond to a request in a timely matter, the requester can take the government to court, where the burden is on the government to come forward and justify the withholding of the information.
The law’s structure does suffer some weaknesses. First, while it gives requesters opportunities to question the government’s decision to withhold information, the burden for filing an appeal or a lawsuit falls on the requester. Another problem is that the law’s Exemption 3 allows Congress, by putting language in other statutes, to grant an agency authority to withhold new categories of information without ever actually amending FOIA. The US Congress can, and often does, this by tucking such provisions into large bills. Because the provision does not statutorily amend FOIA, Congressional Committees with jurisdiction over the Act and with expertise in the public’s right to know often do not review the legislation before it is voted on, and sometimes these new authorities are signed into law before anyone even knows they exist. Although there is no perfect count of how many of “other laws” allow the government to withhold information, a report in March 2011 by the Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coalition of media groups, shows the extent of the problem: according to data the group compiled, agencies cited provisions in more than 240 other laws to withhold information over the last decade.
The execution of the US law is another issue confronting requesters. Long delays in response and a lack of transparency about what the government is doing with a request once it is submitted lead to a system that doesn’t work for a lot of people — certainly not journalists and academics who are on deadline and not for people who in the age of Google expect immediate access to information. Although agency backlogs have been reduced in recent years, most people will have to wait for some period of time before an agency even begins processing their requests. Once a FOIA request is in the system, there is no way currently a person can tell how long it may be before he or she gets a response – let alone records.
One reason the US’s FOIA processing system fails to keep up with demand is the lack of continuous effective oversight. The Office of Information Policy (OIP) at the Department of Justice monitors agency compliance with the FOIA, but uses the compliance information it collects to provide agencies with guidance on how to improve its practices, not demand an agency make any changes. In Congress, FOIA competes for attention with a vast number of issues. The Congressional Committees responsible for FOIA oversight also are responsible for other a number of substantive issue areas.
To counter growing backlogs and continued frustration with the FOIA system, Congress proposed the OPEN Government Act of 2007 to make FOIA processes more efficient. The act was championed by members of both parties and was passed by both chambers with wide-spread support, despite a lack of support for the law from the Bush Administration.
Among other changes, the OPEN Government Act borrowed an innovation from several US states and foreign systems: a mediator to handle disputes between requesters and the government. The US version of the mediator, the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), is charged with helping solve disputes and with suggesting improvements to FOIA. OGIS could reduce costs by, among other things, keeping cases out of the court system and helping make sure Congress and the Administration are more aware of what problems in the FOIA system need immediate attention.
In order to be successful, however, OGIS needs additional authority. Currently OGIS must rely on the goodwill of an agency to enter into mediation and has no power to make an agency turn over records. OGIS also needs better support from the Administration. OGIS’ first round of recommendations have been pending review by the President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for over a year. The Administration needs to move forward to review OGIS’ recommendations, so they can be sent forward to Congress. Each branch then needs to act on the recommendations to improve.
Amy Bennett is the Assistant Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, where she works extensively on the organisation’s coalition partner outreach and on policy issues, including improving public access to government information and increasing openness and accountability of the federal government. Prior to joining the coalition, she earned a Master in Public Policy from the Georgetown Public Policy Institute (GPPI). Amy has previous experience working for a small start-up non-profit, as a lobbyist for government relations firms, and as an aide for Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL).
