Canadian Naser Al Raas was arrested and detained today after he attended a court due to hear his appeal against his five-year prison sentence. The 29 year-old IT-specialist had been in hiding since being sentenced on 25 October 2011, he feared returning to prison after he was tortured while in pre-trial detention.
Al Raas was arrested and tortured for participating in protests in February and March 2011, when thosands of Bahrani’s took to the streets. He was charged with spreading false news and inciting hatred against the regime.
Despite the Bahrain authorities frequently detaining people who attend court appointments, Al Raas’s fiancé Zainab told Index that her fiance felt safe to attend court for the first time after Canadian officials had condemned his sentence. On 26 January, the Canadian government called for Al Raas’s case to be “resolved expeditiously, particularly in view of Mr. AlRaas’ grave health concerns.” AlRaas has a serious heart condition, and his physician claim’s imprisoning his patient’s would place his life “in jeopardy”. AlRaas needs regular medication, and is susceptible to haemorrhages when he is injured. After his release on bail after 31 days in prison, AlRaas claimed prison officials repeatedly beat him on the chest which is scarred from two open-heart procedures.
The judge has allowed a request to allow Al Raas to see a cardiologist. Al Raas is now being held at Jaw prison, where a number of imprisoned activists are on hunger strike. Fourteen activist are on a one-week hunger strike protesting the Bahrani states vicious crackdown on activists and its continued detention of prisoners of conscience. Al Raas told his fiancee that if he was imprisoned he would join the prisoner’s action, many members of the Bahraini opposition have also joined the hunger strike in solidarity.
Al Raas’s appeal hearing has been postponed until 16 February. His lawyer told Index that he was “optimistic” about the appeal hearing, and he also he said that he pressed the judge for an earlier court date.
The current chairman of the Press Complaints Commission gave an impassioned warning against statutory regulation of the press at the Leveson Inquiry yesterday.
“There is already statute,” said Lord Hunt. “What is missing is a statutory regulator, which is what I’d regard as infringement on freedom of press.”
Lord Hunt said Britain’s “much envied” press freedom was the country’s “greatest asset”.
“The road to parliamentary hell is paved with good intentions”, he added, telling the Inquiry that there were “very strong views” in parliament that there should be tougher limits on the power of the press.
He said the Inquiry was a “tremendous opportunity” for the press to come forward with the type of system that Sir David Calcutt proposed in the early 1990s. “But not by statute,” Hunt emphasised.
He also held the view that the PCC was not a regulator, arguing that it had been “unfairly criticised for failing to exercise powers it never had in the first place”.
He said there was an urgent need for a new body and that the Inquiry was a key factor in there being “wide consensus for radical reform”. He argued that a new regulator should have two arms — one for handling complaints and mediation, and the other for auditing and enforcing standards.
Hunt also revealed that Northern and Shell boss Richard Desmond, who withdrew from the PCC last year, has agreed to sign up to his newly proposed press regulator. Hunt repeated that there was a “real appetite” for change and proposed a five-year rolling contract for publishers to sign up to.
Earlier today, serving PCC commissioner Lord Grade said he did not believe that statutory regulation would have a chilling effect on investigative journalism, which he said was “alive and well” in broadcasting despite being “heavily regulated”.
Yet he took issue with statutory regulation raising the prospect of judicial review and a slower complaints process, and had concerns over the powers of a statutory body to intervene with newspapers prior to publication.
Grade said a new, improved regulator should have “visible, painful, tangible powers of sanction”, and that statutory recognition of a body that is independent of politicians and proprietors seemed to be a “very important way forward”.
He added that current PCC staff were “underpaid, overworked, overstretched”, and that the body barely had enough resources to do more than be a “complaints resolution vehicle”.
The Inquiry continues today, with evidence from Ofcom, the Advertising Standards Agency and PressBoF.
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That this House notes with concern the sketch on the NBC Jay Leno Show where the most sacred Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple, was disrespected by Jay Leno when it was referred to as GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s summer home; expresses concern and regret that this depiction of the Golden Temple as a home of the rich shows a complete misunderstanding of the Sikh faith and is derogatory to Sikhs across the world; believes that these comments are not acceptable to all those who believe in respect for all religions; calls on Jay Leno and NBC to apologise to all Sikhs for this disrespectful depiction of the Golden Temple; and further calls on the Government to make representations to the US government that while recognising principles of freedom of speech there should be more understanding and respect shown to the Sikh faith.
The former chair of the Press Complaints Commission has made a staunch defence of the self-regulation body at the Leveson Inquiry today.
Sir Christopher Meyer, who chaired the self-regulation body from 2003 to 2009, grew exasperated as he was asked by counsel Robert Jay QC whether the body should stop the press coming up with stories to fit supposed facts. “As long as human beings are involved, there will be fallibility,” Meyer told the Inquiry.
“It is as if you say to the police ‘you are useless because you can’t stop crime’,” Meyer said. “These are ridiculous arguments.”
In one of the more heated sessions of the Inquiry, Meyer told Jay that he seemed “to ignore” that the public has confidence in the complaints body, which has faced criticism in various witness testimony for having failed to deal proactively with complaints. In her evidence to the Inquiry in November, Harry Potter author JK Rowling called it a “wrist-slapping exercise at best”, while the father of missing toddler Madeleine McCann suggested “repeat offenders” of incorrect coverage should lose their privilege of practising journalism.
Meyer contended it was unfair for Jay to suggest he was slow in protecting the McCanns or condemning the Express’s coverage of them. The couple, whose daughter went missing in Portugal in 2007, received a libel payout of £550,000 from Express Newspapers for defamatory articles published about them.
Meyer said he had made it “perfectly plain” to Gerry McCann that he had an option of taking a legal route or the PCC, stressing to the Inquiry that the PCC made “particular efforts” to make itself available to the McCanns within 48 hours of their daughter, Madeleine, disappearing.
He added that he told the then-editor, Peter Hill, “you have to resign” after the payout.
He continued, “the McCanns needed the press for publicity’s sake”, adding that the couple had made a “Faustian” bargain with the media.
He also rejected Jay’s suggestion that, had the PCC taken a more proactive stance with the McCanns, the libellous coverage of Bristol landlord Chris Jefferies would not have been able to go so far.
“Don’t drag me down that path,” he told Jay, noting that he was no longer the PCC chairman at the time, and that the body had been successful in containing media scrums.
Quizzed about why the PCC did not call in newspaper editors in the wake of the Information Commissioner’s reports on Operation Motorman, Meyer said he needed “actionable information” and wanted to “see the beef” before talking to editors.
Last month, the former Information Commissioner Richard Thomas told the Inquiry the PCC “should have done more” in response to the Motorman findings, and that he “just did not buy [the] line”, that the PCC could not intervene because the use of private investigators by the press was a criminal matter.
Discussing the oft-criticised PCC report on phone hacking in 2007, published after the jailing of Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman on related offences, Meyer argued it was not useful for the PCC to “duplicate” the police inquiry, and that interviewing former News of the World editor Andy Coulson would not have added “anything of value” to the report.
He said the PCC decided to conduct a “lessons-learned exercise” to shed a “little more light” on what had occurred at the News of the World. Meyer called the report “monumental” and said the police and papers uncovered more evidence of phone hacking than was known in 2006.
His exchange with Robert Jay QC became more agitated as they moved on to Max Mosley, who sued the News of the World in 2008 for publishing a story accusing him of engaging in a Nazi-themed orgy.
Meyer said Mosley was “extremely rude” about the PCC after he decided to launch a legal complaint against the News of the World, adding later that “the whole thing might have taken a different course” had Mosley had gone to the PCC before the tabloid published its sting. “We around the table — the commissioners — would have had a very interesting debate,” Meyer said, adding, “we would have found for him.”
He added that the PCC could have attempted to halt the publication of Mosley sting, as the body “regularly” gave pre-publication advice and there would have been a “big debate” about whether the Nazi theme of the story “affected the central argument”.
Meyer grew increasingly frustrated when asked if there was “collusion” between the PCC and editors serving on its board.
“God knows I had my conflicts with the editors on all kinds of things,” he told the Inquiry. “If you think I was sitting in their pocket not daring to do things that they did not like, think again Mr Jay.”
Meyer gave a staunch defence of free expression, noting that he was a “strong believer of freedom of the press” and “very firmly of the view that you do not go down the road of statute”.
Meyer warned that state involvement in press regulation was a “slippery slope”. He argued that in the future a “less permissive, less liberal state” may try to take advantage of existing legislation to do things that “might be offensive to freedom of expression”.
He added that the press is “quite closely hemmed in by statute and code of practice”, adding that he would not not want to see a “system of regulation that is more repressive than need be.” Referring to a 2003 speech, Meyer said he still believed the PCC should not be able to fine newspapers, contrary to current PCC director Stephen Abell’s view expressed yesterday.
Contrasting with the testimony of Abell and former director Tim Toulmin, Meyer said he believed “very firmly” that the PCC was a regulator, noting that “it is regulation unlike anything else”.
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