A Kuwaiti man has been sentenced to five years in prison for a Twitter comment reportedly insulting the prophet Muhammad.
Musab Shamsah was arrested by local police in May for posting on his Twitter account that Hassan and Hussein, the sons of Muhammad’s cousin, Ali, were more honest than Muhammad himself. He received a sentence of one-year imprisonment for mocking religion under article 11 of the penal code, and an extra four years for violating the 2012 National Unity Law for publishing content that could be deemed offensive to religious “sects” or groups.
Shamsah pleaded not guilty to all charges during his hearing on 18 November at the Kuwaiti Court of First Instance, arguing that his tweet had been misinterpreted by prosecutors. The tweet was deleted 10 minutes after it was published, with Shamsah following it up with two clarifying messages.
Human Rights Watch has condemned the sentence imposed on Shamsah, imploring that Kuwaiti prosecutors should stop detaining people for their peaceful expression of religious, political, or other views.
“It’s an insult to all Kuwaitis for the government to give itself the authority to decide what’s insulting to religion, and to jail Kuwaitis for it,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Let each Kuwaiti decide what he or she finds insulting, and as simple as clicking ‘unfollow,’ decide whether they want to see or hear a message.”
Shamsah’s lawyer will file for an appeal on 20 November.
Bryan faces a charge of ‘hooliganism’ after he was arrested while filming a Greenpeace protest on an Arctic Ocean oil rig.
Hooliganism is defined in article 213 of the Russian criminal code as “a gross violation of the public order which expresses patent contempt for society, attended by violence against private persons or by the threat of its use, and likewise by the destruction or damage of other people’s property”
Bryon could end up with a two-year sentence should he be convicted. That’s what Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Ekaterina Samutsevic of Pussy Riot received after they were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” in October 2012. Samutsevic has been released on bail, but Alekhina and Tolokonnikova remain in prison. There were fears for the wellbeing of Tolokonnikova recently after authorities could not confirm her whereabouts in the course of a prison transfer.
In the past week, artist Pyotry Pavlensky was charged with hooliganism for nailing his scrotum to Red Square, in what he said was a protest against political apathy.
Azerbaijan meanwhile, defines it as “deliberate actions roughly breaking a social order, expressing obvious disrespect for a society, accompanying with application of violence on citizens or threat of its application, as well as destruction or damage of another’s property…”
In May of this year, Azerbaijani activist Ilkin Rustamzadeh was sentenced to two months pre-trial detention for a hooliganism charge after he allegedly took part in a “Harlem Shake” video. Rustamzadeh, who had been active in calling for investigations into the deaths of young soldiers in Azerbaijan’s army, denied ever having taken part in the videos.
Before that, in 2009, Azerbaijan had jailed two young activists for hooliganism after they posted a video on YouTube satirising the government’s expenditure on importing donkeys from Germany.
It was suggested that the donkey import was a cover for money laundering. Shortly after the video was posted, the activists, Emin Milli and Adnan Hadjizadeh, were attacked in a Baku cafe. They were blamed for the fight and sentenced two and a half years and two years respectively.
In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko’s regime frequently uses hooliganism charges to harass journalists and activists. Lukashenko is so paranoid about dissent that he at one point banned clapping in public, so its unsurprising that moderators of online anti-government groups get arrested. In August 2012, Pavel Yeutsikheieu and Andrei Tkachou, administrators of the “We are fed up with Lukashenko” group on Russian social network VKontakte, were both given short prison sentences for “minor hooliganism”.
In the old Soviet Union, inconvenient people were often declared mad and locked up by the authorities. Now, they’re classified as hooligans.
Members of Baloch Shohada Committee lighten candles during a protest against Baloch genocide on the occasion of Youm-e-Shohada-e-Baloch. (ppiimages / Demotix)
Farzana Majeed holds Pakistani media as responsible for the disappearances of thousands of Baloch nationalists as the state security apparatus, labelling it a “very willing accomplice.”
29-year old Majeed is among the two dozen people on a long march organised by the Voice of Missing Baloch Persons (VOMBP) which has protesting for the last four years. They are demanding the return of their loved ones, who they allege have been illegally apprehended and detained by Pakistan’s intelligence and security agencies.
“The media should be the voice of the victims and report on the atrocities committed on our people; instead they are pressured into silence by the state”, she said.
The march began on October 27 from Quetta in Balochistan covering a distance of almost 700 km, and will reach Karachi, in the Sindh province, by the end of the week. There, outside the Karachi Press Club, they will hold an indefinite sit-in and hunger strike. The marchers started with covering anywhere between 35 to 40 km/day, but blisters and illness are slowing down progress to barely 25km a day.
The mineral-rich Balochistan is the largest of the four provinces of Pakistan, and was an independent state until 1947, when Pakistan annexed its eastern side and Iran its western side. For many Baloch families, since the disappearances began more than a decade back, life has not been the same.
According to Qadeer Baloch who founded the VOMBP, around 18,000 Baloch nationalists, including doctors, professors, politicians and students, have been abducted since 2001. “We have received mutilated corpses of 1,500 of them.”
Farzana Majeed’s brother Zakri was abducted four years ago from the city of Mastung. He was the vice president of the Baloch Students Organisation (Azad), a nationalist student group raising awareness of the rights of the Baloch on campuses. Despite holding a double master’s in biochemistry and Balochi language, Majeed said her life has been put on “on hold” and her three siblings and mother rendered “homeless” since Zakri’s disappearance. She hasn’t heard any news of him for three years.
Baloch’s own son Jalil Reiki, the information secretary of Baloch Republican Party, was picked up in 2009. Almost two years and eight months later, his tortured and bullet-riddled body was found.
“The disappearances started way back in 2001 during president Pervez Musharraf’s rule but this human rights abuse came on public radar in 2004-05 after the women — mothers, sisters and wives — started coming out and began protesting,” explained Malik Siraj Akbar, editor of online English newspaper The Baloch Hal. He said Baloch women hardly ever come out publicly and so when they did, they were bound to be noticed.
“Except for BBC, and a couple of English national dailies, no other media is supporting us,” said Baloch, who is leading the march. The lukewarm response, however, has failed to deter the marchers. “It is a way of teaching our coming generation the value of speaking up,” Baloch told Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.
“Some of our friends in the media have disclosed that the intelligence agencies have warned and threatened them from covering our peaceful protest; others have been told that we are causing bad publicity internationally,” he added.
Akbar, who has taken asylum in the United States after most of his friends and colleagues were killed, said: “I know the agencies have been threatening the protesters with dire consequences and forcing them to shut down their camps and end the rally.” However, he added that he was not aware of any “threats or pressure on the media from the agencies and the government”.
But according to the chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Zohra Yusuf, “journalists in Balochistan are under pressure from the Frontier Corps [federal reserve military force], the Baloch separatists as well as the religious extremists”.
Mazhar Abbas, a former secretary general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, speculated that the poor coverage of the march, as well as the issue of disappearances, may be due to the “influence used on media barons by the intelligence agencies”.
While he emphasised the electronic media had covered the Supreme Court hearings around the issue at length, he found it had never been tackled properly from a human rights angle. He lamented the “non-professional” attitude of the print media which did not find the issue grave enough to do investigative reporting on it.
The missing are no longer an “exciting” story so they are not covered by the national media, Akbar said. “Unfortunately, nobody seems to care much about it in a country where dozens of people are killed every day,” he said.
Zohra Yusuf also said the urban-based media did not seem particularly interested in the issue as it was more “ratings oriented”.
As for the on-going march not able to attract media’s attention, Abbas suggested that had it been led by “known political or nationalist figures”, it would have automatically lured the media to it.
A recent HRCP report, based on a fact-finding mission to Balochistan, stated that while the people of the province have pinned their hopes on the new government to address the problems, especially regarding the “grave human rights violations”, many do not see any visible policy change “within the security and intelligence agencies”, as the “kill-and-dump policy” continued.
According to Malik Siraj Akbar, while the ongoing long march isn’t any different from past demonstration, it is the “first major protest” since the new governments in the province and the centre took over the reins.
“The long march reflects the new government’s failure to resurface the missing persons and normalise the situation in Balochistan,” he pointed out.
Lesley Kemp, a British freelance transcriber who faced a ruinous libel case after tweeting criticism of a Qatar-based client, is celebrating this week after the plaintiff dropped the case.
In October 2012 Milton Keynes-based Kemp tweeted criticism of Resolution Productions Limited, claiming the company had been late in paying an invoice for work carried out in September. The head of the company, Irish born Kirby Kearns, reacted strongly, bringing a £50,000 libel case against Kemp. The corporate film producer also sought to bring an action against Twitter.
But in a statement released yesterday, Kearns said he would drop the case, as he refused to pay security of £134,000 into the court, a common requirement for foreign-based claimants. He also cited personal reasons for not pursuing the case.
In his statement, Kearns rejected claims that he was a “libel tourist”, citing his family’s association with the UK. He said that the dropping of the case should not be seen as “some kind of victory” for any side.
Reacting on her blog today, Kemp expressed gratitude to science writer and libel campaigner Simon Singh, as well as the Libel Reform campaign (of which Index on Censorship is a member).
Kemp was represented by Robert Dougans of Bryan Cave, who also represented Singh in his battle with the British Chiropractic Association, and Jonathan Price* of Ely Place Chambers.
Dougans told Index: “We are glad that this case is over, but disappointed it was ever begun. I know how relieved Lesley is, and Jonathan Price and I are happy with a job well done, but we still do not know why Mr Kearns dropped the claim because of having to pay security for costs when he was always going to have to do so.”
This article was updated at 6pm, London time. It originally incorrectly stated that Jonathan Price is a QC.
