6 Mar 2014 | European Union, Religion and Culture
A policy paper published by Article 19 has provided guidelines to help establish the difference between hate speech and freedom of expression, especially in reference to the use of hate speech against LGBTI people.
By focusing on “international standards and domestic trends countering the advocacy of hatred that constitutes incitement to hostility, discrimination or violence (“incitement”) specifically, and hate speech more generally,” Article 19 aims to define what constitutes as hate speech as well as making recommendations for the protection of freedom of expression.
The paper comes after human rights advocates, policy makers and the general public demanded clarity as to where the line should be drawn between free speech and hate speech, in particular that surrounding LGBT people.
In a statement on their own website, Article 19 said: “The paper is guided by the principle that coordinated and focused action to promote the rights to freedom of expression and equality is essential for fostering a tolerant, pluralistic and diverse democratic society in which all human rights can be realised, including those of LGBTI people.”
The policy paper points out the need for all “domestic prohibitions” to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics, but that these laws need to conform to international standards on limiting the right to freedom of expression and information.
Through the paper Article 19 hopes to establish clear boundaries “between permissible and impermissible expression” as well as providing guidelines to help others determine what fits into each category. Not only this, but the report will also contribute to “ensuring that all people are able to enjoy both the right to freedom of expression and the right to equality.”
The report also includes a breakdown of the current jurisdiction against hate speech in 36 countries, primarily in Europe, to highlight the difference between the constitutional and philosophical choices that each country makes when drawing up legislation on free speech and equality.
Read the full report here.
6 Mar 2014 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
(Image: Al Jazeera English/YouTube)
The trial of 20 journalists charged with spreading misinformation and aiding or belonging to a terror cell has been adjourned until March 24.
Only six of the defendants — including three who work for the Al Jazeera English (AJE) service — appeared in court on Wednesday, eighteen days after pleading not guilty to the charges levelled against them.
The widely publicised case known to Egyptians as the “Marriott Cell” case is a test for the new Egyptian authorities’ tolerance of free speech and press freedom, say rights organizations and press freedom advocates. Last week, journalists in cities around the world held rallies outside Egyptian embassies to express their solidarity with the Al Jazeera detainees. Meanwhile, an online Avaaz petition launched a few days before the resumption of the trial on Wednesday and calling for the release of the detained journalists, had already collected more than 50,000 signatures by the time the court session opened at the Torah Police Institute in Cairo.
Al Jazeera has rejected the charges, expressing its disappointment at the trial’s adjournment. “Our journalists were simply doing their job, covering and challenging all sides of the story in Egypt,” Al Anstey, managing director of Al Jazeera English, said. “To continue to keep them behind bars after such a long time in detention is simply outrageous, so we continue to call for their immediate release.”
Australian journalist Peter Greste, Egyptian-Canadian AJE Cairo Bureau Chief Mohamed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohamed, arrested on December 30, remain behind bars at Cairo’s Torah Prison after the judge declared the trial’s adjournment “to allow more witnesses to be heard”. Abdulla El Shamy, a fourth Al Jazeera journalist who has been in jail since August 14 and is on hunger strike to protest his confinement, did not appear in court on Wednesday.
At Wednesday’s session, the judge examined “the evidence” provided by the prosecutors in the case: equipment seized by the police when they raided the hotel suite used by the Al Jazeera team as a makeshift studio. To foreign journalists attending the trial, the set of cameras, laptops , mobile phones and electrical cables displayed in court looked much like the regular set of tools used by journalists to do their work.
At the start of the session, Soheib Saad, one of the defendants shouted out from the steel cage “journalists are not terrorists.” He was arrested at a checkpoint and told the court he had been tortured by members of the national security apparatus before being brought to prison. He added that he had been denied family visits for 40 days and was not getting enough food. Soheib also told the judge he did not know what he was doing there as he had no connection with the detained Al Jazeera journalists.
Mohamed Fahmy pleaded to the Judge to release him on guarantees from the Canadian embassy that he would not travel abroad. “I would never betray my country,” he insisted. Fahmy whose right arm was in a sling because of a shoulder injury sustained before his arrest, complained that he had been denied medical treatment for his injury and that he was sleeping on the floor.
Peter Greste spoke little during the session, merely responding with “I’m here” when he heard his name called out by the judge. With no interpreter on hand to translate the court’s proceedings, he appeared frustrated that he could not understand what was being said in the courtroom.
An eyewitness from national security services who testified in the case admitted that he did not know the difference between Al Jazeera English and the network’s sister channel Mubasher Misr, accused by many Egyptians of being a mouthpiece for the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. “I am not a media person so I wouldn’t know the difference,” he told the court. Asked if he believed Mohamed Fahmy was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, declared by Egyptian authorities in December to be a terrorist organisation, he replied, “Fahmy works for a network that incites violence and portrays Egypt as being in the midst of a civil war so yes, he is a member of the terror cell.”
Another witness who is also a member of Egypt’s national security apparatus and who will testify at the next court session told Index outside the courtroom: “This is a war for Egypt’s very survival, for its existence. Anyone posing a threat to the country’s national security must be annihilated.”
In a country rife with conspiracy theories of plans by external powers to destroy Egypt and divide the country, his chilling words do not bode well for the fate of the Al Jazeera detainees.
This article was posted on March 6, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
6 Mar 2014 | Digital Freedom, Germany, News and features, Young Writers / Artists Programme
Photo illustration: Shutterstock
In February, thousands of websites urged their users to help stop web monitoring. The Day We Fight Back, led by American lobby group Demand Progress, condemned NSA Internet surveillance and remembered Aaron Swartz, opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), who hanged himself last year when faced with fifty years in prison for downloading academic texts. Swartz, from whom courts sought $1m in fines, is synonymous today with US clashes over online justice, but the subject is a global one. Germany, where I moved just before SOPA hit the news, offers a frightening glimpse at what happens when copyright policing trumps privacy.
I moved to Berlin in September 2011, as the German Pirate Party won its way into the city state’s assembly. Papers bewildered by this breakthrough named the party, all of whose candidates gained seats, the new rebels in national politics, noting their platform reached young, deprived and disaffected voters. I spent October in a part of town with plenty, renting a cupboardlike room while seeking somewhere longer term. The other tenants, a Barcelonian tour guide and science student from Berlin subletting empty space for cash, already knew each other. Nocturnal, inconsiderate and antisocial, the new kid scared of trying to make friends, I wasn’t a good flatmate, and left amid severe awkwardness.
At my new address, the scientist – passive-aggressively polite – told me I had to sign a retroactive rental contract. This could easily have been done by email — when he asked to meet, I should have smelled a rat, but obliged outside a supermarket in November, not stopping to wonder why both ex-flatmates turned up. “While you were here,” he said once papers were filled out, “you used BitTorrent?”
I had, I said, like almost all my friends. Filesharing was in my eyes like speeding on the motorway, an illegality most practised and few cared about. “We all do it”, the Barcelonian said, who seemed to have come reluctantly.
The scientist produced a further wad of fine-print forms. “We got sued”, he told me, “by the music industry.”
This wasn’t quite true. The document he held was an Abmahnung, a razor-edged cease-and-desist letter of German law, which lets lawyers bill recipients for time spent drafting them. The aim is to curb legal costs for poorer plaintiffs, but since other laws allow solicitors to act without instruction, firms monitor the web (often via private companies), posting them en masse to copyright infringers as a profit-making scheme; 500,000 people, reports claim, receive them yearly. Whoever issued one to my flat sought money for themselves – rights holders almost certainly weren’t briefing them.
I didn’t know any of this back then. In England, where no such business model thrives, being caught filesharing was unheard of. When I moved there, I had no idea of the German situation, and wasn’t ready for the consequences. Ambushed by ex-flatmates, intimidated and off-balance, I didn’t just sign forms admitting I’d downloaded one major artist’s album – I signed others the scientist handed me stating I’d bootlegged files I hadn’t. These accounted for nine tenths of what I later had to pay — at current exchange rates, close to £2000.
The film and record the forms named, presumably, were torrented by someone else in the flat. I’d never heard of them, and with ten minutes to think straight would have realised that – but thinking straight when bombshells land, not least while scanning foreign legalese, is difficult. Half on autopilot, half assuming I knew them by other names, I signed the papers in the bedlam of the moment. “Um ehrlich zu sein”, the scientist said once I realised my mistake, “glaube ich dir nicht.” To be honest, I don’t believe you.
If I didn’t pay the four figure sum the Abmahnung called for, the firm behind it would file suit – in which case, he said, he’d forward them what I signed and I should find a lawyer. Had I hired one, I might have been cleared or at least fined less. Specialists can haggle numbers down – typically, says Cologne solicitor Christian Solmecke, “by about half”. The trouble, which led me to pay up, was that this wouldn’t be much better.
Abmahnung victims, the Pirate Party states, are often “seriously intimidated”. A court case at the best of times is hard — this was my year out as a language student, my German was nowhere near strong enough, and the thought terrified me. Inflated study grants for life abroad arrived, by chance, just as the crisis hit, and my finances were fortunately healthy even after paying out, but a lawyer wouldn’t have been cheap. Solmecke’s firm charges €400-500 to represent its clients (£300-413), seemingly a mainstream rate, and legal bills stack up.
Not all those affected are BitTorrent users. Hamburg resident Karin Gross was charged €300 when an Abmahnung alleged she’s downloaded an obscure illegal media program which bore all the marks of infectious malware; firms like Kiel lawyer Lutz Schroeder’s make thousands threatening those in her position. “You either get ripped off by some lawyer sending you an Abmahnung”, she told the press, “or you have to hire another lawyer who costs just as much.”
Others pay for honest oversights. Pensioners Lydia and Heinz Paffrath, who sold their grandchildren’s old toys for them on eBay, were charged over €650 when they accidentally advertised a doll’s wardrobe under the wrong brand name. Canadian exchange student Nina Arbabzadeh, visiting Berlin in 2012, was billed €1200 for downloading Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, which neither she nor her flatmate had done. A visitor who had, they guessed, had used their wireless with torrent software left on.
It’s true, I torrented a handful of things, in one case getting caught, and that most Abmahnungen go to users who do. Does this justify the fines at hand – more, I noted then, then you’d get for vandalising Berlin’s city trains, and far more than for shoplifting DVDs? I haven’t touched illegal downloads since, and my web use now is hemmed in by a mesh of proxy servers and precautions. Even having sworn off BitTorrent, I’m anxious, second-guessing every click and panicking at German-language post (last month, when an official looking envelope came for my flatmate, I Google-searched advice for half an hour — it turned out she had unpaid speeding tickets.)
“If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”, the snooper’s mantra goes, but it’s more and more impossible to know what will and won’t be punished.
Last July, a Hamburg court capped sums ordered of downloaders at €150, a measure lauded by the press and praised by local activist Anneke Voss as curbing “the Abmahnung industry’s shameless excesses”. The federal Law Against Dubious Business Practices followed in October, applying an admittedly less helpful €1000 limit nationwide. It didn’t stop the biggest wave of Abmahnungen in history, more than 30,000 people getting them in one December week who’d visited RedTube.com, an adult site whose pornographic clips – some, under copyright, uploaded by third parties – are streamed like YouTube videos.
This isn’t even filesharing — users are made to pay up or face a legal fight simply for viewing web pages. It doesn’t matter that the case against them is a flimsy one. Costs plunge many in to crisis even if they win. Torrenters may not be protected either, as the new law waives its cap on fines “if the stated value [lost to rights holders], according to the individual case’s own circumstances, is considerable”. No one knows yet what this means in practice – a lengthy period of wrangling is expected to ensue – but vested interests will no doubt defend their moneymaking prospects.
British and US laws give firms less room to act like this, but it’s clear to those who care that Germany’s status quo is less a triumph of fair play or honesty than a toxic cocktail of profiteering and surveillance. It’s easy to see, post-Swartz and post-Wikileaks, how the assault on piracy might lead down such a road.
If it does, the world will be dragged with it. SOPA, which threatened the wholesale existence of media platforms like YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo, was meant to take worldwide effect. Officials opted to “postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement”, shelving rather than scrapping the proposals. The act, or the prospect of one like it, still hangs over us. Even that may not be needed. In David Cameron’s Britain, where service providers were ordered last year to block video-sharing sites, the Big Society ideals of web-policing and privatised justice could produce a German style free-for-all if left to run their course.
The internet was made for instant data replication – in other words, for filesharing. Copyright laws weren’t passed with it in mind. On social media this week, you’ve likely witnessed dozens of infringements – photos, gifs, videos, quotations. Clampdowns on piracy, as the German system demonstrates, attack the core idea of the net, scapegoating users for new technology’s inescapable impact. Rights protection has its place, but must be reformed.
This article was posted on March 6, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
6 Mar 2014 | Awards, News and features, Sri Lanka
Callum Macrae, in collaboration with Channel 4 News, has made three films uncovering the truth about Sri Lanka’s human rights abuses in the final months of its decades-long civil war in 2009.
Macrae’s most recent film No Fire Zone, containing carefully authenticated video evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, gained particular attention as it was aired just before the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Sri Lanka last November. “Both sides in that war committed crimes, although the most of those who died did so as a result of shelling by forces under the ultimate command of President Mahinda Rajapaksa,” Macrae wrote recently. The film tells this story, and that of the government’s attempt to cover it up.
Macrae has been continuously smeared in Sri Lankan media, with claims that he is a Tamil Tiger supporter and that he and Channel 4 receive funding from the disbanded rebel group. He has received death threats, and the team has been followed by the secret service as well as impromptu pro-government protesters, while in the country. “I am probably the most hated man in Sri Lanka at the moment” Macrae recently wrote, but added that based on his experiences in the country, “it is very clear there are a lot of people in Sri Lanka who are very happy to see their increasingly despotic ruling family coming under pressure.
Nominees: Advocacy | Arts | Digital Activism | Journalism
Join us 20 March 2014 at the Barbican Centre for the Freedom of Expression Awards
This article was posted on March 6, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
