8 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, Turkey
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Photo: Philip Janek / Demotix)
“What happened in Turkey during the last ten years?” When the storm is over and if we wake up to a bright morning after it’s all over, we will end up with that question at hand which could take another ten years to answer.
One answer could commence as such: A leader came upon and he taught his people a template to think by repeating it over and over again. (The frequency and length of Prime Minister’s speeches are not without cause. Their purpose is not to leave a space to think, therefore a chance to doubt for the people.)
Around the leader an alignment was formed as it happens with all leaders. That working alliance matured, deepened and ornamented leader’s modus operandi. That educated alliance, members of which were not worse than the average in society, wore the oppugning, vindictive, ambushing style and worked hard to provide an intellectual legitimation for the leader’s template. (Those who wrote headlines such as “they were not arrested for their journalistic activities,” journalists providing testimonials for KCK and Ergenekon cases for the judiciary which was already politicized, academicians feasting for “civil governance,” attorneys dancing with jackals, artists using all forms of art, from poetry to music, to be included in the photo shot of good fortune. I’m talking about a huge crowd.)
Since the rest of the people who were not included in the leader’s definition of “my citizens” meaning “the real citizens,” are considered non-human – therefore expelled from human status-, unlawful cruelty against those was accepted in the beginning, later totally ignored. Leader told “his citizens” not to consider the others, nor to feel remorse or feel for them, time and again.
Leader told to “his people” that they were the ones who were done injustice in fact, he told that many times. He told that so many times that they finally believed in him. They wanted to believe, for humanity cannot accept harm for malfeasance. Malfeasance must have a “good” reason, having something to do with benefaction, and grievance is always a good reason. At the end, party member “citizens” started to see the killing of kids by ambition for power, that are as poor as themselves, as a conspiracy against them. (A nation who does not feel remorse after seeing the face of Ali Ismail Korkmaz, a youngster beaten to death by the police during Occupy Gezi, is seriously ill, is insane.)
Leader did not only destroy justice but also the feeling of one. No one in this country can no longer relate a court of justice to jurisprudence, nobody can. Leader replaced the justice, which is supposed to be the basis of the estate with the love the masses felt for him. The behavior of the people in leader’s rallies/rites wearing shrouds and going crazy were not without reason; they sacrificed their physical and spiritual beings for the being of the leader. Leader was justice itself. As the concept of justice is related to God in ancient man’s mind.
For the length of ten years, organized ignorance, in the form of crazy and colossal crowds, mounted over freedom of opinion, human values, conscience and common denominators of humanity. They had their leader shouting “Ahead!” Numerous and grave human rights violations were experienced. It would take at least another ten years to account for those.
When the current ten years are over and a new ten years period would start, it would be more difficult for us. We would ask “what had happened?” We would like to find out by thinking over. Whilst looking for a historical reason we would end up at September 12 coup d’état. As we scratch the surface of history we would arrive at a point when “Deniz and his friends” were hanged, when in fact “kindness” was dangling on the gallows, in fact all were silent back then as well.
Maybe we would go further back to the Dersim Massacre. Maybe further back. To 1915. Maybe further back in history to the time of Ottoman sultans who slayed their brothers… We would search for “the seed of malfeasance” on this land, the first sin, the first womb of mercilessness. But it would still be very difficult to account for the last ten years. Because it is almost impossible to find a rational reason for organized ignorance, organized desire to not to think, organized unscrupulousness. If we finally decide to try those in the court of humanity, if we would have the power to do that, we then have the chore to find a courthouse big enough for all who started that system, for all who supported it and made it possible. That crowd is for sure very crowded.
*The book Radical Malfeasance Problem in Hannah Arendt” by Berrak Coskun, published by Ayrinti Publishers, inspires this article. With gratitude.
The original article in Turkish is published in Birgün Daily on January 6th, 2014. Translated to English by Stratos Moraitis. The translation was originally published at The Globe Times and is posted here with permission of the author.
7 Jan 2014 | News and features, Religion and Culture, Turkey
Meltem Arikan
In the days after the Gezi Park protests, Turkish playwright and author Meltem Arikan found herself at the centre of a government-led hate campaign that left her fearing for her life.
Arikan, now living in the United Kingdom, left Turkey because of the vicious and sustained campaign against her on social media and TV. She was subjected to a continuous barrage of brutal verbal abuse and rape and death threats. The attacks were fronted by Turkish politicians who accused her, and the people behind the production of her play Mi Minor, of being the architects of the Gezi Park demonstrations. The campaign was targeted and persecutory, “like a witch hunt in the 15th century” and members of the public were encouraged by politicians to create Twitter accounts and join the action against her.
This was not the first time that the government had tried to silence her. Arikan’s 2004 novel Stop Hurting my Flesh tells the story of women’s lives that have been left devastated by experiences of sexual abuse and incest. The novel was banned by the government accusing it of “destroying the Turkish family order, offending the Namus (honour) of the society, arousing sexual desire in the readers and disturbing the order of society by inducing fear within women, by using a feminist approach.”
Arikan was interviewed by Index on Censorship Head of Arts Julia Farrington.
Index: How did censorship of your novel affect you?
Arikan: When you experience censorship or a ban you don’t feel fully comfortable about the things you produce. You always have the feeling of “what’s going to come out of this now?” I have already discovered that when my work connects with real lives, I get into trouble.
When they banned my novel, I felt so furious, pure fury. Really. And after that I started a lot of campaigns. Before my novel if you said the word “incest” on TV you would be fined. But the act of incest itself was not punished at all. And you couldn’t open a case on incest because there was no law against incest. They only had child abuse but they are totally different things. My campaigns contributed to the word being accepted, and the law has changed as a result of these campaigns. Later I was awarded the ‘Freedom of Thought and Speech Award’ by the Turkish Publishers Association. But none of this stopped my fury. And then I understood that people are actually comfortable with the way things are. And that when I try to talk about something uncomfortable, people think that I am paranoid, or exaggerating so I stopped. And I started to focus on the world as a whole through social media.
Index: What started your interest in social media?
Arikan: When Wikileaks published the data cables, it shook the male dominated world order. Seeing that world leaders were powerless to stop Wikileaks from fearlessly publishing data cables, excited me very much. Turkish press did not pay enough attention to what was happening around the world. That’s why I started to follow the developments from world press and social media. I started using my Facebook and Twitter accounts more, to inform the people in my country about the happenings. I was not interested in social media as much before, but afterwards I spent most of my time sharing information. I got quite obsessed. People even wrote tweets to me to say ‘have some sleep, you need to sleep’ because I wanted to be awake when people started tweeting in US due to the time difference.
Index: How did this time spent on social media influence the writing of Mi Minor?
Arikan: For two years in social media around the time of Arab revolutions, and the Occupy movement, I felt, received and perceived what was happening around the world. I witnessed how social media gave a platform for people to share their personal stories or give information by using Twitter, broadcasting with their mobile phones using Ustream, live-stream when traditional media was silent. After I got involved in social media I didn’t care about individual countries anymore because I came to realize that interactions on social media happen regardless of the borders of distances, languages, nations, religions or ideologies, and this inspired me to create a play. It was all about the situations and events happening all around the world. Later I shared the script of Mi Minor with people from various countries. A friend from US read my play and said, this is just like US. Then during the rehearsals a friend said that it resembles Korea and another said that it was just like Turkmenistan. This was exactly what I wanted, that it was perceived by people from different countries as their own country.
As a writer it was important to be able to understand what kind of a change was happening and seeing the free flow of information and how people’s perception was changing. During that time I realised we are in a transition period from analogue to the digital world. And I was interested to see how the perception was changing, especially to see where young people’s perception was heading and how it affected the relationship between people and government.
As a woman and writer not just using the social media, but becoming aware of the kind of impact it has had, and using it to develop an art piece to make others aware of the transition we are in – all this has changed my life completely.
Index: In what ways is Mi Minor a ‘social media’ play?
Arikan: Mi Minor was a play that was set in a country called Pinima: freedom in a box deMOCKracy. During the play the audience could choose to play the President’s deMOCKracy game of the or support the Pianist’s rebellion against the system. The Pianist starts reporting all the things that are happening in Pinima through Twitter, which starts a Role Playing Game (RPG) with the audience. Mi Minor was staged as a play where an actual and social media oriented RPG was integrated with the actual performance. It was the first play of its kind in the world.
It was written to be located and performed anywhere in the world and everywhere the show would be live streamed online through Ustream and online audience would influence the action as much as the real live audience.
The actual audience could stand along side the actors, they could use their smart phones during the play to tweet, take photos and share them online in order to show the world what was happening in the fictional country Pinima. At the same time the online audience would do the same by following everything from the Pianist’s Ustream in English, which she starts from the beginning of the play. This created another platform for the actual audience and the online audience to interact with the hashtag #miminor on Twitter. In every performance there were digital actors who would be ready in front of their computers as well as the actual actors. Together they would make the play happen. On every level, the audience was made to make a choice as to which side they were going to be in Mi Minor?
We created a promotional website for Pinima that introduces you to the politics, geography and culture of this small fantasy state. I chose a lot of silly rules from other countries. I researched ridiculous laws around the world, and selected some of them, exaggerated and changed them and put them in the play.
Examples of laws and regulations from Mi Minor: There will no longer be treble sounds and the key of E on the pianos. A masterpiece of design, these brand new pianos will be down to a size that they could be carried in the pockets; President hasn’t slept for 48 hours and he listened to the telephones of people whom he randomly chose. The President declared that this shall be done by him once a week. In his declaration, he underlined that in every country; the telephones are being listened to, however they do it behind closed doors. It’s never announced to the public whose telephones are listened to. Whereas in our country what the President is doing, in the name of democracy and transparency, should be set as an example to the whole world; The president has decided that only two parties will participate in the elections. He is the presidential candidate for both parties; To protect the solidarity and morality of the family, all curtains in homes must be kept closed while having sex at home. Having sex in cars and other conveyances will be a criminal act. Also from today, bar owners are obliged to provide soup to their customers. Bars that fail to provide soup are hereby prohibited from selling alcoholic beverages; From now on, peacocks will have priority on the roads. To awaken a sleeping polar bear to take its photograph is strictly forbidden, plus, those who disturb frogs and rabbits will be fined.
Index: The play has been translated into English but not yet published. Can you give us an idea of the story?
Arikan: I really didn’t want to tell a story. With Mi Minor I wanted to create a situation in which people, anywhere in the world, could see what they do when they were given the opportunity to change something – do they get involved or do they keep quiet?
Index: And when you performed it in Istanbul what did the audience do?
Arikan: At the beginning, during the first couple of performances the audience mainly kept back. Later, there were some very active women and young people, high school and university students, who would be against the system in Pinima during the performances. In each play there were also those who chose to support the system and showed their respect and love to the President of Pinima. Audience who are used to conventional theatre chose to sit in the stalls and watch the action. They didn’t get so involved as the others. I must say, that those who are not aware of the digital world couldn’t get properly involved with the play but those who are aware of it enjoyed every minute of the play and took action using their imaginations.
Index: How did the online audience behave, interact? Did the anonymity and separation made the online audience more or less radical?
Arikan: Using the digital media tools gave the both digital and actual audience another platform to express themselves about what they perceive or experience in the Pinima world during the play. And as far as I observed, the anonymity and separations made them more radical all around the world.
Index: Some pro-government media have claimed that the play was designed as a rehearsal for the demonstrations in Gezi Park.
Arikan: When I read the accusations on some pro-government newspapers and later watched how it was taken to an extreme level on TV programs, I was shocked. In my play my intention was to criticise the patriarchy and perception of the analogue world all around the world. Even though all the countries in the world are being ruled by different leaders, even though it seems like every country has a different system of its own, I believe there is only one domination that exists and that is the Patriarchy.
When I was researching for Mi Minor [in 2011] I did everything I could so that the play wasn’t associated with Turkey, or the particular situation of Turkish politics, or any other actual country. It was a fictional dystopia. Mi Minor is an absurd play and it is too worrying to see how absurdity can be accused of being responsible for the reality of what happened in Gezi Park.
And the most interestingly worrying is that these accusations are still on-going. I wrote an absurd play and now my life has become more absurd then my play.
Index: One of the icons of the Gezi Park demonstrations was a woman in a red dress and the pianist in the Mi Minor wears a red dress. And someone took a piano into the Taksim Square. Is this a coincidence?
Arikan: One of the icons of Gezi Park demonstrations being the woman in red dress and the revolutionary pianist with red dress in my play Mi Minor is a coincidence. When I was writing the play, I was criticized by many for choosing to put a piano at the Pinima square. When they said it would be ridiculous to have a piano at the square, an instrument such as guitar or violin would be much better; I strongly stood against it and refused to change it. During the Gezi Park demonstrations I was surprised to see a piano being brought to the Taksim Square on TV. But then months later I was literally shocked when I saw the picture of another piano in the middle of the protests in Ukraine.
On the other hand Oscar Wilde says, “…life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
As a woman writer, for three years I tried to understand the transition period from analogue to the digital world and I wrote many articles about this subject. After writing articles about this transition period to digital world, I decided to write a play to convey my vision to society as well. Today I’m seeing how one after the other my predictions in my articles and in my play are coming to life.
When I was writing Mi Minor, I have recognised that the younger generation who are widely perceived to be wasting their time in front of their computers and therefore apolitical, could, if given a platform to express themselves, become political and resist a the oppressions of the analogue system together as women and men. That’s why I created the characters in the play called The Teenagers who joined the pianist in the revolution. During the performances I have witnessed that young people, high school and university students were the most active members of the audience. When I look at what happened during the Gezi Park demonstrations I can clearly see how right I was. Unlike everyone else, I had no difficulty understanding the behaviour of these digital teenagers and young adults who were peacefully resisting the authorities out on the streets and parks as well as social media without any attempt of violence, without any leadership.
Even before writing my play in one of my articles I said,
“…We are in a transition from analogue to the digital world. During this transition the common problematic of all sides of the world, from East to the West, from South to the North, is the concept and perception of freedom in societies.
The West is still being dominated with the data and foundations of the analogue world. The transition from analogue to the digital world does not just involve the technological developments but also involves the change in the perception of people. Even though, the West says, “yes” to this transition on technological developments, -just like the East- it says “no” in terms of social and psychological developments of this transition…”
Also, at the time I wrote this article, the news about Snowden hadn’t been leaked and the global debates about surveillance hadn’t started yet.
So my question that I would like to see debated: Would you be potentially guilty if you can foresee what could happen in the world?
This article was posted on 7 Jan 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
7 Jan 2014 | Egypt, News and features
Head of the April 6 Youth Movement Ahmed Maher and two other activists were in December sentenced to three years in prison, among other things for “staging a protest rally without prior permission from the authorities” (Image: Roger Anis/Demotix)
After officially classifying the Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist organisation”, Egypt’s military-backed regime has in recent days, widened its crackdown on supporters of the Islamist group.
But the Egyptian authorities’ heavy clampdown on dissent has also increasingly targeted non-Islamists — including secular revolutionary activists who took part in the June 30 military-backed protests that toppled Islamist President Mohamed Morsi.
On Friday, seventeen Islamist “anti-coup” protesters were killed and scores of others were injured in clashes with security forces nationwide, Egypt’s Health Ministry said. Meanwhile, three journalists working for the Al Jazeera English channel remain in custody pending investigations on charges of “being linked to a terrorist organisation and spreading false news that harms national security.” Egyptian officials have accused the Qatari-based Al Jazeera network of backing the Muslim Brotherhood.
Three prominent revolutionary activists also languish behind bars after being handed down three-year jail sentences in December. Ahmed Maher, Founder/Head of the April 6 Youth Movement (one of the two main groups that planned and organised the 2011 mass uprising), Mohamed Adel, a member of the April 6 group and activist Ahmed Douma have been accused of “thuggery, assaulting police officers and staging a protest rally without prior permission from the authorities.” In November, the Egyptian government passed a controversial law criminalising protests without permission from the Interior Ministry.
The activists are on hunger strike to protest their imprisonment on what they — and various rights organisations — have described as “politically-motivated” charges. They are also protesting the harsh prison conditions and their “maltreatment” at the hands of prison guards and inmates.
On Saturday, the Free Alaa Facebook group slammed the “rights abuses” the detainees face at Torah high security prison where they are being held. According to a statement posted on the group’s Facebook page, the detainees are being held in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day and are being denied access to all forms of communication including with family members. “It has become clear to the detainees and their families that the Interior Ministry is not solely responsible for the rights violations. The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Prison Administration are also implicated,” the statement said.
Other activists too are paying a high price for their criticism of the regime. Political activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, a symbol of the January 2011 Revolution, his sister Mona Seif (Founder of the No To Military Trials movement) and ten other defendants on Sunday received a one year suspended jail sentence for allegedly “attacking the campaign headquarters of former presidential candidate Ahmed Shafik in May 2012”. Both Alaa and Mona have denied the allegation. Before appearing in court on Sunday, Seif told the independent Al Shorouk newspaper that there was no evidence to incriminate her — or her brother — in the case. Alaa will remain in jail on other charges including for allegedly “organising and taking part in an unauthorised November anti-military protest rally”. Alaa has denied organising the protest. His imprisonment, meanwhile, has provoked an outcry from rights campaigners who believe the activist has been jailed “for his oft-scathing criticism of the abuses committed by the security forces.”
Meanwhile, other revolutionary activists have decried what they describe as “efforts by the current regime to defame them”. Asmaa Mahfouz, an internet activist who played a key role in the mass mobilisation of Egyptians that led to the January 2011 Revolution and former MP and activist Mustafa El Naggar have filed lawsuits against TV talk show host Abdel Rahim Ali (widely believed to have close links with the country’s various security agencies) after he aired what he claimed were taped telephone conversations by the activists. The leaked conversations, broadcast last week on TV show “The Black Box” on the privately-owned satellite channel Al Qahira al Nas, provoked an outcry from Egyptian rights organisations. A joint statement released by several rights groups denounced the leakages as “a breach of privacy and a serious violation of basic individual and civil liberties.” The statement also called on the authorities to bring those responsible for eavesdropping, taping and broadcasting the telephone conversations to justice. Ali has remained defiant however, subsequently vowing to air many more taped telephone calls which he claimed would “expose those implicated in a foreign plot to destroy the country.”
The leaked telephone conversations focused on secret documents seized by the activists in question on March 4, 2011. That was the day hundreds of protesters stormed the offices of the much-detested State Security Service, the SSS, to acquire documents they hoped “would expose the crimes of the security agency against Egyptians during the Mubarak era”. The SSS was dismantled shortly after the raids and was renamed “National Security.” The military rulers who replaced Hosni Mubarak immediately after the January 2011 mass uprising, had vowed at the time that the new security authority would be solely concerned with dealing with “national security issues” and would not repeat the practices of the old SSS (including mass surveillance and spying on citizens). As a result of the recently televised leaks, several “private citizens” have filed lawsuits against Mahfouz and Israa Abdel Fattah (another prominent internet activist and former member of the April Six group) accusing them of “inciting the raids on the SSS Headquarters”.
In comments posted on his Facebook page, former lawmaker El Naggar said the leaked conversations were a form of revenge by the state against revolutionary activists. He also described them as a means of “character assassination to defame him and other political opponents of the military-backed regime.”
Meanwhile, an online statement released on January 3 by Amnesty International urged the authorities in Egypt to “halt their crackdown on vocal critics of the regime — including the use of politically-motivated trials to punish dissidents.”
One activist who chose to remain anonymous has best described the heavy-handed, repressive measures used by the state to intimidate and silence critics as “counter-revolutionary practices” which he said were designed “to crush dissent and wipe out all traces of the January 2011 Revolution.”
“But the critics will neither be intimidated nor silenced,” he said. He added that “the current regime tends to forget that the fear is gone… There is no going back to pre-January 2011.”
This article was published on 7 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
7 Jan 2014 | Europe and Central Asia, European Union, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
(Photo: Anatolii Stepanov / Demotix)
This article is part of a series based on our report, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression
Media concentration in the EU poses a significant challenge. The media in the EU is significantly more concentrated than in North America, even when taking into consideration explanations of population, geographical size and income. Even by global standards, media concentration in the EU is high.
Another challenge arises from national media regulation, which may both fail to protect plurality and, allow an unnecessary and unacceptable amount of political interference in the way the media works. While the EU does not have an explicit competency to intervene in all matters of media plurality and media freedom, it is not neutral in this debate. A number of initiatives are underway to help better promote media freedom, and in particular media plurality. Free expression advocates, including Index, welcome the fact that the EU is taking the issue of media freedom more seriously.
Media regulation
Across the European Union, media regulation is left to the member states to implement, leading to significant variations in the form and level of media regulation. National regulation must comply with member states’ commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights, but this compliance can only be tested through exhaustive court cases. While the European Commission has, in the past, tended to view its competencies in this area as being limited due to the introduction of the Charter of Fundamental Rights into EU primary law, the Commission is looking at its possible role in this area. In part, the Commission is acting upon the guidance of the European Parliament, which has expressed significant concerns over the state of media regulation, and in particular with regard to Hungary, where regulation has been criticised for curtailing freedom of expression.
The national models of media regulation across Europe vary significantly, from models of self-regulation to statutory regulation. These models of regulation can impact negatively on freedom of expression through the application of unnecessary sanctions, the regulator’s lack of independence from politicians and laws that create a burdensome environment for online media. Statutory regulation of the print and broadcast media is increasingly anachronistic, raising questions over how the role of journalist or broadcaster should be defined and resulting in a general and increasing confusion about who should be covered by these regulatory structures, if at all. Frameworks that outline laws on defamation and privacy and provide public interest and opinion defences for all would provide clarify for all content producers. In the majority of countries, the broadcast media is regulated by a statutory regulator (due to a scarcity of analogue frequencies that required arbitration in the past), yet, often, the print media is also regulated by statutory bodies, including in Slovenia, Lithuania, Italy; or regulated by specific print media laws and codes, for example in Austria, France, Sweden and Portugal. As we demonstrate below, many EU member states have systems of media regulation that are overly restrictive and fail to protect freedom of expression.
In many EU member states, the system of media regulation allows excessive state interference in the workings of the media. Hungary’s system of media regulation has been criticised by the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and the OSCE for the excessive control statutory bodies exert over the media. The model of “co-regulation” was set up in 2010 through a new comprehensive media law[1], culminating in the creation of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority, which was given statutory powers to fine media organisations up to €727,000, oversaw regulation of all media including online news websites, and acts as an extra-judicial investigator, jury and judge on public complaints. The president of the Media Authority and all five members of the Media Council were delegated exclusively by Hungary’s Fidesz party, which commanded a majority in Parliament. The law forced media outlets to provide “balanced coverage” and had the power to fine reporters if they didn’t disclose their sources in certain circumstances. Organisations that refused to sign up to the regulator faced exemplary fines of up to €727,000 per breach of the law. While the European Commission managed to negotiate to remove some of the most egregious aspects of the law, nothing was done to rectify the political composition of the media council, the source of the original complaint to the Commission.
Hungary is not the only EU member state where politicians have excessive influence over media regulators. In France, the High Council for Broadcasting (CSA), which regulates TV and radio broadcasting, has nine executives appointed by presidential decree, of which three members are directly chosen and appointed by the president, three by the president of the Senate, and three by the president of the National Assembly. According to the Centre for Media and Communication Studies, this system for appointing authorities has the fewest safeguards from governmental influence in the EU.
Many countries have statutory underpinning of the press, which includes the online press, including Austria, France, Italy, Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden. Some statutory regulation can provide freedom of expression protections to those who voluntarily register with the regulatory body (for instance in Sweden), but in many instances, the regulatory burden and possibility of fines for online media can chill freedom of expression.
The Leveson Inquiry in the UK was established after the extent of the phone-hacking scandal was discovered, revealing how journalists had hacked the phones of victims of crime and high profile figures. Lord Justice Leveson made a number of recommendations in his report, including the statutory underpinning of an “independent” regulatory body, restrictions to limit contact between senior police officers and the press that could inhibit whistleblowing, and exemplary damages for publishers who remain outside the regulator. Of particular concern was the notion of statutory unpinning by what was claimed to be an “independent” and “voluntary” regulator. By setting out the requirements for what the regulator should achieve in law, it introduced some government and political control over the functioning of the media. Even “light” statutory regulation can be revisited, toughened and potentially abused. Combined with exemplary damages for publishers who remained outside the “voluntary” regulator (damages considered to be in breach of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights by three eminent QCs), the Leveson proposals were damaging to freedom of expression. The situation was compounded by the attempt by a group of Peers in the House of Lords to exert political pressure on the government to regulate the press, potentially sabotaging much-needed reform of the archaic libel laws of England and Wales. This resulted in the government bringing in legislation through the combination of a Royal Charter (the use of the Monarch’s powers to establish a body corporate) and by adding provisions to the Crime and Courts Act (2013) that established the legal basis for exemplary damages. It is arguable that the Leveson proposals have already been used to chill public interest journalism.
In part a response to the dilemma posed by Hungary, but also to wider issues of press regulation raised by the Leveson Inquiry in the UK, vice president of the Commission Neelie Kroes has overseen renewed Commission interest in the area of media regulation. This interest builds upon the possibility of the Commission using new commitments introduced through the Charter of Fundamental Rights into EU primary law, such as Article 11 of the Charter, which states: “The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.” The Commission is now exploring a variety of options to help protect media freedom, including funding the establishment of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom and the EU Futures Media Forum. In October 2011, Kroes founded a High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism to look at these issues in more detail. The conclusions were published in January 2013.
Many of the recommendations of the High Level Media Group are useful, in particular the first recommendation: “The EU should be considered competent to act to protect media freedom and pluralism at State level in order to guarantee the substance of the rights granted by the Treaties to EU citizens”. Yet some of the High Level Group’s conclusions do not provide a solution to questions of appropriate legislation within the EU. The group called for all member states to have “independent media councils” that are politically and culturally balanced with a socially diverse membership and have enforcement powers including fines, the power to order printed or broadcast apologies and, particularly concerning, the power to order the removal of (professional) journalistic status.[2] Political balance could be interpreted as political representation on the media councils, when the principle should be that the media is kept free from political interference. This was an issue raised in particular by Hungarian NGOs during the consultation. Also of particular concern is the suggestion that the European Commission should monitor the national media councils with no detail as to how the Commission is held to account, or process for how national media organisations could challenge bad decisions by the Commission. The Commission is awaiting the results of a civil society consultation. Depending on the conclusions of the Commission, stronger protections for media freedom may be considered when a state clearly deviates from established norms.
[1]Act on the Freedom of the Press and the Fundamental Rules on Media Content (the “Press Freedom Act”) and the Media Services and Mass Media Act (or the “Media Act”)
[2] p.7, High Level Media Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism
