3 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
At its core, freedom of religion or belief requires freedom of expression. Both fundamental rights are protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yet nearly half of all countries penalize blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion. In 13 countries, atheists can be put to death for their lack of belief.
The U.S. State Department names and shames eight “Countries of Particular Concern” that severely violate religious freedom rights within their borders. These countries not only suppress religious expression, they systematically torture and detain people who cross political and social red lines around faith. The worst of the worst are:
1. Burma
Burma’s population is 90 percent Theravada Buddhist, a faith the government embraces and promotes over Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Minority populations that adhere to these and other faiths are denied building permits, banned from proselytizing and pressured to convert to the majority faith. Religious groups must register with the government, and Burmese citizens must list their faith on official documents. Burma’s constitution provides for limited religious freedom, but individual laws and government officials actively restrict it. Most at risk in Burma are Rohingya Muslims, 240 of whom were killed this year in clashes with Buddhist mobs. Burma has refused to grant citizenship to 800,000 Rohingya, 240,000 of whom have fled their homes in recent clashes.
2. China
The ruling Chinese Communist Party is officially an atheist organisation. China’s constitution provides for freedom of religious belief, but the government actively restricts any religious expression that could potentially undermine its authority. Only five religious groups — Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Catholics and Protestants — can register with the government and legally hold services. Adherents of unregistered faiths and folk religions often worship illegally and in secret. Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners have faced particularly severe repression in recent years, including forced conversion, torture and imprisonment.
3. Eritrea
The Eritrean government only recognizes four religious groups: the Eritrean Orthodox Church, Sunni Islam, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Eritrea. These groups enjoy limited religious freedom while adherents of other faiths face harassment and imprisonment. Religious persecution in Eritrea is generally driven by government rather than social concerns. Jehovah’s Witnesses and other conscientious objectors who refuse to enroll in compulsory military training are subject to physical abuse, detention and hard labour. People of non-recognized religions are barred from congregating in disused houses of worship and have trouble obtaining passports or visas to exit the country.
4. Iran
Iran’s constitution offers some religious freedom rights for recognized sects of Islam along with Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. Baha’is, who the government considers apostates and labels a “political sect,” are excluded from these limited protections and are systematically discriminated against through gozinesh provisions, which limit their access to employment, education and housing. Evangelical Christians and other faith groups face persecution for violating bans on proselytizing. Religious minorities have been charged in recent years and imprisoned in harsh conditions for committing “enmity against God” and spreading “anti-Islamic propaganda.” Government-controlled media regularly attack Baha’is, Jews and other minority faiths to amplify social hostilities against them.
5. North Korea
North Korea’s constitution guarantees religious freedom, but this right is far from upheld. The state is officially atheist. Author John Sweeney says the country is “seized by a political religion” and that it considers established religious traditions a threat to state unity and control. North Korea allow for government-sponsored Christian and Buddhist religious organizations to operate and build houses of worship, but political analysts suspect this “concession” is for the sake of external propaganda. A Christian group says it dropped 50,000 Bibles over North Korea over the past year. If caught with one, citizens face imprisonment, torture or even death. Given the government’s extreme control over the flow of reliable information, it is difficult to determine the true extent of religious persecution in North Korea.
6. Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia’s constitution is not a standalone document. It is comprised of the Quran and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, which do not include religious freedom guarantees as spelled out in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Saudi, it is illegal to publicly practice any faith other than the state’s official religion Sunni Islam. Members of other faiths can worship privately, but non-Muslim houses of worship may not be built. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, otherwise known as Saudi’s morality or religious police, enforce Shariah law on the streets. Apostasy and blasphemy against Sunni Islam can be punished by death, as several high-profile Twitter cases have reminded global media in recent years.
7. Sudan
Sudan’s interim constitution partially protects religious freedom but restricts apostasy, blasphemy and defamation of Islam. Muslim women are also prevented from marrying non-Muslim men. The country’s vaguely worded apostasy law discourages proselytizing of non-Muslim faiths. Christian South Sudanese living in Sudan are subject to harassment and intimidation by government agents and society at large, but untangling the religious and ethnic motivations for this persecution can be difficult. Muslims generally enjoy social, legal and economic privileges denied to the Christian minority population. Government authorities have reportedly destroyed churches in recent years, and Christian groups have reportedly been subject to disproportionate taxes and delays in building new houses of worship. Read more about Sudan’s crackdown on Christians.
8. Uzbekistan
Proselytizing is prohibited in Uzbekistan, and religious groups must undergo a burdensome registration process with the government to enjoy what limited religious freedom is permitted in the country. More than 2,000 religious groups have registered with the government, the vast majority of which are Muslim but also include Jewish, Catholic and other Christian communities. Registered and unregistered groups are sometimes subject to raids, during which holy books have been destroyed. Individuals and groups deemed “extremist,” often for national security concerns rather than specific aspects of their faith, are imprisoned under harsh conditions and tortured, sometimes to death.
3 Jan 2014 | Religion and Culture
This year’s Burning Man festival featured a temple, built by hundreds of artists in the space of a few days. There are not many photographs I can link into this article. The majority of them have been destroyed, along with the temple itself.
Some participants of the festival, which takes place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, have expressed that it seems a shame, or that they can’t help but have mixed feelings about destroying something to which they have dedicated a colossal amount of effort. Others enjoy the fact that they are burning their creations, the making of which they were able to focus on without the nagging distraction of feeling compelled to sell afterwards.
I have never been to Burning Man or anything overly comparable, however in November 2011, I went to the Artist’s Bonfire at the Islington Mill in Manchester. As with Burning Man, the premise is that primal expressions of self can still exist in a modern day context, a context which involves health and safety regulations, and in some cases arts council funding.
I was amused and surprised by the Telegraph’s backlash against the event, which subsequently added to it an even greater feeling of illicitness, that then became mixed with feelings of uncertainty. I had hoped that by going I would be making a small statement against drives towards profit, popularity and ego, which, in my mind should have little to do with artistic experience. But then I decided that, if any profits were made out of a bunch of artists burning their work, then whoever took that money is surely coming from the same mindset that I was naively seeking to undermine.
When it came to it, my contribution to the experience was a cop-out. There were students burning sculptures of cities that had required blueprints in order to build them (the blueprints were burned too). A professional artist immolated an extraordinary self portrait, which leads to other questions: Is it a form of self harm? Does it matter if it is? Is it a simple purging of the painfulness of being painstaking? Was I attempting to self-promote through annihilation?
I was nervous when it was my turn to throw to the fire. Even though all I burned was something that was made in a digital format, and which was backed up on several mediums of hard drive. In fact, due to laziness, what I threw onto the fire was a completely blank disc. I made a shaky speech about the wonders of modern technology, how its capacity for preservation means that the destruction of art is nothing to fear.
Age old connotations regarding censorship make these occasions worrying. There are Hitler’s book burnings and the equally insane pyres overseen by a chief of the NYC police department in connection with the Occupy movement. Luckily the worst case I’ve witnessed in the flesh was a ridiculously puerile feud between two local entertainment guides, which culminated in a brief burning in the car park of a small music venue.
A more historical instance is the destruction of the work of the poet Sappho. That much of her work appears now to be in fragments seems to overshadow it in the minds of many of her critics, shrouding her work and its context in a series of fascinating myths. These myths raise such questions as ‘has the work been destroyed by natural causes?’ and ‘was her work smashed by jealous invaders who not only begrudged her of her art but scorned her sexuality?’ Sappho, for whatever reasons, may also have felt it necessary to destroy the poems herself.
Earlier this year, experimental pop artist Grimes blogged about techno band The KLF, mentioning their decision to burn a million pounds.
Bill Drummond explained: “We wanted the money, but we wanted to burn it more.”
For Grimes and TheWoodQuarter, this stunt feels uncomfortable, compromising the artistic integrity of an otherwise respectable band: “it’s not something you would do if you had ever experienced poverty”.
Their concern echoes The Guardian’s review of Mark Knoop’s Piano Activities, a concert in which the pianist destroyed his piano. I might have been inclined to concur with the reviewer’s outrage were it not for his total denial of destructive relevance, which he deems “creatively redundant” post John Cage and punk. Although the reviewer is careful to state that “censoring [artists] would indeed have been wrong”, he makes the claim that “destructive performance misreads the temperature of a culture where a siege mentality reigns”. This is compounded with dogma: “Once music has been razed to the ground by Cage, Paik and others, it’s time to build”.
For me, such argument is a form of destruction in itself. It is more dangerous than a person trashing his own piano because it seeks to persuade that there is a specific and given “time” for a specific and given artistic ethos. A stance that requires art to be an advantageous strategic building block further entrenches it within the realm of commodity.
This article was posted on 3 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
3 Jan 2014 | Digital Freedom, News and features, United States
San Fransisco based Reddit.com made headlines when it allegedly banned climate change deniers from posting on the site.
UK-based freedom of speech advocate Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked magazine, claimed it had “shredded its own reputation” in a piece for The Telegraph, while James Delingpole, a right-wing commentator for The Spectator delivered a hot-blooded attack on the policy via Fox News website – “The greenies — and their many useful idiots in the liberal media — are terrified of open debate on climate-change because the real world evidence long ago parted company with their scientifically threadbare theory.”
Reddit is a huge online links directory and lively discussion board, with a reputation for scale, wit, lack of censorship and a strong sense of community. Over eighty million monthly unique visitors, two hundred and sixty million comments to date and a presence in one hundred and eighty countries are some of the stats that led Conde Nast to buy the company a year after it was launched in 2005. Last year, analysts valued it at over $200 million dollars. It’s no Facebook or Twitter in terms of publicity attracted, but it gets more traffic than CNN, and the Guardian.com’s monthly readership could fit into Reddit’s three times over.
It’s the famed lack of censorship that has lead opinion writers on both side of the Atlantic to point out this new policy on climate change denial.
For those who haven’t visited, the site is divided up into sub-reddits–links and discussions, which are classified according to themes, and run by unpaid volunteers.
“TIL,” shorthand for “Today I Learned,” offers obscure trivia and little known facts. “foreignpolicy” offers links and discussion on international relations, defence and diplomacy. “foodforthought” collates links to thought-provoking essays. There are subreddits for jokes, celebrity gossip, memes and funny videos – for agony aunts and video gaming.
In fact, rather than reddit.com having banned climate change skeptics, it’s the moderators of the “/r/science” reddit who have instigated the ban. Run by volunteers, it collects links about new research and scientific articles.
“/r/science is not the beginning or the end of internet discussion”, defends Carl Ellstrom from Sweden – a reddit user, scientist and moderator of the science subreddit. “Users who are banned from /r/science are not banned from reddit, and can discuss their opinions in other subreddits.”
While it’s not the beginning or the end, /r/science still attracts millions of visitors each month. So the decision to ban climate change scepticism is of note.
Typical of their profession–other moderators backed up the decision by citing research–97% of climate scientists agree that man is changing the planet, according to a report from the respected Institute of Physics.
The move principally revolved around aggressive and repeated comments, which a small group of malicious users were posting on every article or piece of research concerned with climate change. Their allegations generally focused on conspiracy theories, didn’t address the article with constructive, focused criticism, were repetitive and, critically, had a disproportionate silencing effect on any discussion.
“These problematic users were not the common ‘internet trolls’ looking to have a little fun upsetting people,” explains Nathan Allen, a PhD chemist with a major chemical company and reddit moderator who wrote for The Guardian.
“These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking. They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong. They were completely enamoured by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.”
Expanding on that last point Allen says the same comparison could be made with the climate change denial lobby in general, and their disproportionate influence on the press.
“Like our commenters, professional climate change deniers have an outsized influence in the media and the public. And like our commenters, their rejection of climate science is not based on an accurate understanding of the science but on political preferences and personality.”
He ends his piece with a deliberate challenge to the editors of the world’s largest websites
“If a half-dozen volunteers can keep a page with more than 4 million users from being a microphone for the antiscientific, is it too much to ask for newspapers to police their own editorial pages as proficiently?”
If Allen’s suggestion was ever to be noticed and accepted by editors–he ramifications for freedom of speech and media censorship would be radical. Editors might be forced to ignore lobbying from certain spheres of belief, or might miss out on important stories.
But UK research published earlier in the year, shows the disproportionate effect on distorting the truth that having a free and open press creates.
On average, Brits think teenage pregnancies are twenty five times higher than official estimates. The public think 31% of the population are immigrants–the reality is closer to ten percent. Welfare benefit fraud is thought to be 34 times higher than it actually is.
All of the misconceptions covered by IPSOS Mori, the polling company that undertook the research, have been central to political party manifestos and been aggressively pushed by their PR companies.
Or that journalists are too readily being made tools of political parties who want to get elected, who want the issues that they care most about continually in the press, hotly discussed and “on the agenda.” Perhaps we, as journalists, need to remain ever vigilant to the briefing of misinformation and our responsibility to the truth.
This article was published on 3 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
3 Jan 2014 | Digital Freedom, News and features
Chinese websites
In 2010 China shut down 1.3 million web sites with popular pages, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, blocked. Three years later and China has employed over 2,000,000 people to monitor microblogging sites, a further clampdown on free speech in the country.
Having blocked major social media sites it’s not surprising that a large percentage of China’s hundreds of millions web users have turned to microblogging sites to offer up their opinions on society. Although the Beijing News stated that the monitors are not required to delete posts they view online they do gather data by searching for negative terms relating to their clients and compiling the information gathered into reports.
Weibo, China’s largest microblogging platform, has more than 500 million registered users who post 100 million messages daily. Postings on the website that criticise the Chinese government are often removed.
Global internet access
The internet is often taken for granted by those with regular and easy access to the online world. However, a staggering 4.6 billion people live without access to it; that’s around 68% of the global population. The number of internet users has grown by 566% since 2000 but considering the positive effects the internet can have on employment, communications and finances more of the world should have access to this valuable resource.
Africa has the poorest access to the internet; only 7% of total global internet usage comes out of the continent with, on average, 15.6% of the population using the internet.
YouTube
YouTube was bought by Google in 2006. Seven years later and localised versions of the video sharing site have been implemented in 56 countries, allowing for the content posted on to YouTube to be tailored specifically to the country it is serving. Although localising YouTube for specific countries can help with issues surrounding copyright, it also means that governments can block specific content from being uploaded and viewed on the website.
In Pakistan the online video sharing site has been banned since 2012. Google is looking to localise YouTube in the country, allowing the population access to the site, but only if the search engine makes it easier to block any blasphemous or objectionable content. Iran, Tajikistan and China are the only other countries with a block on YouTube.
India and the internet
India may be able to claim to be the world’s third largest internet user (behind the U.S and China) but that does not mean the country’s 74 million internet users have free access to the web. According to the Google Transparency Report, India leads the way in the number of take-down requests issued. Between July and December 2012 Indian authorities requested, without court orders, that 2,529 items be removed from the internet- a 90 percent increase from the first half of 2012.
In 2013 amendments were made to the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules which stated, under Section 79 of the IT Act, that intermediaries had only 36 hours to respond to complaints or content deemed by regulators to be “grossly harmful” or “ethnically objectionable”. The clarification meant that this content does not have to be removed from the web, but failure to respond or acknowledge to the request within the short time frame, which does not take into account weekends or holidays, can result in a criminal procedure.
This article was posted on Jan 3 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
