As the Greek government prepares to open a public consultation on the tender for new broadcast licenses, the country’s private TV owners have escalated their criticisms of a controversial new media law passed on 11 February.
The law aims to regulate the country’s media market and includes a competitive bidding process for limited private broadcast licenses. Nikos Pappas, the minister responsible for its implementation, announcedat a Syriza party meeting on 23 March his intention to launch the open international bid after the public consultation.
The changes will not affect the country’s public broadcaster ERT.
Panos Kyriakopoulos, president of the Association of Private TV Stations of National Range (EITISEE), criticised the government’s move, pointing out that the industry group was only invited to discuss the proposed legislation late in the process, when the draft bill had already been approved by a parliament committee. He added that EITISEE would appeal to the Greek Council of State and has already contacted the relevant EU agencies.
While broadcast television licensing has not been harmonised at an EU level, the changes to the Greek broadcast regime are being driven by the financial bailout. Under the rescue package, a European Commission spokesperson confirmed that Greece had committed to launch an international tender for broadcasting licenses.
From the Syriza-led government’s point of view, the new licensing process will bring order to broadcasting environment and fight corruption. Political opponents see the licensing regime as an attempt to take full control over the country’s media.
“We want financially viable media, because if this is not the case, they end up with financial holes and large loans, putting pressure on the political system to intervene in banks,” said Pappas.
Kyriakopoulos claims that whatever is being said about EITISEE member’s finances is “lies”.
“Our members do not have a euro of arrears to the state budget, the social security funds and the banks,” Kyriakopoulos told Index on Censorship. “Moreover, no loan does belong to the category of red loans.”
However, not everyone agrees with Kyriakopoulos.
“In our country the private TV channels have dominated the media environment for 25 years without ever having been given licenses and under a provisional legal status. Regulation is not only necessary but it’s a precondition for the smooth functioning of the market,” said Matina Papachristoudi, a journalist with the magazines Digital TV Info and Hot Doc, and a blogger at mediatvnews.gr.
For its part, EITISEE said that after the transition from analog to the digital age, the licensing framework has changed as in other European countries. “The TV channels do not have frequencies anymore,” Kyriakopoulos said. “It’s the network provider which has been given the frequencies, and this is Digea, following an international tender.”
According to Papachristoudi, non-authorised stations are “clients” of Digea, a digital network operator.
The main fight between the government and the Greek private TV is over the number of licences to be sold. Currently, eight national TV channels are operating in Greece. The new law allows for only four. Based on research from the University Institute of Florence, the government maintains that only four channels are viable.
“This is unprecedented for a democratic state where the open market is established,” Kyriakopoulos said. “The government cannot impose how many licences will be allowed within a sector, based on a revenue approach; the open market regulates this.”
“The issue will be judged in the supreme court, to which the channel owners will appeal,” Papachristoudi said. “Personally, I think it is not a restriction on freedom of expression, but an attempt to control the broadcasting landscape under new conditions.”
Most controversially, the government has decided to conduct the international bidding process itself, rather than have the National Council for Radio and Television (NCRTV), Greece’s independent regulatory authority, run the tender. NCRTV is designated by the Greek constitution as the body responsible for such a process.
Kyriakopoulos said this “abolishes the independence of the press” and accused the government of creating a “kind of oligopoly with few stations”, which are easily “manageable” and “better controlled … either through the distribution of state advertising or by threatening to pull their licences, if they do not obey the requirements imposed”.
The government opted to oversee the process due to a deadlock with the major opposition party in parliament over the appointment of NCRTV board members. The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, accused the dominant opposition party of wanting to “cancel the contest”.
“Mr. Mitsotakis is a hostage to the various interests and the TV contractors and denies the consensual establishment of the NCRTV,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. “His aim is to cancel the contest, and those who had for so many years a free use of public frequencies, not to pay anything.”
Index on Censorship welcomes the release of lawyer Intigam Aliyev, but says the Azerbaijan authorities must now release journalists and activists who remain imprisoned.
Aliyev is a lawyer who specialised in defending the rights of Azerbaijani citizens before the European Court of Human Rights. Index calls on the government of Ilham Aliyev, the president, to further release journalists Khadija Ismayilova, Seymur Hezi and all political prisoners who have been locked up for voicing criticism of the government.
“This release is good news for Intigam Aliyev’s family. The international community must continue to put pressure on Azerbaijan to free journalists and political prisoners that it remain in detention,” Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg said. “Azerbaijan still has a very long road ahead in delivering basic freedoms — including a guarantee of freedom of expression for all its citizens. It must end its judicial harrassment of reporters, political opponents and others who are committed to the promotion of democracy and human rights.”
Aliyev, who ran the Azerbaijan-base Legal Research Institute, was one of a score of prominent human rights activists and journalists who were arrested and subjected to show trials in 2014 and 2015.
In April 2015, Aliyev was sentenced to 7.5 years imprisonment for illegal business activities, tax evasion and abuse of power. The case was widely condemned as being politically motivated by Azerbaijan’s government.
Human rights defender Rasul Jafarov, the founder of the Sport for Rights campaign, stepped out from Baku’s Prison Number 10 into freedom on 17 March after spending 593 days unjustly jailed. The same day, the European Court of Human Rights issued a judgment in Jafarov’s case, acknowledging that his arrest and detention were politically motivated.
Jafarov was one of 14 political prisoners included in the pardon decree signed on 17 March. The other political prisoners pardoned through that decree included journalists Parviz Hashimli, Hilal Mammadov, and Tofig Yagublu; human rights defenders Taleh Khasmammadov and Anar Mammadli; NIDA civic movement activists Rashadat Akhundov, Mahammad Azizov and Rashad Hasanov; bloggers Siraj Karimli and Omar Mammadov; former government official Akif Muradverdiyev; chairman of the National Statehood party Nemat Penahli; and Musavat party activist Yadigar Sadigov.
A further political prisoner, journalist Rauf Mirkadirov, was released on 17 March by the Baku Court of Appeals, which commuted his six-year prison sentence into a suspended five-year sentence. Mirkadirov had been unjustly jailed since April 2014 on politically motivated treason charges.
Award-winning investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who has been detained since 5 December 2014. Ismayilova was initially arrested on charges of incitement to suicide, which Index condemned as spurious. In February 2015, Ismayilova was additionally charged with tax evasion and abuse of power. In September 2015, she was sentenced to 7.5 years after a show trial at which she declared her innocence.
Journalist Seymur Hezi was sentenced to five years imprisonment for “aggravated hooliganism” on 29 January 2015. He was arrested and detained in August 2014.
Rahim Haciyev, acting editor of Index award-winning newspaper Azadliq, told Index in September 2015 Hezi’s prosecution was due to his critical articles of the Azerbaijan authorities in the newspaper, as well as critiques he had made in his online TV programme, Azerbaijan Hour.
Members of the group were arrested last June after discussing author Gene Sharp’s 1993 work From Dictatorship to Democracy – about non violent resistance – at their book club.
They were sentenced on Monday 28 March to between two and eight-and-a-half years each. Rapper Luaty Beiro, one of the 17, was given a five and a half year sentence for “rebellion against the president of the republic, criminal association and falsifying documents”.
Activist Domingos da Cruz, singled-out as the group’s “leader”, was given an eight-and-a-half year sentence for planning a coup and for criminal association.
“It is a year since Index awarded a Freedom of Expression prize to Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais,” said index CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “These latest sentences show how dire the situation remains for anyone who questions Angola’s regime.”
Index on Censorship urges international governments to condemn these sentences and for the Angolan government to uphold its commitments to human rights and freedom of expression.
GreatFire was set up in 2011 by three anonymous individuals to counter the “Great Firewall of China”, the systematic blocking by the Chinese government of any website deemed controversial, including any that touch on news, human rights, democracy or religion.
“We know them as a mix of folks within China and outside of China who have a mix of activism and technological expertise,” said Dan Meredith of the Open Tech Fund, one of GreatFire’s financial backers.
“Their motivations are not regime change, but purely wanting to see progress for the Chinese people, and see more reforms happen in the Chinese government. They’re passion driven, but they also have this insider knowledge about how to circumvent some of these really sophisticated things that are happening in China,” he told Index.
“GreatFire is quite a mysterious organisation,” Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia told Index. “It’s, roughly speaking, five people, maybe it’s not quite five, maybe its more,” he said. “But it really is just a small group of people who have come together to do something important.”
The team started out collecting data about which sites were blocked in China, and now monitors over thousands of sites, domains and Google searches. “They have a network of computers in and outside of China, testing for whether websites that are generally available to the public here in the UK or the US or any other country that has unrestricted access to the whole internet, are available within China,” Meredith explains. Their site also shows how much of the time it has been blocked, and offers an explanation as to how.
GreatFire are also the makers of FreeWeibo, which was a shortlisted in 2015’s Index Awards and acts as a mirror to Weibo, the popular, but heavily censored, Chinese social network. As well as this they also run FreeBooks, allowing people in China read censored books.
“GreatFire are one of the organisations that are really fighting hard against censorship in China,” said Wales.
But last year GreatFire’s work went from being an annoyance to the Chinese authorities, to being something they couldn’t ignore, Meredith explained.
Using an idea called collateral freedom, GreatFire made blocked sites accessible to millions in China and around the world. The collateral freedom idea works by pinning banned websites to those of big corporations (such as Amazon, Microsoft or GitHub) which, in order to compete in the global marketplace, China cannot block. When organisations normally blocked in China – like the BBC or Reuters – use, for example, amazon.com as a host their sites can remain visible in China.
In February 2015, GreatFire used this technology to release an Android app, allowing anyone in China, or in other countries where the web is censored, to access these otherwise censored sites. Everything they do is open source, so their work can be replicated by others.
However, it was GreatFire’s work with Reporters Without Borders, Meredith says, that finally caused the Chinese government to retaliate.
“We know is that they are incredibly frustrated by this collateral freedom idea,” he said. “But what happened last year when Reporters Without Borders started employing this is…there became a very big press strategy, so what ended up being a thing that was quietly annoying the Chinese became a very public thing that was annoying the Chinese.”
The project was launched on World Press Freedom Day in March 2015, and used collateral freedom to unblock websites around the world, making previously censored sites available in Russia, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. The unblocked websites included Reuters Chinese, BBC on China and German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
The response from the Chinese government, which became known as the “Great Cannon”, was a critical test for the idea of collateral freedom, says Meredith.
“They took all the Chinese traffic that was trying to come in, and put a mirror on it – so this is one billion people, a third of the internet – and instead of directing that to an internal website, they redirected all that traffic to GitHub, to Amazon, to Microsoft,” said Meredith. By directing this traffic to all the sites used by collateral freedom, the Chinese government were testing those service providers.
“It was just enough to raise all the flags and create a very public storm which created a further media event that said ‘China is blocking Amazon or blocking GitHub’ – at which point they stopped.”
The point of this, Meredith explains, is that the economic cost of blocking the big providers, this time, outweighed the Chinese government’s desire to censor the web. So if in the future, during a major election for example, the government might be tempted to block these sites. GreatFire showed the Chinese government, and the world, what it would cost.
“What it shows is possible is something GreatFire can really lay claim to. They showed that China could do this, would try to do it, that those companies could weather that storm, and that the balance is still there where millions of people are able to get online because of collateral freedom.”
