Press freedom in the UK is under threat as the Snoopers’ Charter undergoes its third and final reading at the House of Lords today, 31 October. Read the full article
The trial of prominent Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab – president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights – has been postponed for a fourth consecutive time to enable the country’s high criminal court to hire a cybercrime expert to verify who manages his Twitter account.
A new trial date has been set for 15 December.
“Nabeel Rajab’s continued detention is clearly aimed at silencing him and punishing him for expressing his views. The reopening of his case seems to confirm the political motives behind Rajab’s prosecution. He should be released immediately and all charges must be dropped,” Melody Patry, senior advocacy officer for Index on Censorship, said.
BCHR said in a statement that the latest postponement “throws a light on the lack of evidence of any wrongdoing” by Rajab.
It continued: “Rajab is being prosecuted in relation to tweets and retweets about torture in Jau Prison and the human rights violations in the war on Yemen. The prosecution of Rajab is based on Articles 133, 215, and 216 of Bahrain’s Penal Code over charges of ‘false or malicious news, statements, or rumours,’ ‘offending a foreign country’ (Saudi Arabia), and “offending a statutory body” – for which he may be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.”
On 13 June 2016, Rajab was taken from his home. He was charged the next day and – on orders of the court – has remained in custody since while awaiting his trial, despite recurring health problems for which he was briefly hospitalised in late June after 15 days in solitary confinement.
His trial was initially due to take place on 2 August but was first delayed until 5 September, and then 6 October, 31 October and now 15 December.
Rajab served two years in jail between 2012 and 2014 for taking part in protests in the country.
Each week, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project verifies threats, violations and limitations faced by the media throughout the European Union and neighbouring countries. Here are five recent reports that give us cause for concern.
Sergey Leleka, a columnist for the pro-government newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, suggested in an article on 24 October that independent journalists Anton Nosik and Sergei Parkhomenko should be “cured in gas chambers”.
According to Leleka, he wrote the article in reaction to jokes by Nosik and Parkhomenko about the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov which passed through the English Channel emitting thick black smoke.
After the journalists complained to KP, the media outlet deleted the offending paragraph. However, Leleka’s original post is still available on his Facebook page.
A number of Belgian media websites, including De Standaard, RTBF, Het Nieuwsblad, Gazet van Antwerpen and Het Belang van Limburg were subject to a co-ordinated DDoS attack on 24 October, which temporarily shut the sites down.
A group that calls itself the Syrian Cyber Army claimed responsibility.
“We have attacked the Belgian media outlets that support the terrible actions of their Air Force in Syria,” the group said in a message to the newspapers. It wanted to “shame the Belgian authorities, which killed dozens of civilians in the village of Hassajik near Aleppo on 18 October”.
Belgium’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation.
Editor-in-chief of Gazeta Express, Leonard Kerquki, received death threats after the airing of his documentary which mentions war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The documentary, Hunting the KLA, aired in two parts and covers crimes and prosecutions from the war between Serbia and Kosovo at the end of the 1990s. The threats were made after the showing of the second part on 23 October.
The Journalist Association of Kosovo condemned the threats, as did the OSCE mission in Kosovo. “I condemn the threats and calls for violence against Kërquki. Freedom of expression must be upheld and respected in all circumstances,” said the head of Kosovo’s OSCE mission, Jan Braathu. “I call on rule of law authorities to investigate these threats immediately and bring the perpetrators to justice,” he said.
Ella Taranova, a senior producer for Russia Today, was detained by Latvian border guards on 21 October and later deported.
The incident occurred after Taranova was admitted to Latvia and to participate in a conference in a seaside suburb of Jurmala.
Taranova was blacklisted for being an employee of Russia Today, which the Latvian authorities see as a hostile propaganda organ of the Russian government. The head of Russia Today, Dmitry Kiselyov, is blacklisted from travelling to the European Union and other countries under EU sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
After her detention, Taranova told journalists: “I did not engage in any political activities nor do I intend to.” She added that she was unaware that she had been blacklisted since 2014 and had attended several such conferences prior to 2014.
At around 6am on 21 October, Russian Investigative Committee (SKR) officers entered and searched the apartment of Ksenia Babich, journalist and spokesperson for human rights international organisation Russian Justice Initiative.
According to Shelepin, SKR officers confiscated a notebook, phones and memory cards.
Babich was also asked to go to the SKR for questioning, Ilia Shelepin, a journalist and Babich’s acquaintance, wrote on Facebook. Babich believes the search is related to the case of Artyom Skoropadski, a press secretary of the Ukrainian organisation Pravyi Sektorwhich, which is banned in Russia.
Mapping Media Freedom
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