When feminist punk group Pussy Riot staged a protest performance on the altar of the Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 21 February 2012, Russia’s government set in motion legislation that would severely punish blasphemy and drastically change relations between the country’s believers and non-believers.
Pussy Riot launched the performance to highlight the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Vladimir Putin’s 2012 election and the ongoing collaboration between church and state. But Russia’s religious community took offence, calling the protest blasphemous and demanding action from prosecutors.
Within days, police arrested three of the group’s members. Later that year they were found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years in prison.
In June 2013, following the Pussy Riot case, new legal amendments to toughen punishment for blasphemy were enacted. The new Federal Law on Countering Insulting Religious Beliefs and Feelings of Citizens introduced changes into Article 148, “Obstructing the exercise of the right to freedom of conscience and religious belief,” of the Criminal Code. The new edition of the article included criminal liability for “public actions expressing obvious disrespect to society and committed with a view to insulting religious feelings of believers”, and for actions committed “in places specially designed for worship, other religious rites and ceremonies”.
The punishments vary from fines of up to 500,000 rubles (€8,000), compulsory labour and imprisonment for up to three years.
However, despite demands by a large part of society to toughen punishments for blasphemy, monitoring of trials involving Article 148 for the last three-and-a-half years has demonstrated its uselessness.
According to the report “Unlawful Implementation of the Anti-Extremist Legislation” by SOVA, a Moscow-based analytical centre studying relations between churches and secular society, only six sentences under the revised Article 148 were registered since 2013.
Aleksandr Verkhovski of SOVA told Index on Censorship that there will be no more in the future: “There’s no reason to use this article unless there is a new ideological mobilisation like in 2012 [with Pussy Riot].” Verkhovski said the blasphemy article does not work because the judiciary has been for years using Article 282 (incitement to racial, national or religious hatred and hostility) of the Criminal Code to prosecute offences of this nature.
According to SOVA, since 2007, Article 282 has been used in 1,477 cases. Not all of the cases are based on religious hatred, Article 282 has long been used to harassing opposition leaders, journalists and bloggers when they cover abuse of power by the state officials.
Articles 282 and 148, in addition to the Law on Countering Extremism, have been used to target a popular Moscow-based vlogger and comedian Ilia Davydov, known under the pseudonym Maddison. Davydov, who was named a hero of the Russian internet in 2009, became popular for his internet reviews and standup performances.
In January 2017, despite wide popularity, he suddenly deleted all his social media accounts and went into hiding. His disappearance from the internet was driven by accusations that he had insulted the “religious feelings of believers”. The uproar stemmed from a 2012 video in which he reportedly mocked both the Koran and the Bible. In the video, posted to YouTube, Maddison appeared with a book which he called “the Koran” and told a story about wanting to use it as toilet paper but opted for a sock instead. He then told his viewers it was actually the Bible, not the Koran. But then he opened the book to reveal that it was neither holy text.
The video on YouTube did not arouse much interest for three years. But in November 2016, Demand Knowledge, an Islamic Telegram channel geotagged in Chechnya, re-posted the video with a comment (in Russian): “An infidel is insulting Islam and Koran. If you find him, you know what to do.”
The video went viral and Maddison was inundated with abuses and death threats. In late January 2017 some Russian media outlets reported that a financial reward had been offered for reprisals against the comedian. Following the threats, Davydov left Russia.
The threats on his life were only part of the story. On 3 February 2017, the Prosecutor of the Republic of Chechnya appealed to a local court to prosecute Davydov. According to the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office, a review of the video and eight others on Davydov’s channel contain speech and actions that are humiliating to human dignity of Muslim and Christian believers. Prosecutors demanded the courtfile a criminal case under the Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code. The court is currently considering the request.
Davydov declined to speak to Index on Censorship stressing he does not give interviews to any media.
Maddison’s case is not isolated. Chechnya counts as one of the most closed and media-intolerant regions of Russia. Independent media and bloggers have been pushed out of the area in during the rise to power of the Chechen autocratic leader Ramzan Kadyrov. [/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”10″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1491398230204-8311d8c4-ec30-9″ taxonomies=”15″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row full_width=”stretch_row” full_height=”yes” css=”.vc_custom_1491319101960{background-image: url(https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Cover-slider.jpg?id=88947) !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: contain !important;}”][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”The “now” generation’s thirst for instant news is squeezing out good journalism.
We need an attitude change to secure its survival” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
THIS WORLD HAS never been in more need of good, well-researched journalism. It is tempting to write the words “old-fashioned” here too. And if by old-fashioned, what is meant is detailed, neutral, in-depth and well thought-out writing, then old-fashioned is what is called for.
Around the world there are squeezes from all directions, stifling what the public is allowed to know, and what it is allowed to say or write. From government pressure to mafia threats, from commercial agencies to reputation- damaging (ro)bots, the right to speak and report is under huge pressure.
And good journalism must be there to unmask those threats. With the rise of the words “fake news” comes a spirit that seems to think that I can apply this phrase to anything I disagree with. So the epithet “fake news” was out of its box and being used to try to disarm reporters and to undermine public belief both in research, experts, truth and often journalism.
So, this is a time for journalists and journalism to step up and do a really excellent, thorough job of discovering and publishing the news: that’s not a news broadcast or publication that is just a hodgepodge of opinions based on very little research; nor a news story that has so much spin in it it’s hard to discern any actual facts. There are those that might argue that the media has been through a pretty unimpressive period in the past 10 years, with some valiant exceptions. The line between the news and opinion pages has become increasingly hard to distinguish. So, it might be less than surprising that the public might have lost faith in news sources.
Social media has played a massive part in this. Hysterical opinion goes down a storm, instantly shared across platforms; while well-argued journalism, with more facts than screeching, tends to stay in its box, unread. And, of course, there are signs that attention spans are melting away. So not only does every item have to be now, now, now, but we can only be bothered to read the first line, or look at the picture.
Sadly, research from Stanford University shows young people are gathering their “news” from social media without bothering even to click through on a link. They also have trouble discerning the difference between a social media-placed advertising feature and a news story from a well-established news media company. So shareable opinion has become king, and news has melted away and merged into a hybrid of what it once was.
But journalists need to take back the news wherever they can, and re-establish it as a well-researched, investigated piece of information, not an outpouring of ill-informed thoughts. And the public has to take some responsibility too. We need to be capable of a bit more dissection and scepticism when we see stories, rather than swallowing them whole without thinking.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left” color=”custom” align=”right” custom_color=”#dd3333″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_custom_heading text=”Hysterical opinion goes down a
storm, instantly shared across
platforms; while well-argued
journalism, with more facts
than screeching, tends to stay in
its box, unread” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
As our seasoned journalists explain in our Decoding the News special, everyone should be aware of techniques and tools to stop them being taken in, at least most of the time. Meanwhile, journalists are doing some really strong investigations.
As we go to press the BBC was broadcasting a story about truck drivers in the supply chain for furniture company Ikea, who were being paid less than the minimum wage, and being forced to live in their vehicles. They were drivers from Romania but working in Denmark, where they should have been paid according to Danish laws. The journalist was on the road talking to lorry drivers to find the story. Stories like these are hard to dispute, because the journalist has evidence to stand up the allegations.
Over in the Maldives, journalist Zaheena Rasheed, shortlisted for an Index journalism award this year (see page 37), is reporting about what is happening in the south Asian island country, despite a climate of fear. And in other countries, remarkable reporters continue to make extraordinary efforts to get news out, despite dangerous conditions.
There are some signs that the world is starting to realise it needs good journalism. The New York Times saw a growth of 41,000 subscriptions in the week immediately after the election of President Trump. Sales of satire and news magazine Private Eye recently hit their highest level ever with 287,334 copies sold for one issue. Reports from Poland suggest a surge in sales of independent weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (see our report on page 69). This in a country that is seeing its media freedom fall down global charts. Jeremy Leslie, creative director of magazine- only shop Magculture in London, said he is seeing an upward tick in the sales of magazines “with serious intent”.
“More people are making [magazines with that type of content] and more people are buying it,” he told Index on Censorship.
Is this a sign that some members of the public are learning at last that if they want journalism that tells them something they don’t know (and isn’t made up), they just might have to pay for it? Only time will tell. Otherwise, the survival of journalism looks fraught with danger.
Rachael Jolley is the editor of Index on Censorship magazine. She recently won the editor of the year (special interest) at British Society of Magazine Editors’ 2016 awards
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”From the Archives”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”80566″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422015605737″][vc_custom_heading text=”A matter of facts: fact-checking’s rise” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1177%2F0306422015605737|||”][vc_column_text]September 2015
Vicky Baker looks at the rise of fact-checking organisations being used to combat misinformation, from the UK to Argentina and South Africa.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”80569″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422016657017″][vc_custom_heading text=”Giving up on the graft and the grind” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1177%2F0306422016657017|||”][vc_column_text]June 2016
European journalist Jean-Paul Marthoz argues that journalists are failing to investigate the detailed, difficult stories, fearing for their careers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”90839″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/030642209702600315″][vc_custom_heading text=”In quest of journalism” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1177%2F030642209702600315|||”][vc_column_text]May 1997
Jay Rosen looks at public journalism, asserting that the journalist’s duty is to serve the community and not following professional codes.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”The Big Squeeze” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fmagazine|||”][vc_column_text]The spring 2017 issue of Index on Censorship magazine looks at multi-directional squeezes on freedom of speech around the world.
Also in the issue: newly translated fiction from Karim Miské, columns from Spitting Image creator Roger Law and former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve, and a special focus on Poland.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”88788″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/magazine”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsubscribe%2F|||”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
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Turkey Blocks is a monitoring system and publicity platform set up to raise awareness of internet shutdowns – often in connection with political events in the country – to help Turkish citizens to keep communicating during emergencies.
Since its establishment in 2015, Alp Toker, a Turkish-British technologist, has set aside his day job, drew on his personal savings and brought together a team to develop new methods, including statistical models, computer hardware and network monitoring tools that have allowed them to break news of 14 mass censorship incidents during politically significant events, challenging the official narrative that the shutdowns are just coincidence.
Using Raspberry Pi technology they built an open source tool able to reliably monitor the blackouts in real time. The tool has proved so successful that it has been implemented elsewhere globally
“Our alerts, issued within minutes of detection, have helped Turkish citizens to stay online when shutdowns get implemented and provided the media with enough confidence to report assertively on digital censorship in Turkey,” Toker told Index on Censorship.
Turkey Blocks’ findings have helped explain how Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, retained power and suppressed the July 2016 coup attempt by using social media effectively, while denying that capability to opposition demonstrators on other occasions. Users were able to get online after notice of the internet restrictions and developing military uprising spread.
“We similarly tracked the Ankara bombings, Ataturk airport attacks and several others,” Toker said. “Our research has been described as instrumental in the understanding of why and how the government responds to IS and PKK terror attacks, routinely slowing of access to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”
In a country marked by increasing authoritarianism, a strident crackdown on the press and social media as well as numerous human rights violations, Turkey Blocks provides a necessary service to take control away from those who seek to restrict the internet.
See the full shortlist for Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards 2017 here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content” equal_height=”yes” el_class=”text_white” css=”.vc_custom_1490258749071{background-color: #cb3000 !important;}”][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Support the Index Fellowship.” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:28|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsupport-the-freedom-of-expression-awards%2F|||”][vc_column_text]
It was around 2am on the morning of 3 March 2017 that Turkish police broke the door open to the apartment of Nur Ener, a journalist who works for the daily Yeni Asya. Her house was searched. She was held in custody for three days at the Kocasinan Police Department detention centre in complete isolation before she was arrested on 6 March.
A court ordered her arrest on charges of being affiliated with the Fethullah Gülen network, a religious community which Turkish authorities claim is behind Turkey’s July 15 failed coup. Since then, she has been imprisoned in Bakırköy Women’s Prison in Istanbul. As an alleged member of the group involved in the coup, she is allowed only 45 minutes of family visits a week and only an hour to consult with her lawyer. She is barred from all written communication with the outside world.
It later emerged that her arrest was based on a tip-off from a former flatmate, who was likely coerced into providing names to go free in Turkey’s increasingly Kafkaesque judicial system, where letters or emails are accepted as enough evidence to be arrested on very serious chargesby Turkey’s controversial Criminal Judicatures of Peace. Currently, over 150 journalists are imprisoned in the country, almost all accused of terrorism charges, both as part of and outside the coup investigation.
Life before journalism
Nur was born in the city of İzmir in 1991 to a devout Muslim family. Her father, Uğur Ener, is a furniture seller and her mother, Nazan Ener, a housewife. The couple has another daughter, Rana Ener, who is two years older than Nur.
As a child, Nur was very active and curious, according to her mother Nazan Ener. She was a very good student at school but also had a seemingly limitless energy for a wide range of extracurricular activities, from horseback riding to archery. She was brought up in İzmir and lived there, until her admission into the Communications Department of Erzurum University in 2010.
As a leading member of her university’s Communications Student Club, she often organised panels. During such one event, she met with Kazım Güleçyüz, the editor-in-chief of Yeni Asya, the flagship newspaper of a community in Turkey which profoundly respects and adheres to the Risale-i Nur a collection of treatises offering interpretations of the Quran by the 19th-century Sunni theologian Said’i Nursi.
She interned at the newspaper that summer, and was hired formally in 2015, shortly after her graduation.
“When she was four, we were in the yard and her father asked her to bring something. She said she couldn’t walk in that direction because she didn’t want to step on the ants walking outside. She was always very compassionate,” Nur’s distraught mother said.
“Nur was always respectful of other people’s opinions,” she continued. She mentioned the name of a neighbor, whom she referred to as “our grandfather,” a staunchly secular old man, who “had a complete opposite worldview” from the Ener family. “One day, she saw him painting the yard wall, and she jokingly said ‘Grandfather Mevlüt, I can’t let you tarnish your charisma like that with that paint roller!’ and painted the wall herself.”
Most staff at Yeni Asya agrees that Nur is a natural peacemaker, a born mediator. Her mother remembers: “When she was just a schoolgirl, she once forced us to have a positive dialogue with a neighbor who had yelled at Nur for playing soccer infront of her house.” The neighbor was surprised when Uğur Ener politely asked the neighbor what was wrong, instead of arguing for yelling at her daughter. The neighbor never found out that this had happened on Nur’s demand, and in fact Uğur Ener was initially very angry at him.
Assertive journalist
“I shared a flat with Nur,” said Ülker Caba, a fellow editor at Yeni Asya. “She is a very active person. Before she started working at Yeni Asya, she was involved in various projects in the media. For example, I remember she contributed to Bianet[Independent News Network, a secular news website in Turkey with a good reputation for its journalism, funded by SIDA] . She is a great journalist. She was always very insistent about getting interviews for example. She would call a person a thousand times to make sure that she would get an interview.”
“She was very social and very engaged. Starting these Periscope sessions was her idea,” said Kazım Güleçyüz, who met me in his office at Yeni Asya minutes after completing a morning Periscope broadcast on Yeni Asya’s Twitter account. “We often broadcast these together with Nur,” he said.
Ener’s boisterous and energetic personality also made her an active person outside work. “We cycled or took strolls along the shore on the weekends,” says Recep Kılınç, Nur’s fiancé, who works at the newspaper’s accounting department. The couple had set a wedding date for 29 April. Rana, Nur’s sister, was looking for a wedding gown a few days before her arrest.
“She also loved reading, we would talk for hours and sometimes go star-gazing at night.” Kılınç cannot visit his fiancée in prison as per the restrictions imposed on journalists arrested as part of the coup investigation under Turkey’s State of Emergency rules, which went into force on 20 July, five days after the coup attempt.
Speaking of Nur’s initial detention, Kılınç said: “There wasn’t a single female police officer when they came to her house. All male officers raiding the house of a woman who lived alone in the middle of the night,” a deeply offensive act for the devout family. “They seized her laptop, her books; they left the house a mess.”
Interviews that disturbed some
But why was Nur detained and later arrested, nearly after seven months after the coup attempt? Her family says that a former flatmate of Nur had given her name to the police after being detained herself shortly after the coup attempt. She later called Nur and admitted what she had done, and even apologised. Turkey’s so-called“repentance law”allows suspects to be released if they provide more information about an organisation. Still, her newspaper and family find it perplexing that the police would wait so long to continue the investigation. Could it be a message to Yeni Asya, which has so far been spared in the post-coup decimation of news outlets in Turkey? 160 media organisations have been shut down under several Cabinet Decrees under the post-coup State of Emergency rule.
The answer could be a yes, according to Yeni Asya editor-in-chief Güleçyüz. “It is possible. She recently published some reports that disturbed [the Turkish government]” he said. “Most recently, she published an interview with Fatma Bostan Ünsal,” who parted ways with the Justice and Development Party over differences in opinion after being one of its founders. “The interview criticised the State of Emergency implementations. Its headline quoted Ünsal saying ‘We were freer in Feb. 28,’ a reference to the 1997 unarmed military intervention against a religious-minded government, which caused much grievance among Turkey’s conservative segments, who were profoundly affected by the intervention.
Unclear charges
Because there is a confidentiality decision on the investigation, Nur’s lawyers have not been formally informed of the charges she faces. Nor have they been able to see any document pertaining to the investigation. According to the arrest ruling, she was arrested for having downloaded ByLock, a little-known mobile chat application which Turkish officials say was used only by the members of the Fethullah Gülen network. Although the National Intelligence Agency itself has said that the use of ByLock by the group ended long before the coup, thousands have been arrested for downloading the app.
Nur was put under arrest by a ruling of the 4th Criminal Judicature of Peace. An objection filed by her lawyers to another Judicature of Peace was not processed at any point. However, it recently appeared that an indictment has been prepared and submitted to a court — a rare and positive development in Turkey, a habitual offender in terms of using pre-trial detention as a form of punishment for journalists — and Nur will soon be tried by the 26th High Criminal Court, to which the objection was referred; a procedural violation. A court date has yet to be set.
“We are hoping for her release. The fact that they haven’t rejected our objection might mean that she might be released any time,” Güleçyüz said.
Kılınç agreed, smiling optimistically, he said: “Yes, we start every new day with that hope.”[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
