10 Sep 2018 | Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Dear Mr./Ms. Foreign Minister,
We, the undersigned, are writing to you concerning Saudi Arabia’s upcoming 3rd Cycle Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in November 2018 and ahead of the 39th Session of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC 39) in September. The UN HRC and the kingdom’s UPR review are important opportunities to raise concerns about Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record and to press for urgently needed reforms. We thus call upon your government to publicly engage with Saudi Arabia during the forthcoming HRC as well as the UPR in November, to call for the release of detained writers and activists, and to issue strong recommendations to end restrictions on the right to freedom of expression.
During Saudi Arabia’s 2nd UPR cycle in October 2013, the kingdom received nine recommendations pertaining to protecting and promoting the right to freedom of expression out of 225 total recommendations. Saudi Arabia fully accepted three of these freedom of expression-related recommendations and partially accepted the remaining one. Despite this commitment, the kingdom has failed to implement the recommendations, and we remain concerned over the continued criminalization of the right to freedom of expression and opinion as Saudi Arabia’s UPR approaches in November.
Fundamentally, the Saudi government does not recognize the right to freedom of expression and opinion. Rather, the kingdom’s de facto constitution – the Basic Law – grants authorities the power to “prevent whatever leads to disunity, sedition and division,” including peaceful criticism. It likewise proclaims that “mass and publishing media and all means of expression shall use decent language and adhere to State laws. Whatever leads to sedition and division, or undermines the security of the State or its public relations, or is injurious to the honor and rights of man, shall be prohibited.” Subsequent laws have enshrined further limitations on free speech, including the 2000 Press and Publications Law, the 2007 Anti-Cybercrime Law, the 2014 Law on Terrorism and Its Financing, the 2015 Law on Associations, and most recently, the November 2017 Penal Law for Crimes of Terrorism and Its Financing which explicitly criminalizes expression critical of the King and the Crown Prince.
This web of legislation empowers Saudi officials to arrest activists, journalists, writers, and bloggers who are accused of crimes related to religion, including blasphemy, atheism, and apostasy, as well as crimes filed under the counter-terror law related to speech critical of the royal family, government, or ruling structure.
Among those currently in prison for speech crimes related to religion and critical expression of the government are:
– Blogger Raif Badawi, arrested in June 2012 on atheism charges for his writings and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes;
– Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh, arrested in January 2014 on charges of atheism and apostasy for his poetry and serving a sentence of eight years in prison and 800 lashes– reduced from an initial death sentence;
– Saleh al-Shehi, a columnist for al-Watan, arrested on 8 February 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison after he discussed corruption and the royal court on television;
– At least 15 other journalists, including Nadhir al-Majid, who was charged on 18 January 2017 with “slandering the ruler and breaking allegiance with him,” and Wajdi al-Ghazzawi, the owner of religious satellite broadcaster Al-Fajr Media Group, who was sentenced on 4 February 2014 to 12 years in prison after he criticized the government and accused it of corruption.
The Saudi government has also arrested several women activists over their speech, including a number of prominent women human rights defenders arrested on 15 May 2018. According to nine UN Special Rapporteurs, although many of the women had advocated for gender equality and the lifting the ban on women driving, “reports state they were accused of engaging in suspicious communications with foreign groups allegedly working to undermine national security, and of trespassing against the country’s religious and national foundations.” In a demonstration of the kingdom’s attempt to silence women and activists, reports recently emerged that the government was seeking the death penalty against activist Israa al-Ghomgham, who was arrested in 2015 for her role in organizing protests and for calling for the release of political prisoners and an end to anti-Shia discrimination.
Saudi Arabia’s suppression of free expression demonstrates the kingdom’s failure to implement its 2nd Cycle UPR recommendations. We therefore see both the UN HRC session in September and the kingdom’s UPR in November as important and significant opportunities to raise concerns not only about ongoing restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, but also the kingdom’s failure to abide by its commitments to reform. To that end, we call upon your government to publicly urge Saudi Arabia to lift restrictions on free expression, call for the release of activists, journalists, and writers, urge implementation of its 2nd Cycle UPR recommendations, and offer serious follow-up recommendations during the 3rd Cycle UPR in November.
Signed,
Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB)
Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE)
Bytes for All (B4A)
Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI)
Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR)
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Freedom Forum
Fundamedios – Andean Foundation for Media Observation and Study
Independent Journalism Center (IJC)
Index on Censorship
Initiative for Freedom of Expression – Turkey
International Publishers Association (IPA)
Mediacentar Sarajevo
Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance
Norwegian PEN
PEN American Center
South East Europe Media Organisation
Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM)
Vigilance for Democracy and the Civic State
AlQst
Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC)
Association for Human Rights in Ethiopia (AHRE)
Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD)
Caucasus Civil Initiatives (CCIC)
Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine)
CIVICUS
European Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (ECDHR)
International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
Karapatan (Philippines)
Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)
Odhikar, Bangladesh[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1536591904030-5e1deab8-708b-0″ taxonomies=”6534″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
7 Sep 2018 | Event Reports, News and features
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From left to right: Dionne Walker, Elizabeth Pears, Kunle Olulode, Ethel Tambudzai, Toyin Agbetu. (Credit: Long Dang/Index on Censorship)
Is free speech a way to promote unheard and under-represented voices and perspectives, or is it a tool wielded by extremists and supremacists? So discussed a panel at the BFI Southbank on Thursday 6 September. Chaired by the director of Voice4Change Kunle Olulode, panellists included activist and filmmaker Toyin Agbetu, Buzzfeed News editor Elizabeth Pears, activist and charity director Ethel Tambudzai and filmmaker Dionne Walker.
The lively discussion covered topics ranging from the use of “the n-word”, what free speech means and drawing the line between free speech and abusive speech.
“I think free speech is such a complex issue,” Pears, the former news editor at The Voice, Britain’s only black newspaper, told the audience. “How do we balance free speech with someone’s human rights, someone’s rights to exist?”
Asked whether the repeated use of the “n-word” by musicians and artists can take the power away from it, Agbetu said: “It has a lot to do with commerce and little with desensitisation. Some commercial artists deploy it to make money. I’m not saying there’s not some conscious recognition [about its offensiveness], but they can’t take out the toxic element because it always has a toxic connotation.
“History is important, context is always important, but [as a British African] I’m always at the mercy ideologically and statistically of the ethnic majority,” he added. “If the ethnic majority says that the n-word is a cool word, [unlike myself, many] would continue to use it.”
On the topic of former foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s comments about Muslim women looking like ”letterboxes”, Pears said: “As a consequence…a kind of free pass has been given to the man on the street or woman on the street to repeat it in order to harm people. We’ve seen reports that islamophobic attacks went up. I don’t think you should use that platform to attack people.”
“This is what happens when you blur the line between what is taboo and what is sacred, what is free speech and what is abusive,” said Agbetu.
While everyone has access to free speech, Pears adds, not everyone has access to a platform. “Not all free speech comes at the same price, not all free speech has the same consequences,” she said.
Former vice president of Westminster University’s student union Ethel Tambudzai also spoke on hate speech and the idea of banning speakers in universities. “Regulations might be too heavy-handed, and depending on who’s making that regulation it becomes dangerous because who are we allowing to speak, or not to speak, and why?” she asked.
“Whatever happens in a university is also happening on the streets. We’re all silenced somehow. If you said everything you wanted to say all the time, I don’t think any of us have that privilege. Boris Johnson might more often, but I don’t think all of us do, and we have to think what does that look like and what does that mean.”
“The moment the government are controlling what academics are researching, studying, teaching and even allowed to think about in a classroom or how students express themselves, there are limits on where free speech becomes hate speech,” she added.
The visibility of minority communities was an issue for the panel. Walker, the director of the documentary film The Hard Stop, which focuses on the 2011 London riots, spoke about the importance of film in raising these voices in today’s society.
“[The film] covered such a controversial topic. It was a quite sensitive portrayal of stories of the black community. The idea of free speech comes in. It was quite important to tell a nuanced story. Oftentimes there’s a sense of being very black and white,” she said. “Argument becomes a kind of beaten over the head, you’re either for or against a particular motion. For Hard Stop we went for somewhere in the middle.”
The chair left the audience with a thought-provoking question: “Is free speech a way to promote unheard and underrepresented voices and perspectives, or is it a tool wielded by extremists and supremacists?”
Additional reporting by Long Dang. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1536747948713-02464451-bc02-0″ taxonomies=”12953, 518, 6840″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
7 Sep 2018 | Bulgaria, Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features
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After Bulgarian news reporter Maria Dimitrova helped expose an organised crime group from Vratsa’s involvement in fraud and drug trafficking, she received threatening text and Facebook messages. One of the gang’s victims, who spoke to Dimitrova for her report, was later attacked by three unidentified men. According to investigative journalism outlet Bivol, investigators from the Vratsa police precinct, where Dimitrova was questioned, “acted cynically and with disparagement”.
In November 2017, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom platform, which monitors press freedom violations in 43 countries, revealed that members of the gang had planned to murder Georgi Ezekiev, the publisher of the Zov News, where Dimitrova works/had worked.
Zoltan Sipos, MMF’s Bulgaria correspondent, says such violations have had a marked impact on the country’s media, adding that “sophisticated” soft censorship is a “big problem”.
“Self-censorship is also an issue in Bulgaria, though the nature of this form of censorship is that its existence is difficult to prove unless journalists come forward with their experiences,” he says.
Under increasing pressure from the government and a media environment becoming more and more censored, journalists within Bulgaria are finding themselves in danger. With an inadequate legal framework, pressure from editors and other limitations, journalists regularly self-censor or suffer the consequences.
Sipos has made 40 reports of media freedom violations in Bulgaria since the project’s launch in 2014.
In May 2018, a report was filed of an investigative journalist was assaulted outside his home in Cherven Bryag, a town in northwestern Bulgaria.
Hristo Geshov writes for the regional investigative reporting website Za Istinata, works with journalistic online platform About the Truth and hosts a programme called On Target on YouTube. In a Facebook post, he said the attack was a response to his investigative reporting and “to the warnings [he] sent to the authorities about the management of finances by the Cherven Bryag municipal government”.
Geshov faced harassment after publishing a series of articles about government irregularities, in which he claimed that three municipal councillors were using EU funds to renovate their homes.
“It is unacceptable that Bulgarian journalists should be the target of physical attacks and that there should even be plots to kill them, simply because they are engaged in investigating official corruption,” Paula Kennedy, the assistant editor for Mapping Media Freedom, said.
“The authorities need to take such attacks seriously and do more to ensure adequate protection for those targeted.”
Bulgarian journalists are also being limited by legislation designed by politicians as a means of censorship. Backed by Bulgarian MPs, amendments to the Law for the Compulsory Depositing of Print Media would force media outlets in the country to declare any funding, such as grants, donations and other sources of income that they receive from foreign funders. Ninety-two members of parliament voted for the amendments on the first reading on 4 July, with 12 against and 28 abstentions. Unlike most legislation, there was no parliamentary debate beforehand.
With the second reading due in September, when it will have to be once again approved by parliament, and the president still has the right to veto it, amendments would force outlets to clearly state the current owner on their website, how much funding they received, who it was from and what it is for.
MPs claim the aim is to make the funding of media organisations more transparent.
Referred to as “Delyan Peevski’s media law”, the amendments were first proposed in February 2018 by MP Deylan Peevski, a politician and media owner. Almost 80% of Bulgarian print media and its distribution is controlled by Peevski, former head of Bulgaria’s main intelligence agency and owner of the New Bulgarian Media Group.
The amendments will create two categories of media, separating those funded by grants and those who receive funding from “normal” practices such as bank loans, which they are not obliged to declare. Peevski-owned media is funded predominantly through bank loans, with his family receiving loans from now-bankrupt Corporate Commercial Bank.
There are few independent media outlets remaining in Bulgaria, with fears the new law will only increase the level of self-censorship within the country. Amendments will put additional pressure on media outlets that rely on foreign grants and donations to maintain their editorial independence.
Atanas Tchobanov, co-founder of Bivol, told MMF the amendments are a way to “whiten [Peevski’s] image”, adding: “The bill is exposing mainly the small media outlets, living on grants and donations. If a businessman gives [Bivol] €240 per year with a €20 month recurrent donation and we disclose his name, his business might be attacked by the Peevski’s controlled tax office and prosecution.
“Delyan Peevski has blatantly lied about his media ownership in the past. Then, miraculously, he started declaring millions in income, but this was never found strange by any anti-corruption institution.”
The level of transparency required of independent media owners has become a major issue within the country, threatening independent journalism and editorial independence.
Speaking at the biannual Time to Talk debate meeting in Amsterdam, Irina Nedeva from The Red House, the centre for culture and debate in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, Bulgaria, tells Index: “We live in very strange media circumstances. On the surface, it might look like Bulgaria has many different private media print outlets, radio stations, many different private tv channels, but in fact what we see is that especially in the print press, more of the serious newspapers cease to exist.”
“They don’t exist anymore, they can’t afford to exist because the business model has changed and what we see is that we have many tabloids,” she adds. “These tabloids are one and the same just with reshaped sentences.”
Nedeva is concerned that such publications don’t adequately criticise the government or businesses. “They criticise only the civil society organisations that dare to show the wrongdoings of the government for example.”
In an effort to examine media ownership within Bulgaria, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom undertook a press freedom mission in June 2018. The mission found money from government and advertising is distributed to media considered to be compliant. EU funding is controlled by the government, giving those in charge the power to decide which publications receive what. This has created an atmosphere of self-censorship, dubbed “highly corrupting” by an ECPMF into press freedom in Bulgaria.
“There seems to be no enabling environment, politically or economically for independent journalism and media pluralism”, describing the media situation as a “systemic symptom of a captured state,” Nora Wehofsits, advocacy officer for ECPMF tells Index. “If the new media law is accepted, it could have a chilling effect on media and journalists working for “the wrong side”, as the media law could be used arbitrarily in order to accuse and silence them.”
Lada Price, a journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and Director of Education at the Centre for Freedom of the Media describes for Index the role the media owners play: “There’s lots of abuse of power for personal gain and I think, therein lies the biggest issue for free speech in Bulgaria. Media outlets are not being bought for commercial purposes, but for political purposes. They like to follow their own political and business agendas, and they’re not afraid to use that power to censor criticisms of government or any corporate partners.”
Price says that while the constitution guarantees the right to receive and disseminate information, the media landscape in Bulgaria is very hostile for journalism “because of the informal system of networks, which is dominated by mutual, beneficial relationships”.
“There is a very close-knit political, corporate and media elite and that imposes really serious limits on what journalists can and can not report,” she says. “If you speak to journalists, they might say whoever pays the bill has a say on what gets published and that puts limits on independence. There is no direct censorship, but lots of different ways to make journalists self-censor.”
ECPMF also said in its report into press freedom in Bulgaria that the difficulties media workers face are due to the current censorship climate, adding: “It is difficult to produce quality journalism due to widespread self-censorship and the struggle to stay independent in a highly dependent market.”
Funding from the EU and its allocation has become a controversial issue for media outlets in the country. In January 2018 ECPMF called for fair distribution of EU funds to media in Bulgaria, saying “the Bulgarian government should disseminate funds on an equal basis to all of the media, also to the ones who are critical of the government”. It also requested that the EU actively monitor how EU taxpayers’ money is spent in Bulgaria.
Bulgarian journalism is heavily reliant on EU funding and during the economic crisis of 2008/2009, advertisement revenues fell, making both print media and broadcasters much more dependent on state subsidies.
“When it comes to public broadcasters, they are basically fully dependent on the state budget,” says Price. “That means funding comes from whoever is in power, so they are very careful of what kind of criticisms [they publish], who they criticise. Their directors also get appointed by the majority in parliament.”
“The funding schemes that put restrictions on journalism is by EU funding, which shouldn’t really happen,” she adds. “But if you have your funding which is aimed at information campaigns then that is sometimes channelled by government agencies, but only towards selected media, which we see in the form of state advertising, in exchange for providing pro-government politic coverage.”
According to the US State Department’s annual report on human rights practices, released in April 2018, media law in Bulgaria is being used to silence and put pressure on journalists. ECPMF, in a report released in May 2018, described the current legislation as not adequately safeguarding independent editorial policies or prevent politicians from owning media outlets or direct/indirect monitoring mechanisms.
This was also reiterated by the US State Department’s report, which highlighted concerns that journalists who reported on corruption face defamation suits “by politicians, government officials, and other persons in public positions”.
“According to the Association of European Journalists, journalists generally lost such cases because they could rarely produce hard evidence in court,” the US State Department said.
The report also showed journalists in the country continue to “report self-censorship, [and] editorial prohibitions on covering specific persons and topics, and the imposition of political points of view by corporate leaders,” while highlighting persistent concerns about damage to media pluralism due to factors such as political pressure and a lack of transparency in media ownership.
Nelly Ognyanova, a prominent Bulgarian media law expert, tells Index that the biggest problem Bulgaria faces is “the lack of rule of law”.
“In the years since democratic transition, there is freedom of expression in Bulgaria; people freely criticise and express their opinions,” she says. “At the same time, the freedom of the media depends not only on the legal framework.”
In her view, the media lacks freedom because “their funding is often in dependence on power and businesses”, and “the state continues to play a key role in providing a public resource to the media”.
“The law envisages the independence of the media regulator, the independence of the public media, media pluralism. This is not happening in practice. There can be no free media, neither democratic media legislation, in a captured state.”[/vc_column_text][vc_raw_html]JTNDaWZyYW1lJTIwd2lkdGglM0QlMjI3MDAlMjIlMjBoZWlnaHQlM0QlMjIzMTUlMjIlMjBzcmMlM0QlMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRm1hcHBpbmdtZWRpYWZyZWVkb20udXNoYWhpZGkuaW8lMkZzYXZlZHNlYXJjaGVzJTJGNzUlMkZtYXAlMjIlMjBmcmFtZWJvcmRlciUzRCUyMjAlMjIlMjBhbGxvd2Z1bGxzY3JlZW4lM0UlM0MlMkZpZnJhbWUlM0U=[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1536667459548-83ac2a47-7e8a-7″ taxonomies=”8996″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
