24 Nov 2021 | News and features, Statements
Writer Catherine Belton
The undersigned organisations express their serious concern at the legal proceedings that are being brought against journalist and author Catherine Belton and her publisher HarperCollins.
The two defamation lawsuits are being brought by Russian businessman Roman Abramovich and the Russian state energy company Rosneft in relation to Belton’s book, Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West, which was published in April 2020.
Abramovich’s complaint relates to 26 extracts in the book, including the suggestion that his purchase of Chelsea Football Club in 2003 was directed by Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Rosneft’s complaint relates to claims that they participated in the expropriation of Yukos Oil Company, which had been privately owned by businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Both claims were filed in March 2021.
“We believe that the lawsuits against Belton and HarperCollins amount to strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs),” the organisations said, referring to a form of legal harassment used by wealthy and powerful entities to silence journalists and other public watchdogs.
“SLAPPs are used to drain their targets of as much time, money, and energy as possible in order to bully them into silence. The individual may be sued personally and several lawsuits may be brought at the same time, including in different jurisdictions,” the organisations said. “These are hallmarks of SLAPPs, and they’re consistent with what Belton and HarperCollins have faced.”
Five separate claims were initially filed against Belton and HarperCollins, but three have since been resolved without the need for costs or damages being awarded to the claimants. In June 2021, Abramovich filed an additional lawsuit against HarperCollins in Australia in relation to Belton’s book.
“We, once again, urge the UK government to consider measures, including legislative reforms, that would protect public watchdogs from being subject to burdensome, lengthy, and financially draining legal actions, which can stifle public debate,” the organisations concluded. “Our democracy relies on their ability to hold power to account.”
SIGNED:
ARTICLE 19
Association of European Journalists (AEJ)
AEJ Polish Section
Blueprint for Free Speech
Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland (CFoIS)
Citizen Network Watchdog Poland
Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice
English PEN
European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
Index on Censorship
IFEX
Justice for Journalists Foundation
National Union of Journalists (NUJ)
OBC Transeuropa (OBCT)
PEN International
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Society of Journalists, Warsaw
Spotlight on Corruption
The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation
19 Nov 2021 | China, News and features
Forget about the white lines. When it comes to tennis China might have just crossed a red one. That has been the lesson from the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai.
Two weeks ago the Wimbledon doubles winner vanished after she made sexual assault allegations against a top Chinese government official. For those familiar with China, the plot unfolded much like other #MeToo stories there – victim speaks up only to be quickly silenced.
Except in this case, rather than a smattering of individuals and NGOs condemning the action, the world’s sporting greats have screamed with fury. United under the hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai Serena Williams has said Peng’s disappearance “must be investigated and we must not stay silent”. Novak Djokovic said he was shocked. Germany’s Olympic team have asked for “clarity” on “her well-being and current condition”; Even FC Barcelona football player Gerard Pique shared a meme of the star alongside the hashtag.
It’s not just sporting superstars. It’s organisations too. Organisations like the Women’s Tennis Association. WTA chair Steve Simon said on Wednesday that “the WTA and the rest of the world need independent and verifiable proof that she is safe”. Her sexual assault allegation must be investigated “with full transparency and without censorship”, he added.
Then, yesterday, when a letter surfaced claiming to be from her both denying the allegations and saying she was ok (a letter that was quickly discredited), the WTA chair said:
“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it because…this is bigger than the business.”
This, despite years of the WTA building up the profile of tennis in China. It’s an astonishing show of solidarity.
Not mincing his words at all, the writer Christoph Rehage, currently chronicling his ‘longest walk’ from China to Germany, tweeted: “I totally did not expect the tennis world to be the first to say fuck you xi jinping this shit is enough”. Neither did we Christoph, neither did we.
And why would we? We’ve become so accustomed to the opposite – silence. In the face of series after series of human rights violations, ones of a scale that we said would never happen again, the world’s leading financiers, brands and sporting figures have usually opted to not speak up. Silence like that from the International Olympic Committee, who have said they would not comment on the Peng affair and favoured “quiet diplomacy”.
And not just silence, actual kowtowing, such as when the general manager of Houston Rockets basketball team apologised for a tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters, or when actor John Cena apologised on Chinese social media after calling Taiwan a country, or when the parent company of Zara reportedly removed a statement on their website relating to cotton in Xinjiang.
At the core of the Peng story is a tragedy on an epic scale, of a woman who might have been sexually assaulted and has presumably been threatened or even imprisoned – and of a nation where free expression is muzzled and showing solidarity with the victims of sexual crimes can be a crime in itself. But this is also a story of hope. It’s been very heartening to watch the international outcry, to see for the first time in a while people and organisations who have everything to gain from being friends with China actually saying “enough is enough”.
The tennis world is not the only one taking on China this week. Granted much smaller in scale, students at the University of Exeter called a meeting with senior management about the university’s links to Chinese universities deemed complicit in the genocide of Uyghur Muslims. The students used freedom of information requests to establish the link and as a result the university says it will rethink its policy. On the back of this victory, the external organisation they teamed up with – Students for Uyghurs – have expressed a desire to do similar work at other UK universities.
These two actions, one local one international, are hugely significant. We’ve been told for years that China is too big to take on, too powerful. We’ll be punished; people in China will be punished. We’ve even had the environment thrown at us “Don’t upset the Chinese! We need them on our side to achieve 1.5 degree goals!”). And yet where has silence got us? “Nowhere. We need to speak up”, wrote Rushan Abbas, an activist whose family is incarcerated in China, in a 2020 issue of Index on Censorship.
So to all those of you who have spoken up against atrocities in China this week – thank you. You’ve given us hope that a different future can exist.
19 Nov 2021 | Brazil, News and features
There is a highly symbolic scene in Marighella, a Brazilian film that has only reached movie theatres now, even though it has been ready for release since 2019. An American agent (Charles Paraventi) praises Police Chief Lúcio (Bruno Gagliasso) for the inventiveness with which the revolutionary group Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN) infiltrated radio stations, broadcasting a subversive message using only a tape recorder and circumventing the censorship. The sequence fulfils at least two functions: to reinforce the deep ties between the brutality of the Brazilian military dictatorship and North American imperialist interests; and reinforcing political and social resistance through creativity, a typically Brazilian trait often described as jeitinho or malandragem – a way of circumventing the bureaucratic norms.
I evoke this idea of trickery because it is at the centre of the imbroglio involving the release of Marighella, a political biopic of Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian Marxist-Leninist communist, politician and writer.
Marighella, born in 1911, was regularly in and out of jail between the 1930s and 1950s for criticising the Brazilian government as an active member of the Communist Party.
In 1966, he published The Brazilian Crisis, which argued for an armed struggle against Brazil’s military dictatorship which had been installed as a result of the 1964 coup in the country. Two years later, Marighella was expelled from the Communist Party and he went on to found the ALN, which became involved in robbing banks to finance guerilla warfare and the kidnapping of high profile individuals to win the release of political prisoners.
After the ALN’s involvement in the kidnapping of US Ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick, Marighella became a target. On 4 November 1969, he was ambushed by the police in São Paulo and shot dead.
The release of the biopic during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, an apologist of Latin American military dictatorships and nostalgic for the bloodthirsty Brazilian regime that acts as the de facto villain of the film, is timely.
Marighella was supposed to be released in early 2020 but Ancine, the government agency that works to promote national cinema in Brazil, withheld funding of R$1 million (roughly £134,000) for its distribution, alleging a problem in the accounts for another production by O2 Filmes, the film’s producer.
Celebrated actor Wagner Moura, who debuts here as the director, had no doubt that the film was censored.
“It was a time when Bolsonaro was talking about filtering and regulating Ancine,” Moura said at a press event about the movie.
Brazil hasn’t had a censorship department since the end of the military dictatorship, which ended with popular elections in the mid-1980s. The constitution that was enacted at that time was so influenced by the “years of lead” (as the times under the regime are known) that censorship was expressly prohibited by the law.
There are, of course, age rating systems and, with the justification of “protecting the innocence of children”, certain films, events or exhibitions are only released for certain ages, and/or with parents’ authorisation, very much alike the ratings systems in the US or the UK. That’s why, as long as it feels the need to comply with the Constitution, the current far-right Brazilian government needs to be at least as creative as the speeches it seeks to curb.
Hence Moura’s revolt, saying that there would be “veiled censorship”, different than what happened during the dictatorship, applied as a state policy.
“Today they infiltrate people in these agencies, and they make anything impossible to happen. That’s what they did with Marighella. They found a way to make the release impossible, from a bureaucratic point of view,” he said in an interview with Veja magazine.
Without this being state policy, made official by documents, it is difficult to say that there is de facto censorship. Carlos Marighella symbolises much of what the radical wing of the government despises, finding it absurd that public money is used to finance “non-aligned” works.
Bolsonaro himself has even threatened Ancine with extinction because the productions it finances are no longer “aligned” with the government. His government’s special secretary of culture, former actor Mário Frias has even tweeted a response to Moura’s statements: “Did you think I was going to get public funds for this pamphlet garbage?”
This type of declaration by a state representative helps to understand the Brazilian Government’s relationship with culture. Its origin lies in one of the ideological consequences of the end of the military dictatorship, in which some far-right intellectuals and disgraced military personnel came to the conclusion that the left had “won” the “cultural war”, infiltrating universities and fostering ideologically aligned artistic production .
This conclusion was, in part, a reaction to the establishment of the National Truth Commission, dedicated to revealing and documenting the crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship, and the result of a bad reading (and also in bad faith, it should be said) of the theories of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist intellectual.
The rise and permanence of the extreme right in power, they think, would be conditioned to the dismantling of an apparatus of cultural incentive and promotion, developed over the years of redemocratisation. This explains the presence of someone like Frias in charge of culture and the use of jeitinho to impede the exhibition of “misaligned” films such as Marighella.
This institutional trickery, in this case at least, has backfired, since a work is not an isolated object of its historical context. Since release – without the benefit of government funding – Marighella has become the most watched Brazilian production of the last two years, with 100,000 spectators in 300 theatres across the country. This is low in a historic context, as the screen quota which usually ensures that cinemas show a certain amount of locally produced content to counter the influx of foreign films is currently suspended while a new proposal, suggest by Brazil’s opposition parties, is considered.
Despite its success, the film has problems – from the annoying overacting to the lack of real interest in its main character – and it perhaps wouldn’t be so celebrated in another time. In Brazil at the end of 2021, with all the absurdities committed by action or inaction of the Bolsonaro government, Marighella has become the film to be seen.
15 Nov 2021 | China, Hong Kong, News and features
A former food delivery worker calling himself a “second-generation Captain America” and who would turn up at protests in Hong Kong with the Marvel superhero’s instantly recognisable shield has been convicted for violating the country’s national security law (NSL).
On 11 November, Adam Ma Chun-man was sentenced to five years and nine months for inciting secession by chanting pro-independence slogans in public places between August and November 2020.
Evidence cited by a government prosecutor in the court case against Ma included calls for independence he had made in interviews.
Ma becomes the second person to be found guilty under the law imposed by Beijing in July last year. He has lodged an appeal against the verdict.
The first person sentenced under the NSL was former waiter Tong Ying-kit who was jailed in late July for nine years for terrorist activities and inciting secession. Tong was accused of driving his motorcycle into three riot police on 1 July 2020 while carrying a flag with the protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our times.”
The watershed ruling on Tong has profound implications for freedom of expression and judicial independence in Hong Kong.
The “Captain America” case has further fuelled fears about the rapid erosion of the city’s room for freedom and the strength of the court in upholding civil liberties.
Like the Tong case, the Ma judgement has significant implications for related cases but the ruling has attracted far less attention. The general public reacted with indifference mixed with a feeling of futility and helplessness. It does not bode well for civil rights and liberties in the city.
The significance of the Ma case lies with the judge’s ruling on what constituted incitement.
Ma’s lawyer said Ma had no intention whatsoever of committing a crime, but was just expressing his views. Merely chanting slogans should not be deemed as a violation of the NSL, the lawyer argued. That he urged people to discuss the issue of independence in schools did not necessarily mean the result of the discussions would be a yes to independence. It could be a no.
Importantly, his lawyer argued Ma had merely expressed his personal views without giving thought of how to make it happen through an action plan. Referring to Ma’s slogan “Hong Kong people building an army”, his lawyer said it was just an empty slogan, again, without a plan.
In sentencing, judge Stanley Chan described the case as serious. He rejected the argument by Ma’s lawyer that the level of incitement in his speeches was minimal, saying Ma could turn more people into the next Ma Chun-man.
Put simply, judge Chan said that although the actual impact of Ma’s speeches in inciting others has been minimal, this was insignificant when determining whether his act constituted incitement.
This view is markedly different from the reaction of the media and the public over Ma’s political antics.
Ma had drawn the attention of journalists when he turned up in protests for obvious reasons. But no more. The lone protester neither had a sizable group of followers nor electrified the sentiments of the crowd at the scene.
The heavy sentencing of Ma will worsen the chilling effect of the national security law on freedom of expression. Importantly, it will have serious implications for a list of incitement cases currently in the process of trial.
In a statement on the sentencing, Kyle Ward, Amnesty International’s deputy secretary general said: “In the warped political landscape of post-national security law Hong Kong, peacefully expressing a political stance and trying to get support from others is interpreted as ‘inciting subversion’ and punishable by years in jail.”
With no sign of an easing of the enforcement of the law 16 months after it took effect, the international human rights group decided to shut down its local and regional offices in the city by the end of the year. They said the Beijing-imposed law made it “effectively impossible” to do its work without fear of “serious reprisals” from the Government.
Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam responded by saying no organisation should be worried about the national security law if they are operating legally in Hong Kong, adding Hong Kong residents’ freedoms, including that of speech, association and assembly were guaranteed under Article 27 of the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution.
To a lot of Hongkongers, the assurance, which is an integral part of the former British colony’s “one country, two systems” policy, is an empty promise.
The power of the national security law in curtailing freedoms in other aspects of everyday life in Hong Kong has been widely felt.
In October, the legislature rubber-stamped an amendment to the film censorship ordinance, giving powers to the authorities to ban films that are considered as “contrary to the interests of national security.” The phrase, or “red line” in the law, is much broader than the original version, which targeted anything that might “endanger national security.”
Even before the bill was passed, a number of films and documentary films relating to the 2019 protest were not allowed to be shown in public locally. They include the award-winning Inside the Red Brick Wall and Revolution of Our Times, a nominee in the 2021 Taiwan Golden Horse Film Award.
Moves to revive political censorship in film are part of the authorities’ intensified campaign against threats to national security. While targeting political activists, the net has been widened to curb what officials described as “soft confrontation” and “penetration” through films, art and culture and books.
The University of Hong Kong has called for the Pillar of Shame, a sculpture by Danish artist Jens Galschiot, to be removed from the campus, citing concern over the national security law.
On the legislative front, security minister Chris Tang has given clear reminders that more needs to be done to protect national security, pointing to crimes in Basic Law Article 23 that have not been covered in the national security law.
He has vowed to target spying activities and to plug loopholes following the social unrest in 2019. Tang cited the example that helmets and free MTR tickets were distributed free to protesters during the protests, claiming there were state-level organising behaviours, potentially by actors from outside the country.
Both the central and Hong Kong authorities have labelled the movement as a “colour revolution” with hostile foreign forces behind it, without giving concrete evidence.
In addition to spying, a bill on Article 23 will also cover theft of state secrets and links with foreign organisations. Officials gave no timetable. But it is expected to be at the top of the agenda for the new legislature, which is due to be formed after an election is held on 19 December.
Officials are also looking at introducing a law on “fake news” to eliminate what they deem as lies and disinformation, which went viral on social media during the 2019 protest. The Government and the Police claimed they were major victims of this false information.
Looking back to mid-2020 when the idea of a national security law was first mooted, officials assured Hongkongers the law would only “target a very small number of people”.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
