6 Jun 2024 | News and features, United Kingdom
As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of D-Day today, it is worth remembering that for one part of the British Isles the events have something of a bitter taste. As thousands of Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944, the residents of the Channel Islands, occupied by the Nazis for nearly four years, could have been forgiven for thinking their liberation was near. In fact, they had to wait another 11 long months, during which time they endured severe privations as supplies to the islands were cut off by the invading forces. As Madeleine Bunting put it in her book on Nazi rule in the Channel Islands, The Model Occupation: “Far behind Allied lines, the Reich’s British holiday islands were left to starve.”
For Channel Islanders, D-Day effectively marked the beginning of a siege, which denied them food, fuel and medicine. By September 1944 rations to islanders were cut to a minimum and reports by escapees from Jersey revealed that even the German soldiers were reduced to eating horsemeat and potatoes.
One letter from an islander quoted by Bunting written in the winter of 1944 said: “Life is not worth living, we cannot sleep at nights, we are so distressed … we are starving here … I wonder how much longer, it is more than human nature can endure.”
Last year, Index on Censorship broke the story that the UK government was planning a review into the numbers of prisoners who died on the island of Alderney, where the Nazis ran a series of camps for foreign slave workers. The review, published last month, concluded that more than thousand people could have met their end as a result of the Holocaust on British soil.
Lord Pickles, the UK’s Special Envoy on Post-Holocaust issues, who commissioned the report, concluded that it was “a stain on the reputations of successive British governments” that the war criminals responsible for the atrocities on Alderney were never brought to trial.
The history of the Channel Islands is still surrounded by silence. Unlike D-Day, the Occupation does not sit well with our collective narrative of sacrifice and heroism. We will never know the full scale of collaboration on the islands, just as we will never know the full scale of the suffering of the victims. This country has never fully come to terms with the reality of what happened.
The Pickles Review was designed to put an end to speculation about the numbers who perished on Alderney. But its findings are likely to prompt a further reassessment of Channel Islands history. For instance. one section of the review that received little attention on publication, written by Dr Gilly Carr from the University of Cambridge, concerns the Channel Islanders who worked on Alderney. With typical academic understatement, Dr Carr wrote: “More Channel Islanders from Jersey and Guernsey travelled to Alderney at various times to work during the German Occupation than has hitherto been acknowledged.”
The established narrative has always been that Alderney was evacuated before the Nazis invaded, leaving only a handful of residents who chose to remain behind. Although this was initially the case, the truth is that hundreds of Channel Islanders returned to Alderney to work, mainly as agricultural labourers, but also glaziers, joiners, carpenters and masons. Dr Carr’s research has found the names of 429 people, 341 from Guernsey and 88 from Jersey. Some of these individuals were interviewed by investigators after liberation but many, perhaps understandably, chose to remain silent. The revelation that large numbers of British people worked on Alderney servicing Nazi slave labour camps is perhaps the most shocking revelation of the whole review. It provides a sobering counterbalance to the D-Day celebrations and a chilling reminder of what might have happened had Hitler been allowed to invade mainland Britain.
6 Jun 2024 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features
In India, the largest practical exercise in electoral politics the world has ever seen has just come to an end. Narendra Modi and his BJP party has been returned to power for an unprecedented third term, although without an outright majority. While there are many priorities facing the new administration, one of them will undoubtedly be modernising India’s outdated online regulatory framework.
The growth of internet access in India has been exponential. According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in 2000 5.5 million Indians were online; last year that number was 850 million. To look at India’s increasing economic and geopolitical clout is to also see a country willing to take on the tech giants to control India’s image online. The Indian government has not tiptoed around calling for platforms such as X and YouTube to remove content or accounts. According to the Washington Post, “records published by the Indian Parliament show that annual takedown requests for posts and accounts increased from 471 to 6,775 between 2014 and 2022, with those to Twitter soaring from 224 in 2018 to 3,417 in 2022.”
India’s online regulatory regime is over 20 years old and with the proliferation of online users and the emergence of new technologies, its age is starting to show. India is not alone in wrestling with this complex issue – just look at the Online Safety Act in the UK, the Digital Services Act (DSA) for the EU, as well as the ongoing discussions around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the USA. Following the election, the current government has confirmed its intention to update and expand the regulation of online platforms, through the ambitious Digital India Act (DIA).
The DIA is intended to plug the regulatory gap and while the need is apparent, the devil will be in the detail. MeitY has stated that while the internet has empowered citizens, it has “created challenges in the form of user harm; ambiguity in user rights; security; women & child safety; organised information wars, radicalisation and circulation of hate speech; misinformation and fake news; unfair trade practices”. The government has hosted two consultations on the Bill and they reveal the sheer scale of the Indian government’s vision, covering everything from online harms and content moderation to artificial intelligence and the digitalisation of the government.
Protections against liability for internet intermediaries hosting content on their platforms – often called Safe Harbour – has long defined the global discussions around online free expression and this is a live question hanging over the DIA. During an early consultation on the Bill held in the southern city of Bengaluru, Minister of State for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar posed the question:
“If there is a need for safe harbour, who should be entitled to it? The whole logic of safe harbour is that platforms have absolutely no power or control over the content that some other consumer creates on the platform. But, in this day and age, is that really necessary? Is that safe harbour required?”
What would online speech policy look like without safe harbour provisions? It could herald in the near total privatisation of censorship, with platforms having to proactively and expansively police content to avoid liability. This is why the European safe harbour provisions included in the EU eCommerce Directive were left untouched during the negotiations around the DSA. With the Indian government highlighting the importance of the DIA in addressing the growing power of tech giants like Google and Meta, with Chandrasekhar stating in 2024 that “[t]he asymmetry needs to be legislated, or at the very least, regulated through rules of new legislation”, gifting tech companies power to decide what can and can’t be published online would surely represent an alarming recalibration that appears to run at odds with the Bill’s stated aims.
The changing approach to online expression is also evidenced in the slides used by the minister during the 2023 Bengaluru consultation. For instance, the internet of 2000 was defined as a “Space for good – allowing citizens to interact” and a “Source of Information and News”. But for MeitY, in 2023 it has curdled somewhat into a “Space for criminalities and illegalities” and a space defined by the “Proliferation of Hate Speech, Disinformation and Fake news.” This shift in perception also frames how the government identifies potential online harms. During the consultation, the minister stated that “[t]he idea of the Act is that what is currently legal but harmful is made illegal and harmful.” A number of harms were included in the minister’s presentation, highlighting everything from catfishing and doxxing, to the “weaponisation of disinformation in the name of free speech” and cyber-fraud tactics such as salami-slicing. This covers a universe of harms that each would require distinct and tailored responses and so questions remain as to how the DIA can adequately address all these factors, without adversely affecting internet users’ fundamental rights.
As a draft bill is yet to be published, there is no way of knowing what harms the DIA will contain. Without this, speculation has filled the vacuum. To illustrate this point, the Internet Freedom Foundation has compiled an expansive list of what the Bill could regulate collated solely from media coverage of the Bill from July 2022 until June 2023. This included everything from “apps that have addictive impact” and online gaming to deliberate misinformation and religious incitement material. What is also shrouded in darkness so far is how platforms or the state are expected to respond to these harms. As we have seen in the UK and across Europe, without clarity, full civil society engagement, and a robust rights framework, work to address online harms can significantly impact our right to free expression.
For now, the scope and scale of the government’s ambition can only be guessed at. For Index, the central question is, how can this be done while protecting the fundamental right of free expression, as outlined in Article 19 of the Indian Constitution and international human rights law? This is an issue of significant importance for everyone in India.
This is why Index on Censorship is kicking off a project to support Indian civil society engagement with the DIA to ensure it is informed by the experiences of internet users across the country, can respond to the learnings from other jurisdictions legislating on the same challenges and can adequately protect free expression. We will be engaging with key stakeholders prior to and during the consultation process to ensure that everyone’s right to speak out and speak up online, on whichever platform they choose, is protected.
If you are interested to learn more about this work please contact [email protected]
Last year, we published an issue of Index dedicated to issues related to free expression in India. Read it here.
3 Jun 2024 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News and features, Slovakia
You may have seen some of the coverage of the attack on Slovakia’s four-time and current Prime Minister Robert Fico. The attacker was apprehended and has not been formally named but is identified in Slovak media as a 71-year-old unsuccessful and disgruntled amateur writer who spread anti-Roma prejudices in his pamphlets. The blatant attack put Slovakia briefly in the global spotlight and came six years after Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were murdered, reportedly on the orders of oligarch Marián Kočner.
No country could sensibly have wanted this attention. Slovakia still meets the threshold for democracy in global comparative measurements. Yet the attack, coupled with recent governmental assaults on independent institutions including public broadcasters, makes Slovakia appear dysfunctional and inspired by neighbouring Hungary. That country is ruled by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in an increasingly authoritarian manner.
This sense of “something rotten” goes much deeper into the past than the 2024 assault, and the 2018 murder of Kuciak and Kušnírová was a critical juncture. Fico governed back then, too, for the third time, and his rule facilitated the impunity of Kočner and the like. While not known as a friend of independent institutions, Fico managed to persuade some democratic parties to form a coalition with him.
The 2018 murder sparked massive protests and Fico resigned – only to hand his seat to one of his deputies. That politician, Peter Pellegrini, is now Slovakia’s President-elect, to be inaugurated in June.
The 2020 elections were supposed to translate anger towards the previous political elite into a pro-reform government. A new government emerged, but led by an inexperienced populist, who was faced straight away by the immense challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A post-pandemic cabinet emboldened qualified investigators to unearth crimes of corruption. In fact, this is why Kočner is already in jail, as his orchestration of the Kuciak murder is still being litigated. The first-instance court acquitted Kočner twice for the murder-related charges, despite the first acquittal being quashed on appeal.
The “untying of hands” of the investigators made some Slovak elites, Fico among them, worried. Fico himself narrowly avoided investigative detention although one of his closest aides spent a month inside.
Hence, when frustration from the mismanagement of the pandemic combined with unscrupulous use of disinformation catapulted Fico to become PM for the fourth time, his government identified those same anti-corruption bodies as a key target. If democracy was to fall with them, why not?
With the police and special prosecution service gutted, the media has become the obvious next target. Fico has not hidden the fact that Kuciak’s journalistic successors, as well as intellectuals speaking truth to power, irritated him.
Some Slovak independent media have resisted this slide from democracy and a good deal of resistance remains, including from journalists themselves even in major commercial media which the government has had a hard time to subdue directly. Media owners are less enthusiastic about the risks of losing profit though, and signs of their willingness to compromise good relations with the government have been scarce so far.
There are other institutions that can help democracy, too. The Constitutional Court, an influential interpreter of the Slovak constitution, remains largely untouched by the government and difficult to be subordinated by the executive.
Slovakia’s constitution enshrined democracy at the front of its wording when it was enacted more than 30 years ago. That principle is still there, as are the rule of law and a relatively broad rights catalogue. As such, the Constitutional Court has much to work with to address, for example, challenges to legislation curbing independent public broadcasting.
These forms of resistance may even generate new leaders and ideas. Yet, there is little social energy left to go beyond just bearing up under the strain.
On New Year’s Eve 1990, weeks after the Velvet Revolution, dissident and last Czechoslovak President Václav Havel argued that “our country is not flourishing”. He meant to prepare the public for the difficulties of the transition from authoritarian state socialism.
These words apply equally for today’s Slovakia. The government is going to have a hard time to completely silence the opposition even with the additional support gained from the attack on Fico. The EU institutions may weigh in as well, especially if they learned some lessons from having observed the Hungarian regime change with minimal questioning.
But the energy to resist is taken from addressing long-term local and global issues – the climate emergency, demographic changes, a braindrain of Slovakian talent, underperformance in research and much more.
Arguably, Slovakia has lacked an elected government with a vision for more than a decade. NGOs, the media, or the public at large cannot replace vision-building completely. That leaves Slovak academia, where most Slovak political leaders were educated. Comparative disadvantages abound here: the oldest surviving university is just over a century old, and the country did not get an intellectual injection akin to, for example, the founding of the Central European University in Hungary. But these hurdles do not excuse its insufficient contribution towards a societal vision.
In Hungary, Orbán succeeded in effectively forcing most of the CEU out of Budapest and subordinating most public universities. In Slovakia, it is unclear whether the followers of Orbán would need to bother with academic resistance in the first place. And long-term democratic resistance is difficult to sustain without a positive societal vision.
Five years on from 2019, the individual who fired five bullets at Fico lamented that definitions and notions no longer apply. He should have stuck to his writing and talking. After this desperate act, a critical mass of Slovak journalists is trying their best to prevent even more definitions and notions being captured by non-democrats, an increasingly uphill struggle.
Alone, they will not succeed but others can help – both in daily vigilance to the government’s new measures, and by refocusing to a long-term vision for life in and of Slovakia beyond mere bearing up.
3 Jun 2024 | Israel, News and features, Palestine
Israel’s decision to seize video equipment from AP journalists last week may have been swiftly reversed but the overall direction of travel for media freedom in Israel is negative.
Journalists inside Gaza are of course paying the highest price (yesterday preliminary investigations by CPJ showed at least 107 journalists and media workers were among the more than 37,000 killed since the Israel-Gaza war began) and it feels odd to speak of equipment seizures when so many of those covering the war in the Strip have paid with their lives. But this is not to compare, merely to illuminate.
The past few days have provided ample evidence of what many within Israel have long feared – that the offensive in Gaza is not being reported on fully in Israel itself. On Tuesday a video went viral of an Israeli woman responding with outrage at the wide gulf between news on Sunday’s bombing of a refugee camp in Rafah within Israeli media compared to major international news outlets. Yesterday, in an interview with Canadian broadcaster CBC, press freedom director for the Union of Journalists in Israel, Anat Saragusti, spoke more broadly of the reporting discrepancies since 7 October:
“The world sees a completely different war from the Israeli audience. This is very disturbing.”
Saragusti added that part of this is because the population is still processing the horrors of 7 October and with that comes a degree of self-censorship from those within the media. The other reason, she said, is that the IDF provides much of the material that appears in Israeli media and this is subject to review by military censors. While the military has always exerted control (Israeli law requires journalists to submit any article dealing with “security issues” to the military censor for review prior to publication), this pressure has intensified since the war, as the magazine +972 showed. Since 2011 +972 have released an annual report looking at the scale of bans by the military censor. In their latest report, released last week and published on our site with permission, they highlighted how in 2023 more than 600 articles by Israeli media outlets were barred, which was the most since their tracking began.
In a visually arresting move, Israeli paper Haaretz published an article on Wednesday with blacked out words and sentences. Highlighting such redactions is incidentally against the law and will no doubt add to the government’s wrath at Haaretz (late last year they threatened the left-leaning outlet with sanctions over their Gaza war coverage).
The government’s attempts to control the media landscape was already a problem prior to 7 October. Benjamin Netanyahu is known for his fractious relationship with the press and has made some very personal attacks throughout his career, such as this one from 2016, while Shlomo Kahri, the current communications minister, last year expressed a desire to shut down the country’s public broadcaster Kan. This week it was also revealed by Haaretz that two years ago investigative reporter Gur Megiddo was blocked from reporting on how then chief of Mossad had allegedly threatened then ICC prosecutor (the story finally saw daylight on Tuesday). Megiddo said he’d been summoned to meet two officials and threatened. It was “explained that if I published the story I would suffer the consequences and get to know the interrogation rooms of the Israeli security authorities from the inside,” said Megiddo.
Switching to the present, it feels unconscionable that Israelis, for whom the war is a lived reality not just a news story, are being served a light version of its conduct.
In the case of AP, their equipment was confiscated on the premise that it violated a new media law, passed by Israeli parliament in April, which allows the state to shut down foreign media outlets it deems a security threat. It was under this law that Israel also raided and closed Al Jazeera’s offices earlier this month and banned the company’s websites and broadcasts in the country.
Countries have a habit of passing censorious legislation in wartime, the justification being that some media control is important to protect the military. The issue is that such legislation is typically vague, open to abuse by those in power, and doesn’t always come with an expiry date to protect peacetime rights.
“A country like Israel, used to living through intense periods of crisis, is particularly vulnerable to calls for legislation that claims to protect national security by limiting free expression. Populist politicians are often happy to exploit the “rally around the flag” effect,” Daniella Peled, managing editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, told Index.
We voiced our concerns here in terms of Ukraine, which passed a media law within the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion with very broad implications, and we have concerns with Israel too. But as these examples show, our concerns are far wider than just one law and one incidence of confiscated equipment.
