The harassment of Chinese-Australian artist, political cartoonist and activist Badiucao must end

The undersigned organisations condemn the harassment of artist, political cartoonist and activist Badiucao, which has taken place via email, in the media, and on social media in the last week. The harassment began as Badiucao was preparing to publish a statement criticising the human rights situation in Hong Kong. The statement was providing context to his artwork – a short video – that was being exhibited in the city. Like much of Badiucao’s work, the video sought to champion the right to freedom of expression and challenge authoritarianism.

Badiucao was one of more than a dozen artists featured in the three-minute video compilation put together by the Milan-based digital gallery, Art Innovation, on billboards during the Art Basel fair in Hong Kong last week. The 4-second clip, entitled “Here and Now”, showed Badiucao silently mouthing the words “you must take part in revolution” – the title of his newly-published graphic novel and a Mao Zedong quote. It was broadcast hourly between 28 March and 2 April.

On 1 April, Badiucao contacted several media organisations to let them know he would be publishing a statement about the artwork later that evening. Some of them then contacted Art Innovation for comment. Shortly thereafter, Badiucao received an email from the gallery warning him not to publish his statement. They told him that legal action would “definitely” follow if content “against the Chinese government is published”. The gallery later responded to media requests saying that the exhibition “had nothing to do with political messages”.

Badiucao went on to publish his statement. In it, he said: “This art action underscores the absurdity of Hong Kong’s current civil liberties and legal environment. And it would remind everyone that art is dead when it offers no meaning.” The exhibition was removed from the billboards the following morning, despite having been scheduled to be displayed until 3 April.

In a second email to Badiucao, Art Innovation said that his actions had already resulted in financial implications, as well as legal actions, “which will be directed against you”. They demanded that he immediately remove all posts from his personal social media accounts related to the exhibition and claimed that failure to comply could “result in further legal consequences”. They said their lawyers were already working to “initiate appropriate legal action” against him.

On 3 April, Art Innovation publicly accused Badiucao of having provided them with false information and of having violated the contract he signed by submitting political content. “[W]e can consider it a crime,” they wrote on social media. Badiucao said he had submitted the artwork under the pseudonym Andy Chou because the video clip was to be shown in Hong Kong, where the authorities had previously shut down his exhibition. He said he never concealed his identity from the gallery and that they knew that he was behind the artwork.

Art Innovation would also have been aware of the distinctly political nature of Badiucao’s artwork given that they first contacted him via social media, where he regularly shares his artwork with his more than 100k followers, in 2022. They invited him to collaborate on a billboard exhibition during Art Basel in Miami that year, to which he contributed a satirical image of Chinese president Xi Jinping.

“We are appalled at the behaviour of this Italian gallery, which claims to ‘love everything that is outside the rules’ and ‘love the freedom of artists’ and yet harasses and tries to silence an artist that stands for exactly those principles,” the undersigned organisations said. “Badiucao must be applauded for his efforts to creatively challenge censorship and authoritarianism in such a repressive regime. Art Innovation should immediately withdraw their legal threats, issue a public apology to Badiucao, and refrain from further harassment of the artist.”

Signed:

Index on Censorship

Alliance for Citizens Rights

Art for Human Rights

ARTICLE 19

Australian Cartoonists Association

Australia Hong Kong Link

Befria Hongkong

Blueprint for Free speech

Civil Liberties Union for Europe

Cartooning for Peace

Cartoonists Rights Network International

The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

European Federation of Journalists

Foundation Atelier for Community Transformation ACT

Freemuse

Freedom Cartoonists

Freiheit für Hongkong

Hong Kong Committee in Norway

Hong Kong Forum, Los Angeles

Hong Kong Watch (HKW)

Hongkongers in Britain (HKB)

Hong Kongers in San Diego

Hong Kongers in San Francisco Bay Area

Human Rights in China (HRIC)

Human Rights Foundation (HRF)

Humanitarian China

IFEX

Lady Liberty Hong Kong

NGO DEI

NY4HK

Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT)

Croatian Journalists’ Association (HND)

Trade Union of Croatian Journalists

PEN America

PEN International

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

Richardson Institute – Lancaster University

The Rights Practice

Safeguard Defenders

StraLi for Strategic Litigation

Stand with Hong Kong EU

Toronto Association for Democracy in China 多倫多支聯會

Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP)

Washingtonians Supporting Hong Kong (DC4HK)

Notes:

  • The day after Badiucao published his statement, Hong Kong’s new chief of police warned that, despite Hong Kong’s return to stability following the 2019-20 protests, there continued to be “soft resistance” to the regime through arts and culture. He did not name Badiucao or Art Innovation specifically.
  • On 8 April, the South China Morning Post reported that Hong Kong’s Culture, Sports, and Tourism Bureau had confirmed that they had not requested the removal of the video.
  • The Security Bureau of the Hong Kong government had told South China Morning Post that: “[The] freedom of literary and artistic creation and other cultural activities are protected by law. As long as they do not violate the law, the above-mentioned freedoms will not be restricted.”

Australia is turning up the heat on environmental activists

Petrina Harley likens direct action to giving birth.

“My body knew it had a job to do, so I got on and focused on my inner strength,” the 53-year-old mother of two told Index via phone from Perth. “I find it really empowering.”

Harley is a climate activist of eight years facing trial in June for repeatedly blocking entry to Australia’s biggest gas hub to be built in a decade, a AU$16.5 billion ($10.35 billion) project in the Pilbara on the Burrup Peninsula of Western Australia (WA) by sector giant Woodside.

It may come as a surprise to some, but not to Harley, that new research from the University of Bristol released in December showed that Australia is now the world’s top country for arresting climate and environmental protesters.

“I’ve been arrested four times now,” said Harley. Alarmingly, arrest is now a common response in 20% of all climate and environmental protests in Australia, with the international average being 6.3%.

This is also part of a broader crackdown in the country, where new measures in the state of Victoria purportedly aimed at tackling recent cases of anti-Semitism could be used to target climate protesters, human rights lawyers have now warned.

There’s particular concern that a potential ban on “lock on” devices such as glue, chains or locks, could be used to take aim at environmental campaigners. Similar laws have been announced in New South Wales (NSW).

“The arrests [in Australia] are one dimension of criminalisation,” said Oscar Berglund, senior lecturer in International Public and Social Policy in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol.

“There have also been multiple new anti-protest laws passed. What we are seeing currently is an intensifying criminalisation of protest in both democratic countries and less democratic countries.”

Harley, who began protesting after she had children, said that she had tried “everything under the sun” including running for the Senate in the lower house with the Socialist Alliance party, holding weekly stalls in town and gathering petitions, before she took part in two blockades in WA.

In the first one, in November 2021, Harley and another Scarborough Gas Action Alliance activist, Elizabeth Burrow, used a caravan to obstruct entry to the Woodside project. The activists bonded their arms into a concrete drum inside the vehicle. Harley was “locked on” for 16 hours. When she refused to move, she was arrested in the caravan and after being taken to hospital for injuries locked up overnight and charged. Harley said it was “complete overreach” by police.

The pair pleaded not guilty and used an emergency defence – normally reserved for cases like murder – arguing that the activities of Woodside are directly putting lives at risk. In 2023 they were found guilty by a magistrate’s court in Karratha in the Pilbara region of failing to obey an order given by an officer, obstructing public officers, and unreasonably obstructing or preventing the free passage on a path or carriageway.

They received a six-month community-based order, with a requirement to complete 100 hours of community service and were also handed a $600 fine each. Police initially sought more than $33,000 in compensation from the activists for removing them from the caravan, but this application was later dismissed.

Last July, Harley and another activist, Emma, a high school student, used a car and a boat to block the only access road to the same project, in a bid to stop its operations. Harley was “locked on” for 12 hours. She is now facing three obstruction charges over this.

At her trial in Perth in June, she will again plead not guilty using the extraordinary emergency defence.

“I’m very excited, I’ve got a really ethical lawyer who’s keen to test the case because it would be a precedent,” Harley said. “People have tried it before, but no one’s actually won. I’ve got some very high-profile witnesses to testify.”

David Mejia-Canales is a Sydney-based senior human rights lawyer at Australian group Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC). He said that an analysis of two decades’ worth of anti-protest legislation in Australia from 2003 onwards found that out of 49 pieces of legislation introduced, most target environmental protesters in the streets, at mines or logging sites. But laws are broad and vague despite peaceful protest being protected under international law.

“In Australia you just have to look out the window to notice that the climate crisis is getting worse and the thing that our governments are appearing to do is to jail climate protesters instead of actually doing anything that is meaningful and quick and long lasting about this,” said Mejia-Canales.

He said HRLC wasn’t aware of any activists in Australia who have been acquitted on an emergency defence. But framing the necessity defence (breaking the law to prevent greater harm) as an “extraordinary emergency defence” could allow protesters to use the growing acceptance of climate change as an emergency that requires urgent attention, he said.

However, just last week a climate activist in Melbourne was told that he cannot rely on evidence from climate experts following charges relating to an Extinction Rebellion protest.

Mejia-Canales said that Australia urgently needs a Human Rights Act, which could be crucial for climate activists, reinforcing arguments that their actions seek to uphold fundamental rights rather than merely disrupt public order.

A WA government spokesperson told Index: “Everyone is entitled to protest peacefully in WA, however police will respond to violent or threatening behaviour.”

Index approached the minister for climate change and energy for comment, but did not receive a reply.

Woodside said that it supported respectful debate. But it said acts intended to threaten, harm, intimidate or disrupt employees, their families or any other member of the community going about their daily lives “should be met with the full force of the law”.

Read more: UK journalists fall victim to new police tactics

Respect for tradition: Australia’s selective listening on environment issues

The bushfires that tore across Australia in the summer of 2019-20 left in their wake 18 million hectares of scorched land. A total of 33 people – including nine firefighters – lost their lives, and close to 3,500 homes were razed to the ground. Ecologists calculated that as many as one billion animals perished in the fires, while economists estimated the cost of recovery at an unprecedented AU$100 billion.

Faced with tallies of destruction too big to comprehend, Australians cast about for clarity on why this disaster was unfolding, and how it could be prevented from happening again the future. Conveniently, there was a living culture with 65,000 years of experience in caring for the country to turn to for answers.

The fires precipitated a sudden torrent of interest in traditional Aboriginal land management techniques. First Nations rangers, practitioners and traditional knowledge experts – so rarely afforded time on the airwaves – were widely consulted on national television and radio shows. For many Australians, it was their first time hearing about “cool burning” and “fire-stick farming”: traditional methods of burning patches of bushland at low temperatures to clear the undergrowth without damaging root systems and curtail the risk of out-of-control bushfires in the arid heights of summer.

Yet these practices are ancient. They’ve been passed down through generations of Aboriginal Australians, forming part of the symbiotic relationship that First Nations people have with the environment as custodians of the land.

“Think of it like this: an Aboriginal man 300 years ago didn’t have to worry about handing a climate emergency on to the next generation,” said indigenous cultural educator and Wiradjuri man Darren Charlwood.

“What they were handing on to their children was an understanding of how to survive, how to respect their country, how to respect their ancestors in doing so, and how to practise all this through land management, through ritual, through their interactions within their social organisation and systems.”

While the unprecedented interest in traditional knowledge from the media, the government and conservation organisations was undeniably welcome, for educators such as Charlwood – who works for Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens and the New South Wales government’s National Parks and Wildlife Service – it was also frustrating.

“If that sort of engagement had come into play a lot earlier, we probably wouldn’t have had as big a catastrophe as we did,” he said. “Traditional fire management is wonderful, and it can really help with the plight of our environment in Australia. But, mind you, this was a climate catastrophe. Traditional land management would have saved only so much. The bottom line is the climate is changing.”

The consultation-after-the-fact that occurred in the wake of the 2019-20 bushfires is symptomatic of a more troubling “selective listening” that Australia’s First Nations people encounter across the political spectrum – from the prime minister’s office to the halls of local government – especially on land and environment issues.

It’s something that Yvonne Weldon, Australia’s first Aboriginal candidate for Lord Mayor of Sydney, is looking to change.

For Weldon, the principle of inclusion is at the core of an indigenous approach to leadership and environmentalism. It’s a value she places at the heart of her campaign.

“Inclusion is who we are as First Nations people,” she said. “Our ability to be inclusive – to hear what others are saying and act with sensitivity to their existence – is how we have been able to survive.”

She added that the same logic applied to the environment. “Prior to Invasion we didn’t have polluted parts of our country. We didn’t take any more than was needed. Whatever ecosystem you were a part of, you had to live in harmony with it. You didn’t do it at the expense of other living things.”

Reaching for the top

Weldon and her team at Unite for Sydney launched their campaign at Redfern Oval in May, nearly 20 years after then-prime minister Paul Keating’s historic Redfern Speech, where he recognised the impact of dispossession and oppression on First Nations peoples, and called for their place in the modern Australian nation to be cemented.

“It’s about creating moments that represent a landmark for inclusion,” explained Weldon. “And, hopefully, those moments happen closer and closer together in time until inclusion is no longer the exception, it’s commonplace.”

Weldon is a proud Wiradjuri woman who grew up in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, Sydney. With 30 years of experience as a community organiser and campaigner, she has spent her adult life advocating for the disadvantaged. She is a board member of Domestic Violence NSW and Redfern Jarjum College – a primary school supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children needing additional learning support – as well as deputy chair of the NSW Australia Day Council. She’s also the first Aboriginal person to run for the top job at the City of Sydney Council.

“To me, the fact that I’m the first Aboriginal person to run for Lord Mayor of Sydney in 2021 is insulting,” she said. “It’s an insult because it hasn’t been done before in this country, and yet we think we have progressed.”

Running on a platform of effective climate action, genuinely affordable housing and better community engagement, the campaigner-turned-candidate sees plenty of opportunities for improvement.

“True leadership has to be inclusive of all, and what I’ve seen in local government has fallen way short of that.”
She realised she had to take a run at the job after six years as elected chair of Sydney’s Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council (LALC) – an organisation set up by law to advocate for the interests of local Aboriginal people in relation to land acquisition, use and management.

In her experience, representatives of the City of Sydney Council have chosen to engage only when it suits their purposes, and either reject proposals for meaningful change out of hand or use inordinate process as a way of keeping them in check.

It’s an all-too-familiar story in Australia, where the government has been unwilling to reach a treaty with its indigenous people comparable to those of New Zealand, Canada or the USA.

Aboriginal calls for recognition were formalised in 2017 with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution, and a treaty to supervise agreement-making and truth-telling with governments.

But the historical consensus was rejected outright by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and denigrated by the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, who called it an “overreach”.

Following a 2018 parliamentary inquiry which found the Statement from the Heart should indeed be enacted, the current Australian government has delayed plans to introduce relevant legislation until after the next federal election in 2022.

A long fight

The application of “selective listening” to First Nations calls for autonomy over their own land is, historically speaking, one of the foundations that modern Australia was built on.

“The damage that’s been done to Australia over 250 years of not respecting indigenous people or knowledge… you can really see it in our environment, it’s very much on show,” said Charlwood. “Because of the way that people have introduced invasive animals and plants to Australia, because of practices like mining and the way people engage with the landscape here, Australia has lost more wildlife in a shorter time than anywhere else on Earth.”

According to Heather Goodall – professor emerita of history at the University of Technology in Sydney – there is historical evidence that Aboriginal people in New South Wales made efforts to secure broad tracts of land where they could feel a sense of safety and belonging, access sites of cultural significance and act as custodians for the environment as early as the 1840s, when the first “reserves” were established.

Despite a movement which involved direct action, writing their own petitions and recruiting sympathetic white men to convey their demands to authorities, Aboriginal people were gradually moved to government-delineated reserves, missions or small parcels of land for agricultural use.

“Consultation is often about seeking opinions which will be used to justify a decision that has already been made. It’s a very hard-to-define term that often doesn’t mean having decision-making power,” said Goodall.
That’s a sentiment Weldon can relate to. “Aboriginal people are not one people – there are hundreds of different nations and tribes and clans all across the country,” she said.

“Bearing in mind the diversity of Aboriginal Australia, often what people in power do is if they don’t want to hear what one group has to say, they’ll go to another group until they find someone to say what they want to hear. I call it ‘shopping around’.

“They’ll play people off each other, they’ll offer little crumbs, they’ll do all these types of things because that’s the colonial viewpoint. It’s about creating the notion that you’re open and inclusive, when actually you’re orchestrating it all for self.

“Sydney represents ground zero, where the impact of colonisation began,” she added. “But you can’t talk about reviving or respecting traditional knowledge if you’re not inclusive of First Nations people.”

As another generation of Aboriginal Australians stands ready to share knowledge and lead the way to a more sustainable future, the question remains whether other Australians are ready to listen – and ready to vote.

Australia denies Cameroonian journalist visa for press freedom conference (The Guardian)

A Berlin-based journalist who was due to speak at a press freedom conference in Brisbane has said she was denied a visa by the Australian government because they believed she might try to stay. Mimi Mefo, an award-winning Cameroonian journalist who currently works for Deutsche Welle, was scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the Integrity 20 conference on Friday. Read in full.

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