11 Sep 13 | Egypt, News and features, Politics and Society
Egypt faced a new phase of uncertainty after the bloodiest day since its Arab Spring began, with nearly 300 people reported killed and thousands injured as police smashed two protest camps of supporters of the deposed Islamist president. (Photo: Nameer Galal / Demotix)
In a widening crackdown on dissent in Egypt since the military takeover on July 3, the Public Prosecutor’s office has reportedly been looking into legal complaints against thirty five rights activists and public figures for allegedly “receiving foreign funding”.
State sponsored Al Ahram newspaper said on its website on Saturday that private citizens had filed lawsuits against the defendants, accusing them of “accepting money from foreign countries including the United States”. According to the Al Ahram story, diplomatic cables leaked by the whistle blower website Wikileaks support the claims.
A judicial source had originally confirmed the story but the prosecutor’s office denied it the following day, calling on journalists to be “more careful and accurate in their reporting”. The defendants meanwhile, believe the ‘mistake’ was deliberate, insisting it was meant to intimidate them and to send a warning message to pro-democracy activists in Egypt to tone down their criticism of the military.
Prosecuting dissenters was common practice under deposed president Hosni Mubarak with regime loyalists often fabricating charges against opponents to silence them. The practice continued under toppled president Mohamed Morsi with his Islamist supporters frequently filing lawsuits against Muslim Brotherhood opponents to intimidate them.
The Al Ahram story triggered an uproar on social media networks Facebook and Twitter, with many internet activists expressing fears that following the brutal security crackdown on Morsi’s Islamist supporters, democracy activists who took part in the January 2011 uprising may be next in line.
Liberal politician Amr Hamzawi denied Al Ahram’s allegations as ‘untrue’ on Twitter, adding that “the campaign of fabrication and distortion must immediately stop”.
Gameela Ismail, a prominent member of the Al Dostour or Constitution Party–who was also among those accused–reacted angrily to what she described on Twitter as “fabricated charges” insisting she would in turn file a lawsuit against those who were “deliberately trying to defame her”.
The rumoured complaints have also fuelled fears of a severe security crackdown on civil society similar to the February 2012 crackdown on NGOs when 43 NGO staffers–including 32 foreigners–were indicted after accusations they were working for unlicensed institutions and receiving illegal funding. The notorious ‘foreign funding’ case dragged on for a year and a half, culminating in convictions for the defendants ranging between one and five years in prison and fines of 1000 Egyptian pounds.
Meanwhile, the arrests of a journalist and a rights lawyer last week has raised concerns about increased rights violations under the emergency law (now in place) allowing for the arbitrary arrests and detention of civilians without charge. Haytham Mohamedein, a leftist lawyer and rights activist was arrested near a military checkpoint in Suez on Thursday and accused of “spreading lies about the military and of belonging to a secret organisation that is planning attacks against the military and state institutions”. While Mohamedein was released the following day, it remains unclear whether the charges against him have been dropped.
Sayed Abu Draa, a North Sinai-based journalist with the independent Al Masry el Youm newspaper who was also arrested last week, has been referred to a military tribunal. He is being accused of “spreading false information about the armed forces and taking photographs of military installations”. A day before his detention, he had slammed the military in a Facebook post for what he described as “misleading information” by the army and the media on the ongoing military operations in Sinai.
In a protest rally organized by journalists outside the press syndicate in downtown Cairo on Monday, the demonstrators called for Abu Draa’s immediate release and for an end to what they described as ” attempts by the authorities to muzzle the press’.
“Freedom of journalists is a red line,” the protesters chanted. “No to military trials for civilians.’
In a crackdown on press freedom since the June 30 rebellion that ousted Mohamed Morsi, the new government this month closed down Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr along with three other networks it perceives as being pro-Islamist. The Administrative Court ruling to shut down the channels was based on charges that included “spreading false rumours and inciting violence.” Government officials claim Al Jazeera was broadcasting without a license –a charge the network denies.
While most state and independent media outlets have clearly aligned themselves with the military-backed government with TV presenters and talk show hosts using strong anti-Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric and advising viewers to support the army in its war against “the terrorists”, a few independent voices refuse to bow under intimidation and threats. They denounce what they describe as “the return of the police state” and are taking a firm stand against censorship.
This article was published on 11 Sept 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
11 Sep 13 | Americas, Magazine, News and features
A march organized by the National Assembly of Human Rights in Santiago to mark the 40th anniversary of a military coup that ousted President Salvador Allende ended in violence and clashes with police. (Photo: Mario Tellez / Demotix)
The date September 11 has a lot of meanings. For Chile, today marks 40 years since the coup that ushered in 17 years of military dictatorship. This powerful excerpt from Exorcising Terror: the Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet is taken from the winter 2005 edition of Index on Censorship magazine archives.
By Ariel Dorfman
—
It must have been some time in 1974 when I think I first laid eyes on Maria Josefa Ruiz Tagle. She was a baby girl, and if I’m not mistaken she played on the floor of our kitchen in Paris with our son Rodrigo, who was then seven years old, while we chatted with her mother, Monica Espinoza. Angelica says that I am mistaken, that I could not have seen Maria Josefa then because Monica had not come to Europe at that point without her child – and yet that memory burns within me still. I had known Monica’s husband, Eugenio Ruiz Tagle Orrego, only vaguely, just a hello and good-bye a couple of times in the halls of our party’s headquarters (we both belonged to the same revolutionary organisation). Mutual friends keep on telling me that we must have met and talked any number of times, but I can’t for the life of me recall much else, other than trying to squeeze from the memory bag in my head one or two occasions in which we exchanged a joke or two; that’s all I remember of his life. His death, however, was another matter. A civil engineer who came from one of Chile’s most aristocratic families and a dedicated revolutionary since his student days at the Catholic University, the coup had found him in Antofogasta, in the north of the country, acting as general manager of the National Cement Works. He had voluntarily given himself up on 12 September, like so many who had trusted that the military would not defile or denigrate them – and had been killed a month or so later, reportedly in the most savage fashion.
A disturbing rumour had sprung up after his death: that his right-wing father in Santiago had taken his time in pressuring the military to release the wayward offspring, apparently because he thought that nothing much could happen to the young man, given the traditional civility of Chile’s armed forces, or maybe trusting that his son’s blue-blooded heritage would protect him. Which made it even more heartbreaking when his mother demanded that Eugenio’s tightly sealed coffin be opened and discovered his body and face mutilated almost beyond recognition. But I always wondered if these reports of his father’s guilty detachment and subsequent intolerable loss did not constitute a fabrication of the sort that often circulate in uncertain and violent times, an attempt by a repressed community to forge a story of how the murder of a rebellious son awakens a conservative progenitor to the true evil of a regime he helped to bring into being.
What was no fabrication, however, was how that death had devastated the family, and you could see it in the deep well of sorrow that Monica seemed to be floating in when we met her in Paris almost a year after the execution of her husband. And yet, at the same time, there was an unexpected purity in her gaze as I recall it, as if she had decided not to give fate the satisfaction of seeing her cry, as if all the tears had dried up inside her instead of coming out. Or was it a quiet resilience? – a decision she seemed to have made that she was going to get on with life, no matter how hard that might be, for the sake of the baby, but also in the name of her dead love, who would not have wanted the murder of his body to have murdered her future. So I was not entirely surprised when I heard, some months later, that she had settled into a stable relationship with Jose Joaquin Brunner, a friend of hers and Eugenio’s from way back. Brunner, whom I was also close to, was at the time working on his doctorate at Oxford and would become, upon his return to Chile a few years later with Monica and Maria Josefa, one of the country’s most prominent intellectuals. But perhaps more essential to Monica, Jose Joaquin grew into the role of Maria Josefa’s daddy, bringing her up as if she were his own child.
The little girl was told from her early age that her biological father, Eugenio, had died in front of a firing squad, but no other details were forthcoming. She conjured up, Maria Josefa wrote many years later, a sort of romantic scene – a death occasioned by a diffuse group of men, none of whom was identifiably responsible, perhaps a way of keeping that violence done to her father from overwhelming and poisoning her life, by not making her wonder about who was personally responsible for that homicide. She always sensed, nevertheless, that underneath the silence surrounding and covering that remote death, there lurked something more dreadful, some secret terror that was all the more fearful because nobody dared to name it. And then, one day, when she was twelve, a strange hunch led her to probe and explore what might lie behind a photograph in her grandmother’s house, a picture which showed Maria Josefa herself at around two years of age taking a bath in a small tub. Was it the clean water in which she was bathing in the picture that provoked her to undo the frame that held it and go beyond the false innocence of that child she had once been? Perhaps, because what she found were three pages hidden by her grandmother and written by two of her father’s friends who had witnessed the way he had been treated before he died, witnesses who had been tortured themselves but who had, by a miracle, survived instead of being killed by the Caravan of Death. Reading those words from the past, Maria Josefa found out that Eugenio had not been shot by a firing squad, but – to use her own words – ‘he was missing an eye. They had carved out his nose. His face was deeply burnt in many places. His neck had been broken. Stabs and bullet wounds. The bones broken in a thousand parts. They had torn the nails from his hands and from his feet. And they had told him that they were going to kill me and my mother’.
But she said nothing. She kept those words, those images, inside. Like the country inside. Like the country itself.
Many years later, in 1999, when she had Lucas, her first baby – at the age of 26, the age her father had reached upon his death – when she held the baby in her arms and realised that her father had also been able to hold her and get to know her, she burst into tears one morning and felt the irresistible need to write to her father, to tell her story, what it meant to be the child not only of a murdered man but of a country that did not want to confront and name that death. She denounced how everything around her had been built so she and everyone else would not have to look the past in the face. Built, she said, so that people would never have to go to sleep every night feeling afraid.
Still, however, she kept those intimate words to herself. Until, a year and a half later, in November 2000, when Eugenio’s body was exhumed from the Antofagasta cemetery and taken to the Wall of Memory in Santiago for a second burial. Then she allowed an actor publicly to read out, on that occasion, the words she had written to her father. For the tears that have been kept hidden all these years to come out, the tears that I had not been able to see when we sat with her mother Monica in that kitchen in Paris and I watched the fatherless child playing, for that to happen, first Pinochet had to be stripped of his immunity and Eugenio’s name had to be cleared – he was not a terrorist but a victim, he was not a criminal but a hero, and his death was terrible but had not been entirely in vain as it had come back to haunt the man who had ordered it. First Eugenio had to come back from the dead. Then his daughter could come out into the light of day.
But that is not the end of the story. When you drag something out from its hiding place, other things emerge, one thing leading to another. Eugenio Ruiz Tagle still had one more service to perform for his family and his friends and his country.
When Judge Guzman placed General Pinochet under house arrest at the end of January 2001, his lawyers immediately appealed – insisting that their client was innocent, that there was no proof that he had known about any of the deaths of the Caravan of Death. One week later, on February 7, the online newspaper El Mostrador (these sorts of journals are the only really free sites in Chilean print media) published the most damning document yet in the whole case. Back in 1973, Pinochet’s justice minister – probably because of Ruiz Tagle’s family connections – had informed the Commander in Chief of the Army of the young man’s torture and extrajudicial execution by the officers from the Caravan of Death. In his own handwriting, Pinochet answered the minister that he was to deny the facts and conceal them, instructing him to say: ‘Mr. Ruiz Tagle was executed due to the grave charges that existed against him. [Say that] there was no torture according to our information.’ Needless to say, any possible investigation into that death had been quashed.
This piece of news occasioned yet another revelation the next day in the same online newspaper. Carlos Bau, an accountant at the Cement Works where Eugenio had been general manager and who had given himself up to the authorities that same 12 September, told the story of Ruiz Tagle’s daily torture at the Air Force Base of Cerro Moreno in Antofagasta during the month that preceded his execution: the soldiers had wanted the prisoners to confess that they had weapons and explosives (Pinochet’s subordinates were trying to assemble a justification for the repression their commander in chief had unleashed, proof that there was a war and that the enemy was armed and dangerous). It turned out that, far from protecting him, Ruiz Tagle’s surnames had made his tormentors pick him out for special treatment – maybe to teach him a lesson, maybe because they had class resentments of their own, maybe because a Ruiz Tagle should have known better than to associate with the Allendista riffraff. Whatever the reasons, he was always the first to be beaten every time there was a session, constantly mocked and kicked and cut – and, like his wife a year later in Paris, like his daughter throughout most of her life, Eugenio had not let a cry out, had kept what was he was feeling inside. But Bau added one more detail that had not up until that moment been public knowledge in Chile: the identity of the officer who had started the beating, who had begun it all by landing Eugenio a kick in the genitals as an introduction to what was to await him in the days ahead. It was Lieutenant Herna´n Gabrielli Rojas. Who happened to be the present acting commander in chief of the Chilean air force. The same man.
‘Are you sure?’ the journalist asked Bau.
‘Absolutely sure.’
And in the next days, Bau’s identification was confirmed by several other witnesses. Herna´n Vera and Juan Ruiz and another victim, an officer called Navarro, who added that he had also seen Gabrielli torturing a 14-year-old boy.
General Gabriielli’s response on 12 February was not only to proclaim his innocence but also to announce that he was suing Bau and the others for libel – invoking a clause in the Law of National Security that shields a commander in chief from slander. The charges were subsequently dismissed (‘We weren’t slandering him,’ Bau said, ‘we were just telling the truth about him’) and, later in the year, in spite of ferocious resistance from the air force, Gabrielli was forced to step down from his post.
Another side effect of the trial of General Pinochet. And another lesson to be learned.
Because terror is not conquered in one revelatory flash. It is a slow, zigzag process, just like memory itself. Let me make myself clearer: I had read the name Gabrielli as the tormentor of Ruiz Tagle back in 1976 or 1977, when Carlos Bau arrived in Holland (where our family had just moved from Paris). He had already served three years of a 40-year prison sentence which had been commuted into 20 years of banishment. Carlos had no qualms in recounting his terrifying story – though what I recalled above all of that conversation afterward was an image that surged into my head and stayed with me through the years, my realisation that when somebody has been tortured it is as if for the rest of their life they will be wearing sunglasses behind their eyes.
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This article was originally published in the winter 2005 edition of Index on Censorship magazine.
11 Sep 13 | Middle East and North Africa, Religion and Culture
A group of students at the University of Qatar have started a petition to remove “inappropriate” books from the university library.
In a message circulated online, the students state that:
These books which are available with a click of a button call for adultery and homosexuality; they also represent the sin for the youth to seduce them and ruin their morals…We hope that people with conscience would move to get rid of such administrations who brought corruption upon our educational institutions.” (PDF: Arabic)
While specific books were not mentioned, the petition included book covers featuring female nudity.
The university responded with a statement explaining that titles are automatically added to the library through subscriptions to foreign and international publishing houses. They are planning to form a committee to prevent this from happening again, and have put in place a “censoring policy” to be able to “delete the books which are against our culture according to clear standards before they reach the library’s index.”
10 Sep 13 | India, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
In an unprecedented move, the heads of India’s three major media regulators, all retired judges, sat on a single platform with the current Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Manish Tewari, to discuss the way forward for media regulation.
The Indian media industry, including both information and general entertainment channels, are often in the news for violations of industry ethics codes. Entertainment channels often air inappropriate content and exceed the number of advertising minutes per hour as prescribed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. News channels, too, have been in the limelight because of the paid news phenomenon, which has been the subject of a Parliament report, and their complicated ownership structures that belie a deep connection between business and politicians.
While around 100 of India’s 800 channels broadcast news, only about half of them formally come under any industry association, although they account for 80% of viewership. The larger industry associations are the News Broadcasting Standards Association (NBSA), the Broadcast Contents Complaints Council (BCCC) and the Press Council of India (PCI).
The panel explored whether an independent statutory body is needed to act as regulator – opened up an interesting discussion. Justice Markandey Katju, Chairman, PCI, Justice A.P. Shah, Chairperson, BCCC, Justice R.V. Raveendran, Chairperson, NBSA, shared the stage with Tewari.
The Indian media industry itself has been unequivocal in stating that it is capable of self regulation. However, the heads of the currently regulatory bodies pointed out that despite the current system of self regulation, many channels simply opt out of voluntary membership of these associations if they do not want to follows its rules or pay fines. It is clear that regulators in India are of the view that even if self-regulation is the way forward, it cannot be voluntary. The lack of professionalism in journalism, ‘trials by media’, and the urban slant of national news channels have led to skewed and uneven growth in the Indian media industry.
The panel was divided by questions over the exact form self-regulation should take in the future. While some dominant voices such as Katju’s believed that media persons are best suited to regulate their peers, others felt this structure only hurts the regulators’ credibility. However, Katju also suggested that there be only one body to regulate all media, unlike the current system. Others backed a statutory self-regulating body to replace the current system.
A few essential points emerged as consensus – the regulator should have a real power to punish and fine; adopt global standards; enforce universal membership.
There was also a call to the industry to not hide behind a faulty ratings system as an excuse to broadcast lower quality content. In fact, the Tewari made an appeal for the industry to no longer stand in the way of reforming India’s system of television ratings system, which the government believes will help create an alternative business model. Tewari also added that while the regulatory bodies are currently concentrating on television programming, however, a new or reformed regulatory body needs to keep pace with technological changes, especially the internet. The ministry has publicly said it would prefer a model of self-regulation rather than have the government step in.
In the end, there was a call for editors and owners of media houses not to confuse their duties to the citizens and shareholders.
What is clear is that Indian media, by its own admission, has entered a phase where even much of the industry has come to realize that some amount of universal regulation is needed to weed out much of the malpractice in the industry. However, in reforming business practices, including ownership (such as cross media ownership, as reported by Index) or curbing paid news, it is essential that freedom of expression is not trampled.
A new line of thought has been slowly emerging in India: that the media freedoms allowed by constitutional guarantee extends to the content of the news and entertainment programming, but not to the illegal and monopolistic manner in which the media industry itself operates. It is inevitable that with the proliferation of the internet and complete digitisation of cable services, regulatory bodies will have a bigger job on their hands.
Some commentators feel this means an independent statutory body to regulate the media – like the very effective Election Commission of India – is needed, and it is expected that a private member’s bill will be introduced in Parliament in the next session.
This article was originally published on 10 Sept 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
10 Sep 13 | China, Digital Freedom, News and features
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
A new Harvard study for the first time provides an inside look at the complex system of Chinese social media censorship. The report confirms a little-known theory: while messages referencing direct political action are banned, criticism of the communist leadership is often allowed.
To get behind the scenes of censorship, the researchers created their own social media website and signed up to 100 existing ones. These included ‘Chinese Twitter’ Sina Weibo (weibo.com) and Tencent Weibo (t.qq.com) which combined have over 500 million users, as well as blogging platforms that represent 87% of blog posts on the web.
They found that messages are either published immediately and reviewed by a censor within 24 hours, or automatically held for review before publication based on keywords used in the text. One list of such keywords, offered by software companies to clients running social media sites, included ‘go on the streets’, ‘Dalai Lama’ and ‘corruption’.
Sixty-six of the sites tested reviewed at least some of the messages; 41% of the 1,200 messages they posted were reviewed, and 63% of those did not make it online.
But in what may come as a surprise to some, the study found that criticism of leaders and the state are often allowed. The messages that are cracked down on are those related to ‘collective action potential’ – civil unrest that might stir citizens to act.
The report suggest authorities might even welcome such criticism, because it alerts them that an official is incompetent or corrupt and allows them to replace him or her, ‘maintaining stability, and the system can then be seen as responsive.’
The study also found that private company censors are more likely to censor after publication, as they are under less direct government control than state censors. But the extra care taken by state censors can backfire. Pre-publishing reviews are often based on keywords, like corruption, that can be used in both pro- and anti-government messages. In other words, even government praise is restricted by censorship.
This article was originally published on 10 Sept 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
09 Sep 13 | Digital Freedom, Palestine
(Photo: Shutterstock)
The internet is a vital platform for Palestinians to express themselves, but web access and targeting of social media users, bloggers and journalists remain big challenges, according to a new report from the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedom (MADA).
“The internet and the broad tools of communication made available by the social networks gained great importance specifically in the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, who have been under firm siege by the Israeli occupation forces since 2006, and for the Palestinian people in general due to the dispersion they have experienced since the Nakba of 1984 [sic], and now they can communicate with their relatives and friends in the different parts of the world quickly and immediately”, said Mr. Mousa Rimawi, MADA’s general director.
The report states that 67% of Palestinians polled by MADA in 2012 believe Facebook contributes to the promotion of freedom of expression.
However, the latest figures quoted show that internet penetration in Palestine is at 32.1%; 34.3% in the West Bank and 27.9% in the Gaza Strip. Lack of infrastructure due to the Israeli occupation and high service charges are the biggest blocks to access, the report finds.
The report also highlighted threats to journalists working in Palestine. Examples included the imprisonment of Al Quds TV reporter Mamdouh Hamamrah for posting an image deemed to be offensive to President Mahmoud Abbas, and the arrest of journalist Esmat Abdel Khalek for a comment she made on Facebook demanding an end to the Palestinian Authority.
“Violations against journalists and citizens simply for expressing their opinions lead to the strengthening of self-censorship, which is incompatible with the idea of having the social platforms that is suppose to make it easier for citizens and journalists to express their opinions”, said Riham Abu Aita, a MADA spokesperson.
The article was edited on 30 September at 12.00 pm to acknowledge an error in the quote from Mr. Mousa Rimawi, which gives the year of the Nakba as 1984, it took place in 1948.
09 Sep 13 | Religion and Culture, Russia
A criminal case has been opened against American band the Bloodhound Gang in Russia, after bassist Jared Hannegan shoved a Russian flag down his trousers at a concert in Ukraine.
Russian Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said: “A criminal case has been opened against James Moyer, Jared Victor Hennegan and other unidentified persons on counts of inciting enmity and humiliating human dignity.”
The band are accused of desecration of the Russian flag, which is illegal under Article 329 of the Russian Criminal Code and is punishable by up to a year in prison.
The incident took place on 31 July during the band’s gig in Odessa, Ukraine. They have already been banned from entering Ukraine for five years after a similar stunt involving the Ukrainian flag at an earlier concert in Kiev. They faced charges of hooliganism and desecration of state symbols.
The band’s concert at the Kubana festival in the Krasnodar region of Russia was cancelled by Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky. They were also attacked in the lounge at Russia’s Anapa airport by local activists.
“I find the actions of Bloodhound Gang disgusting. I also condemn the act of violence against them,” American ambassador Michael McFaul tweeted at the time.
“Any artist, who wants to come and visit us, should understand that it is not just appropriate to respect the laws of their own country when they are at home, but Russian laws when they are in Russia,” State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Alexei Pushkov said in a statement at the time.
Hannegan has reportedly apologised for the incident, explaining that they didn’t mean to cause offense and that it was simply part of a band tradition that items thrown on stage go through the bassist’s trousers.
09 Sep 13 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society, United States
(Photo: David von Blohn / Demotix)
It seems you can’t step away from the computer for more than a few hours these days without a story revealing previously secret information about the National Security Agency (NSA) setting the internet aflame. The scandal has sparked an investigative journalism renaissance with virtually every major news organisation in the country—not just the keepers of the Snowden files—getting in on the act.
Several stories of critical significance broke in the last two weeks. First, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA’s surveillance system, “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans.” The Journal detailed the NSA’s direct access to telecommunications’ fiber optic cables around the country and their extraordinary reach into many corners of the web.
The next day, the administration finally released the 2011 FISA court opinion ruling some NSA surveillance unconstitutional, making front-page news around the country. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization for which I work, has been suing the Justice Department for its release for over a year. The ruling showed the NSA had vacuumed up more than a 150,000 Americans’ emails, only alerting the court to a collection method that had been in place for three years. The court also accused the NSA of “material misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program” on two other occasions.
Until two weeks ago, the administration had stuck to the talking point that all the privacy violations were unintentional. That was already cold comfort to Americans, as the Washington Post had previously reported, based on Snowden documents, that the NSA has been committing thousands of privacy violations, however unintentional, affecting untold number of people per year. And the numbers seem to be increasing.
Soon after the FISA court opinion was released, Bloomberg News revealed that a still-classified NSA inspector general’s report documented “approximately a dozen” willful privacy over the last decade by the NSA. This contradicted many previous statements by government officials, including NSA chief Keith Alexander, who said “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy” at a speech on August 8.
The Wall Street Journal followed up, detailing how many of these violations consisted of analysts following former spouses or partners (nicknamed “LOVEINT”). The Journal explained that most of the violations were self-reported. How many went unreported we will likely never know.
Couple this with the fact that NBC News reported how Edward Snowden was able to browse the NSA networks for months without detection, and you have an agency which claims it has strict internal oversight procedures in place, but seems to have only one real mechanism for enforcement: self policing.
Amazingly, all of these stories have come since President Obama was forced to address the issue at a press conference just three and a half weeks ago in response to the first wave of stories published by the Guardian and Washington Post. At that point, the sea change in public opinion about civil liberties and privacy had become clear and Congressmen in both parties had been pressuring the White House for weeks. Obama promised more transparency to programs (it’s important to remember he also promised more transparency six years ago when he was first running for president), but there were no concrete proposals for reining in the out-of-control powers of the NSA. He did not even mention the two major stories of the day, one in the Guardian, and the other in the New York Times. Obama did say this, however:
What I’m going to be pushing the [intelligence community] to do is rather than have a trunk come out here and leg come out there and a tail come out there, let’s just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they’re looking at. Let’s examine what is working, what’s not, are there additional protections that can be put in place, and let’s move forward.”
While the full elephant is the only thing that will satisfy the public at this point, disturbingly, Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, the lone NSA critics on the Senate intelligence committee, cryptically said in a press release after Obama’s press conference that we’ve only learned “just the tip of a larger iceberg.”
Congress is currently on August recess, an annual break where members return to their home districts to hear from their constituents. We can expect some sort of action when they return. Eighteen bills have already been introduced, with many more on their way, and as Politico reported, members from both parties are listening to people at town halls voice their concerns about NSA surveillance, “a sign that fears about the ultra-secret National Security Agency have spread beyond the Beltway as lawmakers embark on their annual town-hall tours.”
Meanwhile, the reporting will only continue, as the Guardian is now sharing some of the Snowden documents with the New York Times and ProPublica after GCHQ disturbingly entered the Guardian offices in London and oversaw the destruction of a copy of the Snowden files.
Early on, the administration and its defenders may have hoped the story would disappear with the next news cycle. It won’t. The NSA scandal is destined to a prime issue in the fall Congressional session, carrying into next year’s midterm elections. The administration’s attempts to calm the public with transparency-after-the-fact PR measures won’t change the narrative.
What we want to see is this headline: “Obama reins in NSA surveillance authority.”
This article was originally published on 9 Sept, 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
06 Sep 13 | Australia, Index Reports, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
Australia has no grand constitution outlining civil freedoms and national character. The constitution is instead a lengthy, largely legislative document and does not guarantee freedom of speech or press outright. That notwithstanding Australia’s High Court believes that freedom of speech is implied within, however some press watchers believe it could be strengthened.
Despite a relatively free press Reporters Without Borders placed Australia at number 26 in its 2013 Press Freedom Index, up four spots from 2012 but still far behind closest neighbour New Zealand (number eight), as well as Finland, Jamaica and Costa Rica.
Outright press censorship and the highest profile cases of recent years have involved breaches of discrimination acts or incitements to hatred. Meanwhile press laws and reforms to them have been touted with scant success. Widespread internet censorship was defeated last year after Communications Minister Stephen Conroy rescinded the internet filtering scheme after five years trying to pass it.
However though always fearful of harming the children, and causing offence, most Australians see outright censorship measures as neither useful, fair or in keeping with national ideals.
A historical example might be the 1951 referendum on whether to outlaw the Australian Communist Party after Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies tried to ban it. Despite fear of the communist threat it was defeated by voters thanks to worries on curbs of freedom of speech and association.
Anti-discrimination laws, hate speech and other things untoward
In 2011 political columnist Andrew Bolt, who works for Murdoch-owned News Corp (Australia’s branch of News Limited), was found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act in two 2009 articles after he implied lighter-skinned indigenous people identified as aboriginal for gain. Speaking outside court after the ruling he called it “a terrible day for free speech in this country”. He had argued his articles were within the laws of free speech provisions. In 2009 “shock jock” broadcaster Alan Jones was in trouble for breaching anti-discrimination laws for comments made about Lebanese Muslim men years previous. The court found he had incited hatred.
Age columnist Catherine Devenney was also fired after she live-Tweeted during the Logie television awards: “I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid” in 2010. Irwin was 13 at the time.
Most recently political organisation GetUp accused Channel Nine, Channel Ten and Channel Seven of censorship after they refused to run political ads attacking Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. Channel Nine did run the ads, albeit briefly, before pulling them and blaming a ‘coding error’ for the original airing.
National Director Sam McLean told Fairfax: “This is censorship, pure and simple. Channel Seven says it’s about taste but I don’t buy that for a second. Channel Ten told us they don’t want to criticise another media network – but this is about Rupert’s son Lachlan being [chairman] of Channel Ten.”
Reforms and laws
In March four media reform bills put forward by Labor under then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard were withdrawn after they couldn’t draw the needed amount of cross-bench support from MPs. All were controversial, with the ability to affect the press and drew considerable opprobrium from some quarters of the industry.
The most controversial, from an industry perspective, was the appointment of a Public Interest Media Advocate (PIMA), a watchdog for self-regulatory industry bodies like the Press Council. Called a “big stick… and de facto form of licensing” by Mark Pearson, a media expert and former Australian correspondent for Reporters Without Borders, and ‘Stalinist’ by News Ltd boss Kim Williams, it would have meant much more bureaucracy
“I find it absolutely breathtaking to be lectured by the Murdoch press about the privacy laws,” committee chairman Doug Cameron, a Labor senator, said in response to criticism by News Ltd boss Kim Williams.
Tony Abbott backed critics, calling it a threat to free speech. However in Parliament he seemed more concerned with the sitting government’s purported attacks on freedom of speech than how such laws might play out longer term. “This is a government which wants to hide the truth to protect itself. They don’t want to protect the national interest; they want to damage the national interest,” he said.
Two reports released this year have also been divisive. The Finklestein Report and Convergence Review looked at media regulation (by the government) and media ownership and diversity issues. The former has been lambasted as a threat to a free press, with national broadsheet the Australian noting that the paper had been compiled by many journalism academics either unused to or out-of-practise when it came to the rigours of day-to-day journalism and thus unreliable to offer advice. A Daily Telegraph front page compared Information Minister Stephen Conroy with famous dictators including Mao and Stalin.
Writing in The Conversation, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media at Deakin University Martin Hirst noted, “But the “threat to free speech” line is not an argument that the anti-regulation ideologues actually believe, it is a populist sound-bite.”
The Assange factor
Australia has done very little for Julian Assange, who harbours deep resentment as a result. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard called the Australian a criminal and earlier pushed for a government inquiry into Wikileaks. Former attorney-general Robert McClelland also, according to the Australian Associated Press, at point thought of cancelling his passport and charging him with treason. Assange, though still confined within the the Ecuadorian embassy in London, is running for the Australian senate with his newly formed Wikileaks Party this coming election, and has told reporters support for him and his website within Australia is high.
Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett suffered similarly at the hands of the Australian government, being denied an Australian passport application in 1955 at Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ discretion (he had lost his British passport). He tried several times through the 1960s to no avail and was only granted one under a Gough Whitlam-led Labor government after they could find no support to the treason allegations that had dogged the pro-communist reporter for years. Though long dead he remains a divisive figure and most recently Australia historian Robert Manne published a story in The Australian alleging he really had been on the KGB’s books.
Media ownership
Australia’s two largest print media companies are News Corp and Fairfax, though both also have digital, radio and, in the case of News Limited, television interests. Australia’s wealthiest person Gina Rinehart bought a stake in Fairfax, but by 2012 was trying to offload despite being the biggest shareholder. She also bought a significant part of Channel 10, a commercial television network. These purchases had been touted for a while and worried many as Rinehart was seen as unfriendly to the press and with a strong right-wing agenda. She has argued against the controversial mining tax and also criticised high wages in Australia.
Despite owning a chunk of the press Ms Rinehart is not particularly friendly to it. Most recently she subpoenaed West Australian journalist Steve Pennells and Fairfax reporter Adele Ferguson to hand over materials relating to conversations with her son John Hancock that detail her ongoing feud with her children. Mr Pennells has written a series of articles on the family rift and Ms Ferguson a book on Rinehart.
Chris Warren, federal secretary of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, told a rally of journalists outside West Australia’s Supreme Court, “This is the major challenge not just to free speech but to democracy in Australia.”
There have been some recent but as-yet unsubstantiated worries that should the Coalition win the election on September 7 funding may be cut to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national broadcaster. Criticisms of left-leaning bias have been levelled at the ABC before, notably by Andrew Bolt who called for more conservatives to be on its board.
Internet
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s internet filtering scheme was, in contrast, far more wide-reaching and could have been far more dangerous. Not only were many sites to be blocked (nothing unusual in itself when it comes to issues of child pornography or other highly illegal content), but he ‘blacklist’ of sites marked out by the Australian Communications and Media Authority was not released publicly. A list of 1,000 leaked in 2009 showed that many of the websites in fact did not host illegal content. Distasteful, possibly, but as in the case of instructions on suicide or pro-Satanist sites, not illegal.
The government insisted it was not about curtailing freedom of speech or the internet but rather, according to Conroy: “The Government believes that parents want assistance to reduce the risk of children being exposed to such material.”
He said an independent body would have decided what sites were RC – Refused Classification (a demarcation that also belongs to films deemed unsuitable in Australia)
Dropped in 2012 five years after Conroy first proposed it the Coalition and Greens applauded the move even if it didn’t thrill the Australian Christian Lobby. Fourteen hundred known child abuse sites would be blocked under the via the Telecommunications Act instructing ISPs. Many, including shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull (formerly leader of the Opposition) had oft-pointed out that highly illegal content would not be affected by such a filtering system as it is already shared via Peer-to-Peer networks. ISPs such as Telstra and Optus (both major telcos) already blocked child abuse sites as listed by Interpol.
Turnbull also called it “bad for freedom of speech”.
One of the other criticisms were that blocking all such material from overseas sites would have slowed already sluggish net speeds.
The proposed system meant Reporters Without Borders listed Australia as a country “under surveillance” in 2012.
One legal expert speaking with Computerworld suggested that the Act should be clarified to state how ISPs might block websites.
“I think it may be that potentially the government might want to specify with greater clarity the types of websites that people will be prevented from accessing or that ISPs will … need to put in procedures to limit access to [them], as opposed to leaving it to some fairly broad-ranging powers of ACMA,” he said.
Facebook’s first Transparency Report states that in the first half of this year the Australian government made 564 requests related to 601 users. According to data the social networking site has made public it complied with 64 per cent of those requests. Requests were as often related to criminal cases as national security though no breakdown was given in the case of any country. The United States, in comparison, made 11,000 – 12,000 requests for 20,000 to 21,000 users.
Meanwhile a recent Google Transparency report states that the Australian government requested the search engine remove 145 items in the second half of last year, over 92 for the first half. Most were related to trademark infringement, privacy and security or defamation.
The Liberal-National Coalition just announced its internet policy two days before the election and almost a year after Labor abandoned its internet filtering system plan. Except, that it actually didn’t. The A$10 million plan would have required telcos and ISPs to censor or filter out ‘adult’ material unless users chose to opt out. The policy was called, possibly unsurprisingly, the “Policy to Enhance Online Safety for Children”. However only hours later shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull said release of the “poorly worded” policy had been a mistake and instead the Coalition would “encourage” parents to install software to filter out content that was not child-friendly.
The arts
Media and the arts are rarely subject to censorship. In 2009, when China demanded a film festival to dump a Uighur documentary, the opprobrium was met with bemusement. However many things that insult and offend, for non-political reasons, are met with fearful censoriousness.
In May there was a furore in New South Wales when images at the Vivid outdoor photo festival were culled from the exhibition for being “too distressing”. Destination NSW, a state tourism body, was responsible for the decision which festival organisers found “embarrassing”.
”We think it is threatening to families. Would they want those children to see that?” Sandra Chipchase, CEO of Destination NSW, said of images that included photographs of the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, photos of the aftermath of bushfires in Australia, and victims of genocidal attacks in Rwanda.
“In that public domain area it’s about entertainment and engagement.,” she continued when speaking with the Sydney Morning Herald. Vivid is known for its arresting exhibitions. In a survey by the paper 27 per cent of the respondents agreed with the decision.
“The children’, actual or hypothetical, justify much.
Photographer Bill Henson has come close to being charged with child pornography in the past and his work still excites tremendous passion, and sometimes outrage, for his portrayal of nude pre- or pubescent children. A 2008 show in Sydney was raided by police. The New South Wales government changed its child pornography laws as a result in 2010. Artistic purpose was no longer a defence. A Commonwealth classification is now needed for images of naked children.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said at the time that his work was “devoid of artistic merit”. Much of the art world would disagree. Henson is regarded as one Australia’s leading artists with 30 years and many international exhibitions.
In 1996 Spanish artist Andre Cerano’s exhibit was removed from the National Gallery of Victoria after Catholics protested against works that included a photograph of a crucifix in urine, titled Piss Christ.
Films are not banned but “refused classification”; most recently French rape revenge film Baise Moi (Fuck Me) was again banned. Films with highly sexual content, sexualised violence and anything relating to pedophilia are usually of especial concern to the Board of Film and Literature Classification. The ratings system has undergone changes; the R-rating was brought in in the 1970s and restricts media to over-18s.
Laws
Under John Howard some 30 new anti-terror laws were brought in post-9/11 which according to Pearson infringed on work by reporters. Australia does not, however, have an Official Secrets Act though public servants are restricted from revealing information. This pertains more national security information (such as in the noted example of the identity of ASIO agents) than anything which may simply embarrass the government.
There are also the almost-defunct D Notices which request media not report on certain topics related to defence or national security, issued by the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee, which last met in 1982. Whilst related to national security the system was voluntary and no penalty for ignoring requests – as they were quaintly called – exited; it was largely left to an editor’s judgement.
There are restrictions on information regarding terrorism and terrorists or suspected terrorists but often laws turn into a convoluted version of a Donald Rumsfeld quote and reporters aren’t allowed to know what they aren’t allowed to know and thus might know things they are not allowed to, without knowing.
Transparency can be a problem. Reporters Without Borders has noted the government’s unwillingness to grant access to asylum seeker detention centres and government departments will often officially offer no more information than a pre-prepared statement or press release.
Though individuals’ right to privacy has been upheld in individual cases there is no specific charter that protects the right to privacy; however, rape victims cannot be named in the press here as in the United States. Such things have been debated when looking at changes to press laws and were, obviously, especially apposite in the wake of the long running phone hacking scandals in the United Kingdom. News Limited has in the past come out against a Bill of Rights in Australia which, though shoring up privacy laws, could have also bolstered press freedom laws, according to analysts.
Pornography has long been classified and only in the ACT – Australian Capital Territory – was “hardcore” or triple X pornography allowed. It is a state, not federal matter however. The legality of prostitution is also state, not federally, regulated. It is largely illegal in South Australia and Tasmania and legal in Victoria and New South Wales.
06 Sep 13 | News and features, United Kingdom
Image Darrenp/Shutterstock
The stakes are incredibly high as the British government considers buckling in the face of intense pressure over its controversial and divisive lobbying bill. If it does not, there is a real danger that the voice of David Cameron’s “Big Society” is about to be snuffed out for good.
From out of nowhere, the coalition government’s lobbying bill has created a sudden, serious threat to freedom of speech in Britain. Charities are terrified that their campaigning activity will be virtually shut down if the coalition’s proposed measures become law.
After a week of outrage and anger the first indications of a shift in stance are now starting to emerge. One coalition source I’ve spoken to says further concessions as the bill is debated in detail next week will leave the charities “mollified”. A Liberal Democrat source has, separately, suggested amendments will be tabled making clear charities’ activities will not be impinged. At the time of writing it remains to be seen whether that’s the case.
It has happened astonishingly quickly. Before the summer started there was no cause for concern. Now, though, dark partisan motives are underpinning debate on the legislation many of those affected are already calling the “gagging bill”.
This “nasty little bill”, as one Labour MP put it, is ostensibly an attempt to create more transparency in the system by which interest groups of all shapes and sizes put pressure on MPs and ministers. Its proposal to create a statutory register of lobbyists is widely criticised for being fundamentally flawed, though, because it only covers those working for public affairs agencies. In-house lobbyists, representing large corporations, get away scot-free.
Then there’s the real issue: a move against the influence of third parties in election campaigns. Under the proposals of this afterthought, any organisation which isn’t a political party faces a severe clampdown if it wants to campaign actively on its own issues during the election season. Trade unions, whose activity overwhelmingly helps Labour, are overtly targeted. The problem is that charities, which cumulatively form an important part of British political debate, are also going to be affected.
“The bill will have a chilling effect on campaigning activity,” the National Council of Voluntary Organisations’ parliamentary manager Chloe Stables warns. She fears the complexity and the uncertainty of the rule changes will lead many organisations to become “so scared of these rules they’ll stop undertaking campaigning, because charities are very risk averse”.
Not everyone is convinced there is an issue here. Conservative MP Stephen McPartland says charities are already covered by many of these rules. It’s true – charities are already forbidden from endorsing a particular candidate. “I’m very concerned the opposition have been able to portray this bill as a gagging bill,” he worries (says?).
Drill down to the small print, though, and the way in which the bill would dramatically broaden the activities charities are forbidden from undertaking emerges. Under current rules, Laura Pett of the Royal British Legion (RBL) explains, charities only have to prove their “intent” if they are accused of interfering in a specific campaign. Under the text of the bill, though, they’re banned from activity “for the purpose of or in connection with” electioneering.
The question charities are now asking is: what does ‘in connection with’ actually mean? In the run-up to the 2010 general election the RBL persuaded 75 per cent of candidates to sign a pledge promising to ‘do their bit’ for the armed forces if elected. What happens if candidates A and B sign up, but candidate C doesn’t – and then candidate C, having lost by a few hundred votes, complains that literature highlighting the issue influenced the result?
“It’s very widely drawn and is totally unclear as to what is and isn’t included,” James Legg of the Countryside Alliance worries (points out?). “You could find ordinary day-to-day campaigning activity, whatever it might be, could be seen to be for electoral purposes. In other words, we’re losing any sort of objectivity to it. It’s becoming very much a subjective test.”
It will be the Electoral Commission which has to make these judgement calls. You might expect it to welcome these new powers, but you’d be wrong. The bill, it warned in evidence to parliament, “raises real questions of freedom of speech”. It is as deeply concerned by the government’s proposals as everyone else.
The Electoral Commission faces a “bureaucratic nightmare”, Plaid Cymru MP Jonathan Edwards, a former Citizens Advice employee, believes. His party is worried about the impact the changes could have on the devolved administrations. The bill specifically refers to Westminster elections, but Edwards doesn’t think they can be viewed in isolation from the local and devolved contests. “Often campaigns will cross over, so therefore it wasn’t clear to me, as someone who’s worked in the sector, how employers would be expected to dissect the terms of the bill.”
Perhaps there would be more clarity if the government had given the legislation more time to be improved before bringing it to the Commons. MPs have been left aghast by the lack of pre-legislative scrutiny. The political and constitutional reform committee has issued an emergency report calling for it to be withdrawn completely, saying it is “seriously flawed” precisely because of a lack of consultation.
The truth is this bill is not so much being rushed as rammed through parliament. Its Commons stages will be over by mid-October, leaving it set to enter the statute book by the end of the year. “I understand there are some incentives to get this done by a certain date so organisations can have certainty before the next election,” says Stables of the NCVO, but adds that they would’ve preferred more time.
Both sides privately acknowledge the meetings between the NCVO and the government are not going well. There is a complete standoff over whether the text of the bill leaves charities vulnerable or not. The government lawyers say one thing, the charities’ experts say another.
In the meantime all the talk in the Palace of Westminster is of the politicking which underpins the lobbying bill. “The government’s fobbed everyone off so far,” one MP says. It’s an attempt to get at the unions and make it harder for them to reduce their ability to campaign.” Even government figures week implicitly acknowledge the change is being sought to shift the rules of the game against Labour. “This is not about targeting particular people,” one source close to the leader of the House, Andrew Lansley, says. “This is about making sure there is a level playing field.”
Usually, political parties jostling for advantage like this only really matters to Westminster types. It is ugly and undignified and will not have a decisive influence on the outcome in 2015, after all.
This time is different. The fear is the ability of charities to carry out their vital campaigning work could end up as collateral damage in a much bigger struggle for power.
Three years down the line, the charities David Cameron championed with his promises of a “Big Society” are now asking whether they are about to be gagged – just when they need their voices most of all.
06 Sep 13 | News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture, United Kingdom
Pavan Amara
of London’s Camden New Journal has an astonishing story of a head teacher who reported a former pupil to the police, apparently because he student was becoming “more and more enchanted by anti-establishment ways of thinking”.
Jacques Szemalikowski, head at the Hampstead School in North London, said he was worried that A-Level student Kinnan Zaloom, 19, was “developing into an anarchist” and that he was duty bound to report the teenager to the police for “extremism”. Szemalikowski also contacted Glasgow University, where Zaloom had applied to study, to warn them of his dangerous tendencies.
Szemalikowski told the CNJ:
I must do something. In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by anti-establishment ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt.
Zaloom set up a satirical blog called Hampstead Trash in February of this year. The blog has frequently criticised the way the school is run. Zaloom no longer writes for the blog, having finished school this summer, but it is kept up by current students. It is blocked on the school’s computers.
An editorial posted on the blog last night said in response to the head’s comments to the CNJ said:
You called us dangerous. You called Kinnan “a developing anarchist”. Regardless of Kinnan’s political views and whether he believes in it or not, agreeing with anarchism is not illegal. And we aren’t dangerous. We have never threatened to attack or harm anything or anyone. The only danger is to your ego. We aren’t a paramilitary, we aren’t fighting a dictator who will gas those who don’t agree. All we do is post a few jokes at the school’s expense, often about students and their habits, not at the staff themselves; then occasionally we criticise your and your SLT’s decisions, like the change from 8:40 to 8:35, or giving Sixth-formers late detentions.
Zaloom, who has been banned from the school grounds, told the CNJ: “[W]hat worries me is if I had been a year younger they said they would have expelled me halfway through my A-levels, and that means they would have been prepared to ruin my education because they didn’t like my thoughts.”
Szemalikowski confirmed that he would have excluded Zaloom in that circumstance.
If there’s one consolation to this story, it’s that the police have not been in touch with Zaloom to follow up on Szemalikowski allegations of anarchist extremism.
But it does raise serious questions; if Szemalikowski idea of dangerous anarchism is the notion that governments might be corrupt, how much thought policing is he willing to engage in. Will the young people of Hampstead, home of some of history’s greatest radicals, from Shelley, to Freud to Michael Foot, be allowed think for themselves anymore?
(HT @BrianWhelanHack)
06 Sep 13 | News and features, Russia
Image Gonçalo Silva/Demotix
Russian president Vladimir Putin hit the headlines around the world after an interview with the Russian First Channel and the Associated Press on 4 September. His statements on Syria were given much attention, with early reports saying it meant Russia might support military intervention. In fact, Putin did not state that clearly, but pegged it to “conclusive evidence of the use of chemical weapons” by the Assad regime.
Close consideration of Putin’s recent public statements shows the same approach applied to other topics, including several human rights issues that Russia has been criticised about lately. Despite a noticeable change of the tone he prefers to give vague comments rather than well-articulated attitudes.
For instance, his reply to criticism on the law that bans “homosexual propaganda” was aimed to show Putin is tolerant to representatives of LGBT community, all the while referring to them as “such people”.
“I work with such people; sometimes I award them with medals and orders, we have absolutely normal relations, and I see nothing special about it,” said Putin in the interview without going into details on who “such people” are and what kind of “work” with Russia’s president they are involved in.
The same seemingly pleasant, but otherwise void impression was given by Putin during his meeting with a presidential Council on Development of Civil Society and Human Rights. During the meeting on 4 September Vladimir Putin put aside his macho-style image of a firm ruler.
“He suddenly appeared to be a different person, a constructive and attentive politician who is open to ideas and ready to consider them,” Andrey Yurov, a Russian human rights defender who is a member of the Council told Index. “He was listening carefully to suggestions about reforming of penal and judiciary systems, adjustments to internet regulations and public control of the state bodies, and reacted with comments like ‘Oh, this is interesting’, ‘We really need to look into that’ or ‘We might need to create a working group on this’. He did not say ‘yes, we will definitely do it’ to any of our suggestions, but at least he did not say a firm ‘no, we won’t do it’ to anything.”
Vladimir Putin even admitted the notorious NGO “foreign agents” law might need to be re-assessed. The law, adopted a year ago, forced all non-governmental organisations that receive funds from abroad to register as “foreign agents” if they are involved in “political activities”. The problem with the law, as many experts and civil society groups have pointed out, is its extremely broad definition of what constitutes a political activity. During the meeting with human rights defenders President Putin said it might be re-defined and narrowed.
“It is difficult to say if it marks a reboot of an attitude of the state towards the civil society and whether any real steps are to follow. But it was a constructive conversation between a rational politician and civil society. Perhaps it has to do with the G20 summit in St. Petersburg; Putin needs to show he is an open leader and he is in touch with civil society of his country,” recons Andrey Yurov.
Yury Dzibladze, the president of the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, does not believe Putin’s statement signal any change.
“There are no signs of real improvement of the situation with human rights and civic freedoms inside the country. Criminal cases against political opponents are on-going; inspections of NGOs in line with the ‘foreign agents’ law continue. The rhetoric might change, but it only means the authorities want to improve their image abroad, not alter the situation in Russia itself. It might be connected with the G20 summit and up-coming winter Olympics they do not want foreign politicians to boycott,” said Yuri Dzhibladze.
