Warning: Undefined array key "label" in /home/jwkxumhx/public_html/newsite02may/wp-content/themes/Divi/includes/builder/class-et-builder-element.php on line 8927 Index on Censorship | A voice for the persecuted Warning: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /home/jwkxumhx/public_html/newsite02may/wp-content/plugins/expand-divi/inc/ExpandDiviSetup.php on line 217
Warning: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /home/jwkxumhx/public_html/newsite02may/wp-content/plugins/expand-divi/inc/ExpandDiviSetup.php on line 218
Freedom of expression is a basic human right. But do we really have it? Where are you free to express what? A group of leading figures from the arts, all of whom have taken centre stage in this debate at some point in their careers, discuss this hot topic, not only relevant to the stage, but also in our everyday lives.
Join Evening Standard editor Sarah Sands, playwright Howard Brenton and Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg as part of The Festival at Hampstead Theatre. The Festival at Hampstead Theatre, now in its second year, will bring together an array of artists from a cross section of disciplines to share their stories and processes of work via panel discussions and some practical hands-on workshops in writing and performing. More details about The Festival can be found here.
When: Friday, 18 March 11am Where: HAMPSTEAD THEATRE, Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, London NW3 3EU (Map) Tickets: From £8
Participants
Sarah Sands trained on The Sevenoaks Courier as a news reporter, before moving to the Evening Standard – initially as Editor of the Londoner’s Diary – and took further posts as Features Editor and Associate Editor. She joined The Daily Telegraph in 1996 as Deputy Editor to assume responsibility later for the Saturday edition. She was appointed the first female Editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 2005. In 2006 she worked as Consultant Editor on The Daily Mail and in 2008, she became Editor-in-Chief of the UK edition of Reader’s Digest. She was appointed Deputy Editor of the London Evening Standard in 2009 and became its Editor in 2012.
Howard Brenton has been writing plays for over 50 years. The most recent are Paul (2005) and Never So Good (2008) at the National Theatre, The Ragged Trousered Philosophers (2010, after Robert Tressell) at the Everyman Theatre Liverpool and Chichester Festival Theatre, 55 Days (2012), the Arrest of Ai Weiwei (2013) and Drawing the Line (2013) at Hampstead Theatre, In Extremis (2008), Anne Boleyn (2010) and Doctor Scroggy’s War (2014) at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Jodie Ginsberg is CEO of Index on Censorship, a London-based organisation that champions free expression worldwide. Founded by poet Stephen Spender, Index publishes works by censored writers and artists and campaigns against censorship. A former foreign correspondent, Jodie worked for more than a decade for Reuters news agency and from 2007-2011 was Reuters’ London Bureau Chief, where she led coverage of the financial crisis, UK riots, and phone hacking scandal. Jodie set up the Reuters ‘press gang’ initiative – a journalism programme for young people in communities around Canary Wharf, and in 2013 was shortlisted in the media category of the UK’s First Women Awards.
One of the UK’s most interesting historical legacies in music does not involve the actual bands that made up the British Invasion, but rather the people who played these bands records illegally.
During the early 1960s, while American youth were falling in love with numerous bands from the UK, the BBC had still banished rock ‘n’ roll from the airwaves. So, in retaliation, a group of rabble-rousing Brits decided to board old fishing boats anchored off the coast of England, putting them in international waters and out of reach from the censoring British authorities. With the help of these “pirates” people, — particularly younger people — in the UK could enjoy some of the most influential early rock ‘n’ roll while sidestepping the restrictive BBC. Below are a collection of 1960s pop gems that have helped shape American and British rock as we know it today — all while not being allowed on the radio in the UK at the time.
Index on Censorship has teamed up with the producers of an award-winning documentary about Mali’s musicians, They Will Have To Kill Us First, to create the Music in Exile Fund to support musicians facing censorship globally. You can donate here, or give £10 by texting “BAND61 £10” to 70070.
Index on Censorship welcomes the release of journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül after Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that their rights had been violated by their arrest. Index strongly reiterates its call for Turkish authorities to drop all charges against the pair.
Dündar, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, and his Ankara bureau chief, Gül, had been held since the evening of 26 November. They are charged with spying and terrorism because last May they published evidence of arms deliveries by the Turkish intelligence services to Islamist groups in Syria.
The arrests of the two journalists underscored extreme lengths that the government of Turkish president Recep Erdogan had taken to stifle dissent and restrict access to information. In the past 12 months, there have been 106 verified violations of media freedom reported to Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project.
A Bahraini court sentenced Ibrahim Sharif, former secretary-general of the secular, left-wing National Democratic Action Society, on 24 February to a year in prison over a speech made in 2015 calling for change in the kingdom.
Sharif was convicted on a charge of inciting hatred while acquitted on charges of promoting the toppling of Bahrain’s government.
Sharif’s lawyer, Sami Syadi, said he plans to appeal the ruling, and that he believed the time his client had already served would count toward his sentence.
Sharif was first sentenced to five years in prison in 2011. While in prison, he was tortured, held in solitary confinement for 56 days, and wasn’t allowed to contact his family or lawyer. He served four years and three months before being released on a royal pardon on 19 June 2015.
A month after his release, he made a speech in July during the annual commemoration of the killing of 16-year-old Hussam alHaddad by security forces in 2012. In it, he criticised the government for using violence to put down demonstrators, who were engaged in peaceful protests.
“In our case, there is no going back to building a wall of fear,” he said. “The government is only strong when we are cowards and is weak when we are courageous.”
He was subsequently re-arrested for the speech and spent seven months in custody before yesterday’s sentence.
Speaking to Index on Censorship before the ruling, his wife Farida Ghulam said: “Unfortunately, based on the last seven months of trials, it seems that the government is unwilling to entertain the basic right of freedom of speech and that Ebrahim may be sentenced again”
Index on Censorship calls for the immediate release of Ibrahim Sharif. His wife has previously written about the family’s ordeal in Index on Censorship, here and here.
Mr. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, Mr. David Kaye, Mr. Joseph Cannataci, Mr. Maina Kiai, Mr. Michel Forst, Ms. Faith Pansy Tlakula, and Ms. Reine Alapini-Gansou
cc: African Union
African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) Secretariat
Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa Secretariat
Domestic & International Election Observer Missions to the Republic of Uganda
East African Community Secretariat
International Conference on the Great Lakes Region Secretariat
New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Secretariat
Uganda Communications Commission
Uganda Electoral Commission
Uganda Ministry of Information and Communications Technology
23 February 2016
Re: Internet shutdown in Uganda and elections
Your Excellencies,
We are writing to urgently request your immediate action to condemn the internet shutdown in Uganda, and to prevent any systematic or targeted attacks on democracy and freedom of expression in other African nations during forthcoming elections in 2016. [1]
On February 18, Ugandan internet users detected an internet outage affecting Twitter, Facebook, and other communications platforms. [2] According to the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), blocking was carried out on orders of the Electoral Commission, for security reasons. [3] The shutdown coincided with voting for the presidential election, and remained in place until the afternoon of Sunday, February 21. During this period, two presidential candidates were detained under house arrest. [4] The telco MTN Uganda confirmed the UCC directed it to block “Social Media and Mobile Money services due to a threat to Public Order & Safety.” [5] The blocking order also affected the telcos Airtel, Smile, Vodafone, and Africel. President Museveni admitted to journalists on February 18 that he had ordered the block because “steps must be taken for security to stop so many (social media users from) getting in trouble; it is temporary because some people use those pathways for telling lies.” [6]
Research shows that internet shutdowns and state violence go hand in hand. [7] Shutdowns disrupt the free flow of information and create a cover of darkness that allows state repression to occur without scrutiny. Worryingly, Uganda has joined an alarming global trend of government-mandated shutdowns during elections, a practice that many African Union member governments have recently adopted, including: Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Egypt, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo. [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]
Internet shutdowns — with governments ordering the suspension or throttling of entire networks, often during elections or public protests — must never be allowed to become the new normal. Justified for public safety purposes, shutdowns instead cut off access to vital information, e-financing, and emergency services, plunging whole societies into fear and destabilizing the internet’s power to support small business livelihoods and drive economic development.
Uganda’s shutdown occurred as more than 25 African Union member countries are preparing to conduct presidential, local, general or parliamentary elections. [15]
A growing body of jurisprudence declares shutdowns to violate international law. In 2015, various experts from the United Nations (UN) Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Organization of American States (OAS), and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), issued an historic statement declaring that internet “kill switches” can never be justified under international human rights law, even in times of conflict. [16] General Comment 34 of the UN Human Rights Committee, the official interpreter of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, emphasizes that restrictions on speech online must be strictly necessary and proportionate to achieve a legitimate purpose. Shutdowns disproportionately impact all users, and unnecessarily restrict access to information and emergency services communications during crucial moments.
The internet has enabled significant advances in health, education, and creativity, and it is now essential to fully realize human rights including participation in elections and access to information.
We humbly request that you use the vital positions of your good offices to:
call upon the Ugandan government to provide redress to victims of the internet shutdown, and pledge not to issue similar orders in the future;
call on African states to uphold their human rights obligations, and not to take disproportionate responses like issuing shutdown orders, especially during sensitive moments like elections;
investigate shutdowns, in their various forms, in order to produce public reports that examine this alarming trend and its impact on human rights, and make recommendations to governments and companies on how to prevent future disruptions;
encourage telecommunications and internet services providers to respect human rights and resist unlawful orders to violate user rights, including through public disclosures and transparency reports;
encourage the African Commission on People’s and Human Rights, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the UN General Assembly to resolve that Internet Shutdowns violate freedom of expression per se and without legal justification.
We are happy to assist you in any of these matters.
Sincerely,
Access Now African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (ACDHRS)
Association for Progressive Communications (APC)
Article 19 East Africa
Chapter Four Uganda
CIPESA
CIVICUS
Committee to Protect Journalists
DefendDefenders (The East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Global Partners Digital
Hivos East Africa
ifreedom Uganda
Index on Censorship
Integrating Livelihoods thru Communication Information Technology (ILICIT Africa)
International Commission of Jurists Kenya
ISOC Uganda
KICTANet (Kenya ICT Action Network)
Media Rights Agenda
Paradigm Initiative Nigeria
The African Media Initiative (AMI)
Unwanted Witness
Web We Want Foundation
Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET)
Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum
Dutch journalists have been ringing alarm bells about violations of media freedom at public asylum debates throughout the country. Several journalists and broadcasters claim they have been banned from debate evenings in small towns across the country by local authorities. In one instance, a village municipality placed a five-kilometer-wide exclusion zone around the area where the debate took place.
On 28 January 2016, Allard Berends, editor-in-chief of regional broadcaster Omroep Flevoland, received a call from one of his reporters. A citizens’ debate about the possible housing of refugees in the village of Luttelgeest, in the centre of the country, was about to start.
But there was a problem.
“We already knew that journalists were not welcome inside,” Berends told Index on Censorship. “So my reporter was standing outside, on the public ground.” But while conducting street interviews, his reporter and cameraman were approached by two police officers. They told to leave the village because an emergency decree recalled Berends, who’s in charge of the leading radio and TV broadcaster in the province of Flevoland.
“I have a long career in journalism,” he said. “But I’ve never experienced something like this before. It was just ridiculous. It was Kafkaesque.”
According to documentation brought to the journalists by the police officers, the emergency decree was declared by Luttelgeest’s mayor and stated that only people who were invited were allowed inside. Nobody else — including journalists — was allowed to get closer than five kilometres around the area where the citizens debate was held.
The municipality of Luttelgeest had told Omroep Flevoland that an emergency decree was in place to prevent possible turmoil and to give citizens the privacy to say what they want. “This is an unacceptable explanation,” Berends explained. “It crosses the borders of press freedom and should not be possible in this country.”
While Europe is coping with the largest migration crisis since the Second World War, the arrival of thousands of refugees has caused tension in the Netherlands, as it has in other European countries.
The Netherlands made international headlines with a series of incidents. In October 2015, hooligans attacked an asylum centre near the city of Utrecht, where the majority of refugees housed there were Syrian. In December, a meeting of the council in the town of Geldermalsen to decide on the building of a centre to house 1,500 asylum seekers descended into riots. The police fired warning shots, with live ammunition, to disperse a crowd of opponents, chanting anti-migrant slogans. In several other towns and villages, violent protests broke out against plans to build housing for asylum seekers.
Local governments across The Netherlands have had difficulties trying to sell the moral case for housing asylum seekers to a sceptical and often angry electorate. In a bid to include local people in the debate, citizen debate evenings have become a regular fixture in recent months. But on several occasions they have been marred by confrontation and violence, often in front of watching TV cameras.
The incident in Luttelgeest is not an isolated case. In Geldermalsen, journalists were restricted from covering the citizen debates, too. A radio reporter for the national broadcaster NOS tweeted that he was denied entrance to the public debate at the Geldermalsen town hall. According to the report, a security guard had been instructed to “keep the NOS away from the area.” And a municipality spokesperson had reportedly told the journalist the “press doesn’t interest us at all” and “if you want to follow the debate, that is your problem, not mine”.
In the city of Harderwijk journalists were not allowed to record audio or video at a public meeting concerning housing for 800 asylum seekers in the town. Those who refused to comply with the order, it was reported, were told that they would be removed from the venue.
At a similar meeting in the southern town of Heesch, most journalists were simply denied entry. The municipality’s media department had made a strict selection, only allowing a few journalists in.
Similar cases have been reported in the cities of Kaatsheuvel and Utrecht.
“In an open and democratic society, it is up to the media to decide what to report on, how to report and what methods to use,” they wrote in a statement. “We acknowledge tensions surrounding the refugee debate in the Netherlands. But these tensions exist within the debate itself and in all the interests and emotions involved, not in the reporting of it. Restricting the media should never be the answer.”
The letter was initially addressed to the mayor of the municipality of Bernheze, of which the village of Heesch is part of. But it soon turned into a public statement towards all local governments. The letter also condemns that “local governments more and more seem to want to decide which journalist is allowed access and which journalist is not”.
The Dutch Union of Journalists (NVJ) agrees. “It is just wrong to differentiate between visual, audiovisual and written media at meetings in which the public is being informed by local governments,” NVJ spokesman Thomas Bruning told Index on Censorship.
The incident in Luttelgeest, in which journalists were not only banned from a public debate but also denied access to an entire village, is considered particularly alarming by the NVJ.
“The press was not even allowed to talk to citizens and politicians before and after the debate,” Bruning said. “Using an emergency decree is really not worthy of a democratic constitutional state.”
The NVJ has sent letters of complaint to all the municipalities involved.
The Omroep Flevoland editor-in-chief Berends announced that he will go to court and press charges against the mayor of Luttelgeest, who was responsible for issuing the emergency decree.
“I want to ask a judge what he thinks of a mayor who declares an entire village a no-go area for journalists,” said Berends. The NVJ is supporting Omroep Flevoland in court.
On that January evening, Omroep Flevoland was not able to report from the debate about a possible centre for asylum seekers in Luttelgeest.
“We were able to speak to some citizens and council members the day after,” Berends said.
The debate passed off calmly. “But really, we should have been there,” added Berends. “It is the essence of our profession, we observe and report what we have heard and seen.”
I am of the firm belief that even those who do not have faith in a personal and providential divinity can still experience forms of religious feeling and hence a sense of the sacred, of limits, questioning and expectation; of a communion with something that surpasses us.What you ask is what there is that is binding, compelling and irrevocable in this form of ethics.
I would like to put some distance between myself and the subject. Certain ethical problems have become much clearer to me by reflecting on some semantic problems – don’t worry if people say this discourse is difficult; we are perhaps encouraged into easy thinking by the ‘revelations’ of the mass media, which are, by definition, predictable. Let people learn to ‘think difficult’ because neither the mystery nor the evidence are easy to deal with.
My problem was whether there were ‘semantic universals’, or basic concepts common to all humanity that can be expressed in all languages. Not so obvious a problem once you realise that many cultures do not recognise notions that seem obvious to us: for example, that certain properties belong to certain substances (as when we say ‘the apple is red’) or concepts of identity (a=a). I became convinced that there certainly are concepts common to all cultures, and that they all refer to the position of our body in space.
The article is available for free until the end of March. To read it in full, click here.
Still from an Auschwitz exhibition, 22 July 2014 in Oswiecim, Poland
When discussing academic freedom more than a century ago, German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber wrote: “The first task of a competent teacher is to teach his students to acknowledge inconvenient facts.” In Poland today, history appears to be an inconvenience for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is introducing legislation to punish the use of the term “Polish death camps”.
The Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced earlier this month that the use of the phrase in reference to wartime Nazi concentration camps in Poland could now be punishable with up to five years in prison. If enacted, Poland would find itself in the unique position of being a country where both denying and discussing the Holocaust could land you in trouble with the law. Holocaust denial has been outlawed in Poland — under punishment of three years “deprivation of liberty” — since 1998.
Any suggestion of Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes against Jews brings with it, in the party’s own words, a “humiliation of the Polish nation”.
Of course, Poland was an occupied country which suffered terribly under Nazi Germany, so any talk of acquiescence understandably hits a nerve. As all good history students know, however, the discipline has its ambiguities and competing theories, from the acclaimed to the crackpot, and singular, simplistic narratives are rare. But few democratic countries in the world punish those who argue unpopular historical positions. Which is why legislating against uneasy truths is the same as legislating against academic freedom.
Two recent examples show the Polish government of doing just this. Firstly, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda made public his serious consideration to stripping the Polish-American Princeton professor of history at Princeton University Jan Gross of an Order of Merit — which he received in 1996 both for activities as a dissident in communist Poland in the 1960s and for his scholarship — over his academic work on Polish anti-Semitism. Gross outlined in his 2001 book Neighbors that the massacre of some 1,600 Jews from the Polish village of Jedwabne in July 1941 was committed by Poles, not Nazis. More recently, the historian has claimed that Poles killed more Jews than they did Germans during the war, which prompted the current action against him.
Some who disagree with his arguments have labelled Gross an “enemy” of Poland and a “traitor to the motherland”. The historian has hit back, saying in an interview with the Associated Press: “They want to take [the Order of Merit] away from me for saying what a right-wing, nationalist, xenophobic segment of the population refuses to recognise as facts of history.”
Academics too — Polish and otherwise — have come to his defence. Agata Bielik-Robson, professor of Jewish Studies at Nottingham University, points out that a “democracy has to have a voice of inner criticism”. She is worried that PiS is seeking to do away with such criticism in order “to produce a uniform historical perspective”.
Polish journalist and former activist in the anti-communist Polish trade union Solidarity Konstanty Gebert explained to Index on Censorship that PiS has made “convenient scapegoats” of people like Gross. “PiS is moving fast to reestablish a ‘positive narrative of Polish history’ by breaking with an alleged ‘pedagogy of shame’,” he said.
The party first tried — unsuccessfully — to outlaw the term “Polish death camps” in 2013 when it was in opposition. Should the law now pass, and you need help adhering to the proposed rules, the Auschwitz Museum has released an app to correct any “memory errors” you may experience. It detects thought crimes such as the words “Polish concentration camp” in 16 different languages on your computer, keeping you on the right track with prompts asking if you instead meant to write “German concentration camp”.
Poland may have lurched to the right with the election of PiS last October, but the party’s authoritarianism — from crackdowns on the media to moves to take control of the supreme court — seems positively Soviet in some respects. Attempts to control history, too hark back to the Polish People’s Republic of 1945-1989, when, in the words of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier in the winter 1985 issue of Slavic Review, “cultural patterns” and “habits of mind” made it impossible to make historical interpretations “alien to that national sense of identity and a methodology at odds with the canons and objective scholarship”.
Gebert sees similarities between current and communist-era propaganda “in the basic formulation that there is nothing to be ashamed of in Polish history, and in Polish-Jewish relations in particular, and in the belief that there is one correct national viewpoint”.
However, now that freedom of speech exists, the government can and are being criticised for their actions. “This puts the government propaganda machine on the defensive,” Gebert said.
Just last week, President Duda spoke against the “defamation” of the Polish people “through the hypocrisy of history and the creation of facts that never took place”. He has made his motives clear: “Today, our great responsibility to create a framework […] with the dual aim of fostering a greater sense of patriotic pride at home while enhancing the country’s image abroad.”
It should be intolerable for the freedoms of any academic subject to be impinged for ideological ends. If academic freedom is to mean anything, it should include the right to tell uneasy truths, get things wrong and have you work challenged by the highest academic standards.
There’s only one place to turn for PiS to find an example of best practice on how to challenge Gross’ research, and that is to the very body the party will grant authority to on deciding on what is and isn’t a breach of the law regarding “Polish death camps”. Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) produced several reports between 2000-03 challenging claims in Gross’ book on the Jedwabne massacre. It used research and reason — as opposed to censorship — to make the case that the historian didn’t get all the facts right. It found, for example, that German’s played a bigger part in the slaughter than Gross had claimed, and that the numbers killed were more likely to be around the 340 mark, rather than 1,600.
IPN should tread carefully, though. Any inconvenient truths with the potential to humiliate the Polish people could one day soon see it branded a “traitor”.
Ryan McChrystal is the assistant editor, online at Index on Censorship
Acrassicauda concert at The Roxy in Hollywood, 10 June 2010. Credit: Flickr / Bruce Martin
Underground music scenes have begun sprouting up in many countries around the world in the last few years, where previously no such thing existed. These movements have managed, in many cases, to continue despite a continuing trend of censorship in the arts and government repression. Whether it be punks in Indonesia rebelling against Sharia law or hip-hop artists in Mumbai rapping about independence from Britain, people all over the world are fighting for their right to artistic freedom. Here are a few cities around the world where musicians refused to be silenced.
Karachi, Pakistan
Even after social activist and creator of The Second Floor, a cafe that promotes discussion, performance and art, Sabeen Mahmud was murdered by armed motorcyclists in Karachi in April 2015, the experimental and electronic music culture has continued to grow. Refusing to be intimidated into silence, artists like Sheryal Hyatt, who records as Dalt Wisney and founded Pakistan’s first DIY netlabel, Mooshy Moo, and the producing pair of Bilal Nasir Khan and Haamid Rahim, who created the electronic label and collective Forever South, are challenging conventional ideas about the music culture in Karachi.
Aceh, Indonesia
Punk music is one of the ultimate forms of expressing disdain for a system of oppression, so it comes as no surprise that so many youths in Indonesia have embraced the genre with a passion. The punk scene, which grew exponentially following the 2004 tsunami when a great many lost family members and help from the government was less than forthcoming. The hostility and discrimination against the punk subculture came to a head in 2012 when police rounded up 64 youths at a concert, arrested them and took them to a nearby detention centre to have their mohawk hairstyles forcibly shaved. Despite this, bands like Cryptical Death continue to promote their scene and pen songs about resisting repressive government figures.
Yangon, Burma
The vitality of punk music is also present in Burma, where musicians have been advocating for human rights through fast-paced music since around 2007. No U Turn and the Rebel Riot are popular punk groups that routinely rail against a government that they feel is repressive and unjust. No U Turn sounds like a resurrection of Bad Religion-meets-Naked Raygun with a blend of biting lyrics and punishing speed.
Mumbai, India
Indian hip-hop pioneers have been appearing more and more in the last 10 years, with Abhishek Dhusia, aka ACE, forming Mumbai’s Finest, the city’s first rap crew, and Swadesi, another local group whose work they think represents feelings and ideals of many young people in the city. Swadesi, in particular, advocates for social justice within their band’s mission, with working for NGOs and organising events being an important element of their group.
Baghdad, Iraq
Musicians in Iraq have faced a variety of oppressive control, ranging from young people being stoned to death by Shi’ite militants for wearing western-style “emo” clothes and haircuts to Acrassicauda, a popular heavy-metal band from Baghdad, receiving death threats from Islamic militants. Acrassicauda had to flee the country a few years after the USA invaded Iraq, going first to Syria and then to the USA, where they were given refugee status and from where they now continue to make music. They have hopes of touring the Middle East soon but have no idea when they will be able to return to Iraq.
Index on Censorship has teamed up with the producers of an award-winning documentary about Mali’s musicians, They Will Have To Kill Us First, to create the Music in Exile Fund to support musicians facing censorship globally. You can donate here, or give £10 by texting “BAND61 £10” to 70070.
Each week, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project verifies threats, violations and limitations faced by the media throughout the European Union and neighbouring countries. Here are just five reports from 9-16 February that give us cause for concern.
1. Ireland: Reporters receive death threats amid Dublin’s gangland feud
Irish secretary for the National Union of Journalists Seamus Dooley said he was “gravely concerned” by the threats. “Journalists and media organisations will not be intimidated by such threats, which have no place in a democratic society,” he said.
The death threats come almost 20 years after the high-profile murder of journalist Veronica Guerin, who dared to investigate organised crime in Dublin. “Successive governments have let down the memory of Veronica … by failing to provide the resources required to beat the gangs,” said Jimmy Guerin, brother of Veronica.
2. Romania: Journalist faces campaign of cyberbullying and online threats
Boróka Parászka, an ethnic Hungarian publicist and editor working at the public radio in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş area, has become the victim of cyberbullying and online abuse. On 10 February, an online petition was published entitled We Are Sick and Tired of Parászka, which appealed to media outlets not to publish or broadcast any of the journalist’s “left-liberal” work. It claims her pieces are “subversive” (felforgató), that she aggressively attacks everything “Hungarian” and she “undermines the community interests”.
In the wake of the petition, derogatory messages were sent to Parászka via Facebook, including anti-Semitic slurs, sexual comments and threats of violence.
Some Romanian journalists have criticised the draft law as a means to protect politicians from criticism. “This law aims to protect the politicians from being criticised for their actions,” TV producer Radu Banciu said. “In the name of defending tolerance of group differences, they just want to control not only the mass media but also Facebook and other social media.”
4. Greece: New media law limits national TV channels
The law has angered many. “You are choosing the path of authoritarian practices, which alienate the country from the European principles of justice,” New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis told MPs. The Association of Private TV Channels (EITISEE) has also accused the government of performing a “sleight of hand” by basing its decision to launch a tender for just four TV licenses on a study that contains calculations that are incorrect.
5. Turkey: Molotov cocktails thrown and shots fired at newspaper headquarters
While there were no casualties, a fire broke out in front of the building and some vehicles were damaged. Firefighters rushed to the scene as police cordoned off the area. Tight security measures were put in place around the building.
The United States Ambassador to Turkey, John Bass, and his German counterpart Martin Erdmann have condemned the attack. “No violence against journalists is acceptable. Free and polyphonic press is essential to a democratic society,” said Bass.
9 January, 2016: An anti-PiS demonstration in Kraków by the Committee of the Defence of the Democracy calling for a free media. Credit: Shutterstock / praszkiewicz
Poland has undergone rapid changes since the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) won the overall majority in the Sejm, the country’s parliament, in October 2015, and independent media hasn’t been spared.
On the evening of 28 December, draft legislation to change the management of public media was submitted to the Sejm and hurriedly passed with little public discussion and despite the objections of EU and media monitoring watchdogs — including Index on Censorship. The bill was signed into law in early January 2016.
Crucial sections of the media law empowered the government to appoint editors-in-chief at public radio and stations, Polskie Radio and TVP, rather than holding an open competition for the roles. Furthermore, the law ended member rotation on public television’s watchdog committee and symbolically re-branded “public media” as “national media”.
Immediately after enacting the law, the government named Jacek Kurski — a long-standing PiS member who represented the party in the Sejm between 2005-2009 and in the European Parliament until 2014 — as the new chair of TVP. He promised a “fast recovery” of public media on taking the role.
In speaking about the law, PiS representatives have said that the media had been under heavy influence of the Civic Platform (PO), the former governing party. In an interview with the Catholic Radio Maryja and TV station Trwam, defence minister Antoni Macierewicz said: “PiS does not take freedom of speech away from anyone, it is much rather the opposite: it returns the freedom of speech to the majority of the population, which had been deprived of it.”
The electoral success of PiS has been used to frame the changes to the media law as an expression of the public will.
The national daily Gazeta Wyborcza, which in 1989 was the first newspaper published outside the control of Poland’s then-communist government, and its workforce took these changes very seriously and set up an advertising campaign focused on the new legislation.
The changes to the media law raise a fundamental issue for media aligned to the political left or centre, as well as those with pro-European or liberal positions: financing.
Paweł Grzegorczyk, editor-in-chief of the online portal jagielloński24, conducted an analysis of public funding channelled to media outlets in recent years. In an interview with the Association of Polish Journalists (SDP), he said that Gazeta Wyborcza is likely to face a challenging financial future. Regardless of which party is in power, media funding is “usually steered, while not exclusively, by political motives”, he added.
He noted that right-wing publishers, under PO rule, had received less funding both with regards to the amount of publications (only two between 2009-14) and monetary value, than publications closer to the former government. While overall figures are not published, Gazeta Wyborcza received PLN 5 million ($1,284,076) between 2010-2014. Grzegorczyk said it wouldn’t be unreasonable to see this amount diminish in future.
Since PiS gained a majority, advertising by state institutions has soared in a number of media aligned with conservative political viewpoints, and the oil refinery company Orlen is sponsoring some news programming on Telewizja Republika, according to Grzegorczyk.
Commentators have been cautiously optimistic about the changes to the media law, calling it an opportunity to shake up dysfunctional structures in public media. “It was never as bad with the TVP as it is now, and it will never be as bad again,” wrote Stefan Turszczynski, a journalist and SDP member. Jadwiga Chmielowska wrote that Polish television has been destroyed in a 20-year process and the new media law “constitutes a chance” for change. Despite the optimism, some TVP journalists have already been dismissed.
So far commentary has focused the media law’s effect on Polish TV because Poles, on average, watch 4.23 hours a day, a Europe-wide high.
The Press Freedom Monitoring Centre (CMWP) issued a statement appealing “to editors-in-chief of public stations to pay particular attention that personnel changes would exclusively be motivated by criteria of professionalism of certain journalists or media employees”, rather than be based on family relations or political considerations.
In an interview with news-servis.pl Witold Świetlik, chair of CMWP, appeared unconcerned about the changes given that “the public media have never been that good in Poland”, and had increasingly been influenced by the surroundings of former President Bronisław Komorowski. Something had to change, and Świetlik was hopeful to see more pluralism of opinion than there was on TVP previously. One example he cites is the TVP talk show hosted by journalist Tomasz Lis, who was one of the first to leave the station following the introduction of the new media law. While Świetlik’s “fundamental doubt” concerned the fact that a politician is now leading the TV station, he noted that Kurski has so far “set up a rather neutral and pluralistic composition”, while admitting that the workforce was, “of course, predominantly made up from journalists of the conservative media”.
The position heard directly from associates of the SDP on the state of Polish public TV was very negative prior to the new law being passed. Former TVP1 departmental editor-in-chief Ewa Urbanska argues that the leasing structure set up a few years back had a detrimental impact on quality of coverage while a large body of administrative staff continued to be supported by public money, and, crucially, any production was left to commercial firms.
Outside criticism of the media landscape in Poland is rejected by some, such as the lawyer and journalist Andrzej Draminski. He is amused by the agitation of “oppositional groupings and various committees in defence of one thing or another (here you can insert any title as this really does not make a difference)” and warns the opposition not to buy in to the “sudden”, shallow interest of the West, and instead to present arguments of their own, “so far as they have any”.
The issues affecting journalism in Poland predate the changes to the media law. The industry has been grappling with accusations of becoming too simple and partisan from its own professionals. Marek Placzewski from the SDP says while there have been a few notable exceptions, the general trend in the press has been to recount right- or left-wing arguments without an attempt to move beyond these narratives.
It was February 2013 when the police knocked on the door of Anuska Delic’s mother. The two officers had arrived at the house in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana at 8am to speak with her daughter concerning a criminal investigation.
Delic, a journalist for the well-respected daily newspaper Delo, was being charged with disseminating classified information. According to the stern-faced officers at her mother’s door, she could face up to three years in prison if found guilty.
“She called me up and was freaking out,” Delic said. She was furious and didn’t understand why the police went to her family home, as she is registered as living elsewhere. “I told my mother to give the phone to one of the police officers,” she said. “I first asked them to apologise to my mother.”
Delic learned that she was to be charged with a criminal offence and was summoned to come in for questioning at the police station in Ljubljana. The charge, she would soon learn, related to her work reporting on alleged connections between the ruling right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and the controversial neo-Nazi movement Blood and Honour.
“The charges were ridiculous,” she said. “They said that I had published classified information from the Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency. But all the information they came up with was public information. They really didn’t have a case.”
It was the beginning of a long and exhausting legal process. For over two years Delic juggled her time between working as a journalist and defending herself in court, before finally being acquitted.
Delic is known as one of Slovenia’s best investigative journalists and is a member of Association of Slovenian Journalists and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
In 2011, she began researching Blood and Honour, a neo-Nazi punk rock music promotion group which was founded in the United Kingdom in 1987. The name comes from the motto of the Hitler Youth. The group has “divisions” all over the world but has been banned in Germany, Spain and Russia.
Delic discovered connections between Blood and Honour and the then-opposition — and now-ruling — Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) in the town of Ziri. She also wrote about an investigation by the Defence Ministry into Blood and Honour members who were working for the army.
Delic’s investigation also uncovered, she said, that members of the neo-Nazi movement were involved in a mainstream political party. “This party, the SDS, is the largest and most influential right-wing party in Slovenia,” she explained. “These people [Blood and Honour members] are still active among them. The party has not denounced them until this day.”
Delic discovered that some Blood and Honour members were even candidates for local elections in 2014. “This is a democratic state so you are welcome to run elections on your neo-Nazi agenda,” she said. “But you can not hide within the confines of a big mainstream party.”
When her report was published it created a scandal in Slovenian politics. But, rather than look at the contents of her reporting, the state prosecutor instead pressed charges against Delic, believing that she could only have gotten the information from classified intelligence sources. Under article 260 of Slovenia’s criminal code, publishing classified information is punishable by up to three years in prison.
“The right wing was having a field day,” she said of the reaction her reporting provoked among those sympathetic with the SDS. “The right-wing media were doing everything they could to discredit me and their newspapers published blatant lies about me,” she claimed. But she also got support. “In general, people were shocked that this was going on,” she said.
Delic and her lawyer always believed that the state prosecutor did not have enough evidence to pursue criminal charges, and considered the trial a case of political prosecution. “I knew it was a sham,” Delic stated firmly. “I knew immediately that they were just trying to put pressure on me. They were after my sources.”
Although Slovenia did not have a law at the time that explicitly protected journalists from revealing their sources, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favour of journalists prosecuted in EU member states for refusing to give up their sources to the authorities. As soon as Delic realised she was going to be charged, and afraid that she might be monitored by Slovenia’s secret service, she broke all contact with her sources. “I went public immediately because I wanted to send a message to whomever my source was,” she recalled. “To let them know that our agreement was safe.”
On April 15, 2015, Slovenia’s news agency STA reported that state prosecutor Sndreja Zvanut had withdrawn all charges against Delic because of a “lack of evidence.” Zvanut, however, stated before the judge and the media that she believed Delic was guilty. “After dropping the charges against me, the prosecutor spent ten minutes explaining why she was definitely sure that I’m guilty as charged,” Delic recalled. “This really upset me — I felt there was another injustice. Although I was acquitted, I was still guilty. That’s not the way the legal system should work.”
After two long years in and out of a court room, Delic was exhausted. “No journalist wants to be the story,” she said. She believes a huge injustice was done and the trial had put a lot of pressure on her. Yet, looking back, she also believes that it might have been worth the battle. Not only were the charges against her dropped, Delic’s case resulted in a change in the law. Since October 2015, journalists and their sources are now protected under a “public interest” defence.
Although media freedom in Slovenia has improved drastically over the years — and in spite of being the most prosperous of the former Yugoslavian states and the first to join the EU in 2004 — the country still has room for improvement. Slovenian journalists working for the public broadcaster have reported political pressure when covering elections or politically sensitive topics, according to the 2015 Freedom House report on the country. The report also states that, unlike other former Yugoslav republics, journalists are generally free from physical harassment and intimidation. Slovenia is ranked 35th on the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2015 World Press Freedom Index, just below Great Britain. It is the highest ranked former Yugoslavia republic.
Delic has had enough, for a while at least. She doesn’t want to see the inside of a court room ever again. After her acquittal, and the prosecutor’s post-verdict statement, Delic considered pressing charges. In the end, she decided against it. “It would take another three years in court for me to get justice,” she said. “I decided that my life is worth more than that.”
Warning: Attempt to read property "term_id" on null in /home/jwkxumhx/public_html/newsite02may/wp-content/plugins/divi-overlays/divi-overlays.php on line 2979
Warning: Attempt to read property "url" on bool in /home/jwkxumhx/public_html/newsite02may/wp-content/plugins/divi-overlays/divi-overlays.php on line 2990
Warning: Undefined variable $separator_content in /home/jwkxumhx/public_html/newsite02may/wp-content/plugins/exclusive-divi/includes/modules/Divider/Divider.php on line 340
We are currently working hard to ensure that our new website is in perfect working order so we can continue to bring you the latest news, views and content from around the world. You may find that some pages are currently offline or that you are unable to find something that you are looking for. This is only temporary - and we apologise for any convenience this may cause.
Please consider subscribing to our weekly newsletter below, so that you are among the first to hear from our contributors and don't miss anything in future.
Thanks for your understanding.
?
STAY INFORMED.
Be the first to hear from uncensored writers and artists
For over 50 years, Index has published work by censored writers and artists. Subscribe to our email newsletter to get regular updates from our incredible contributors.
Warning: Undefined variable $separator_content in /home/jwkxumhx/public_html/newsite02may/wp-content/plugins/exclusive-divi/includes/modules/Divider/Divider.php on line 340
Be the first to hear from uncensored writers and artists
For over 50 years, Index has published work by censored writers and artists. Subscribe to our email newsletter to get regular updates from our incredible contributors.
?
SUPPORT OUR WORK
Index on Censorship’s work is only possible because of donations from people like you.
Please consider chipping in to help us give a voice to the voiceless:
Sarah Sands trained on The Sevenoaks Courier as a news reporter, before moving to the Evening Standard – initially as Editor of the Londoner’s Diary – and took further posts as Features Editor and Associate Editor. She joined The Daily Telegraph in 1996 as Deputy Editor to assume responsibility later for the Saturday edition. She was appointed the first female Editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 2005. In 2006 she worked as Consultant Editor on The Daily Mail and in 2008, she became Editor-in-Chief of the UK edition of Reader’s Digest. She was appointed Deputy Editor of the London Evening Standard in 2009 and became its Editor in 2012.
Howard Brenton has been writing plays for over 50 years. The most recent are Paul (2005) and Never So Good (2008) at the National Theatre, The Ragged Trousered Philosophers (2010, after Robert Tressell) at the Everyman Theatre Liverpool and Chichester Festival Theatre, 55 Days (2012), the Arrest of Ai Weiwei (2013) and Drawing the Line (2013) at Hampstead Theatre, In Extremis (2008), Anne Boleyn (2010) and Doctor Scroggy’s War (2014) at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Jodie Ginsberg is CEO of Index on Censorship, a London-based organisation that champions free expression worldwide. Founded by poet Stephen Spender, Index publishes works by censored writers and artists and campaigns against censorship. A former foreign correspondent, Jodie worked for more than a decade for Reuters news agency and from 2007-2011 was Reuters’ London Bureau Chief, where she led coverage of the financial crisis, UK riots, and phone hacking scandal. Jodie set up the Reuters ‘press gang’ initiative – a journalism programme for young people in communities around Canary Wharf, and in 2013 was shortlisted in the media category of the UK’s First Women Awards.