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Index on Censorship award winner Nabeel Rajab had the final hearing on his appeal delayed for a third time, until April 15. Rajab, who is appealing his sentence over a tweet, remains under a travel ban.
“It is clear that Bahrain government can’t simply send Bahrain’s leading human rights defenders to jail while the United Nation’s human rights council in Geneva is still in session. Intimidation against him will not stop, they don’t want to end up his case as it will lead to lifting the travel ban, which is something Bahraini government very afraid of”, Sayed Alwadaei, director of advocacy for Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, told Index in an email.
Index’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg said that “the continual postponements of Nabeel’s court dates is another example of how justice is not being served in Bahrain. While his case is still pending, Nabeel is not free to travel, and kept in perpetual uncertainty about his future. And all because Nabeel expressed an opinion. We call on the Bahraini authorities to drop all charges against him and for the international community to ensure that Bahrain meets its international commitments on human rights.”
In January, Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was handed down a six-month suspended sentence pending a fine over the following tweet:
many #Bahrain men who joined #terrorism & #ISIS came from security institutions and those institutions were the first ideological incubator
Bahrain’s ministry of interior and ministry of defence both alleged the tweet “denigrated government institutions”. Rajab was released on bail while appealing the verdict, the outcome of which was expected on March 15 before being delayed a month.
Rajab, one of Bahrain’s most prominent human rights activist, has been continuously targeted by authorities in relation to his human rights campaigning work. He was released from prison last May, where he spent two years on charges which included writing offensive tweets and participating in illegal protests.
On 12 March, Rajab wrote to Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief. Calling for further international support for himself and his fellow human rights activists, he said he was “deeply disappointed by the EU’s lack of strong action to back up its human rights commitments in its foreign policy”.
He also wrote of his latest questioning by police, in early March. He says he was accused of inciting hatred towards the regime, for, among other things “accusing the police and ministry of interior with torturing detainees” and “calling the events happening in Bahrain a revolution”.
“These accusations cannot more obviously target my freedoms of expression and association,” Rajab stated. “Moreover, they are directly related to my work as a human rights activist.”
Echoing Rajab, Alwadaei believes the response from the international community could have significant impact on Rajab’s case: “I strongly believe the moment they [Bahraini authorities] feel they have less international pressure on his case he will be sent directly to prison.”
Tim Cross and Martha Lane Fox, credit: Mark Boardman
Martha Lane Fox and retired Major General Tim Cross debate how far governments go when balancing individual rights and safeguarding the nation. This is an extract from a longer feature in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Martha Lane Fox
When it comes to balancing national security and personal privacy, I believe that your personal data should be your personal data, and that action should be taken based on a case that can be proven, as opposed to looking at everyone in society’s movements and then targeting those who stand out. I am not a fan of the world we seem to be ending up in, and I don’t necessarily believe that it is because of anything malicious. I think it would be better to have a system where your data is your personal property, and there then have to be the same restrictions applied as would be the case if someone wanted to enter your home and go through your belongings or intercept your post.
Tim Cross
Like fighting terrorism, governments have to “fight” with one hand tied behind their backs, but they cannot fight with both hands tied as some would clearly prefer. Individuals will understandably not want governments interfering with, or prying into, their personal privacy, but no one will thank any government if the banking system or consumer supply chains were to collapse. Monitoring cyberspace now forms a key part of any government responsibilities, and is (or should be) included in any national security strategy.
This said, if people fear the state is holding too much data on them unnecessarily and (rightly) demand some semblance of control over what happens with that data, then government is the least of their worries. Leaving aside the fact that government resources are scarce, the idea that some government employee is sitting in a room somewhere carefully sifting through everyone’s email is fanciful. Intelligence and law enforcement have to meet certain criteria including necessity, proportionality and justification. This is absolutely the way it should be. But private firms have no such restrictions in place. Government intelligence and law enforcement agencies are rightly burdened by layers of legality, including authorisations, justifications and audit trails, but big corporations, particularly those whose primary public interface is through cyber means, use and exploit personal details for a wide variety of reasons. While these may sometimes include improving their services, more unpalatably they sell details on to third parties. This is absolutely endemic. Many companies will not allow customers to use their service unless they agree to terms and conditions that essentially mean losing control of their personal details and allowing them to be sold on to the highest bidders. The primary concern of business is making money. Not so with governments, whose intelligence and law enforcement agencies are about deterring/catching enemies and protecting the public.
To read the rest of the debate, click here to subscribe to Index on Censorship magazine. Or buy an individual issue. Or subscribe to the app (free 30-day trial).
Major General (Rtd) Tim Cross (CBE) was commissioned into the British Army in 1971. He served in Northern Ireland, Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo. He was also the British deputy to the US-led Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs, later re-titled the Coalition Provisional Authority. He is chair of the think-tank Theos
Martha Lane Fox is chair of Go On UK, a digital skills charity which helps people to get online. She co-founded travel website lastminute.com, and in 2013 became a crossbench peer in the House of Lords
“Index welcomes the recognition by the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee that Britain’s surveillance laws require a complete overhaul. However, we are dismayed that the committee has accepted the premise that bulk collection of data does not constitute mass surveillance. It does. Bulk and indiscriminate collection of data poses a serious and severe threat to our civil liberties, including our rights to free expression and to privacy.”
A scene from the recently released documentary India’s Daughter (Image: BBC)
Whoever, intending to insult the modesty of any woman, utters any word, makes any sound or gesture, or exhibits any object, intending that such word or sound shall be heard, or that such gesture or object shall be seen, by such woman, or intrudes upon the privacy of such woman, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both.
– Section 509, Indian Penal Code
“The lady…or the girl, or woman, is more precious than a gem, a diamond. It is up to you how you want to keep that diamond in your hand.”
“Someone put his hand inside her and pulled out something long. It was her intestines.”
“My husband told me I was stupid because I went to protest and didn’t think about the consequences”
– From the documentary India’s Daughter
The rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on a bus in Delhi in December horrified much of India and the world. Rape is by definition an act of violence and violation, but the details of the brutality meted out by the gang of six attackers were particularly shocking. Singh was flown to a specialist hospital in Singapore, but eventually succumbed to her injuries.
The 23-year old had been returning home from a trip to the cinema to see The Life Of Pi with a male friend. Of course, in discussions of rape, it does not matter what the victim was doing; where the victim was going, or when, or why or with whom. But it was extraordinary how the “asking for it” argument was extended in the prosecution of Singh’s killers.
Watching the BBC’s stunning India’s Daughter documentary was a disturbing experience. Singh had not gone out alone, it was true. She had not gone to a bad part of town: but she had gone out in the evening, with a man who was not a family member. That was enough.
She was female in public. That was enough to justify the attack. One attacker spoke of taking “pleasure” where you found it: the rich man will pay for his “pleasure”, the poor man will attain it “through courage” — that is, rape.
India’s Daughter was a shocking, grim and important hour of television that laid the misogyny of society bare for all to see. All, that is, except Indian BBC viewers, who were denied the opportunity to watch the documentary.
The Indian government obtained an injunction barring the film being shown in the country after it emerged the filmmakers had interviewed one of the rapists, Mukesh Singh. The attacker was apparently unrepentant, repeating the mantra that a “good girl” would not have got herself into the situation where he raped her.
Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh was appalled, saying: “It was noticed the documentary film depicts the comments of the convict which are highly derogatory and are an affront to the dignity of women.” The government invoked section 509 of the Indian penal code
So the film was banned from television. And then later from YouTube in India. An hour of forensic, challenging film-making, exploring violence against women and the attitudes around violence against women was censored in order to protect women’s honour — a woman’s “honour” being patriarchy’s most precious bauble. Indian society had failed to protect Jiyoti Singh in life and now, still, she, through her story, was to be denied access to public space in death. This is not how we “protect” women.
It is not the job of society to “protect” women: rather it is the job of society to ensure women’s rights. This is not done by keeping quiet, or suggesting that women keep quiet, but rather by talking loud and clear.
This week, Naz Shah, the Labour parliamentary candidate for Bradford West (where she will challenge George Galloway) became an instant star after an article about her life and what had driven her to seek political office. Her mother had been brutalised for years. Shah’s father had run off with another woman, and her mother sought shelter for herself and her children with another man. But she found torture, not sanctuary. After years of abuse, Shah’s mother killed her tormentor. Following campaigning work from the ever-inspirational Southall Black Sisters, Shah’s mother Zoora saw her jail sentence for the killing reduced from 20 years to 12.
Borrowing a phrase from Barack Obama, Shah described how her political ambition had stemmed from the “dream of her mother”. After Shah’s father left, it was the mother, the innocent party, who was left with the shame, the besmirched honour. While in prison, Zoora Shah told her daughter that she would like to see her become a prison governor, so that she could help women in incarceration. Shah’s impulse ever since, she says, was to be in a position to influence change.
But still she realises there will be people who are not interested in women taking up public spaces. “Already my ‘character’ has been attacked and desecrated through social media and trolling. The smear campaign that has started has been some of the most vicious and disgusting I have seen. But it does not scare me, will not change me, and it in fact fuels my passion for change more,” she wrote for Urban Echo.
The impulse to deny women the right to exist in public is not limited to the streets of Delhi, or Bradford. Think of the threats received by feminist Caroline Criado Perez, by MPs such as Stella Creasy and Luciana Berger. Think, even of the sexist chants against female officials and staff that have been highlighted by the Football Association recently. The language may be openly hateful, or couched in “protective” metaphor, but the message is always clear. The public sphere, public interaction, is for men, and at best, you are here by our permission. But the question is not, fundamentally, about who grants permission. As long as we accept that that power belong to one group and not the other, then we are accepting and entrenching inequality. The aspiration is to smash any idea of who is “allowed” to go where, who is allowed to wear what, who is allowed to say what. In an equal world, there can be no concept of “permission” being granted by one group to another. Instead, as Naz Shah wrote, there must be “real meaningful and honest conversations not only with ourselves but with our families, our communities and beyond”.
Nico Sell is a US-based entrepreneur and activist for online privacy and secure digital communication. Sell is the CEO of Wickr, a private messaging app with watertight encryption technology. Messages sent using the app self-destruct after a length of time adjusted by the sender – from six days to one second – and are then overwritten by gibberish data on the sender’s and receiver’s phones, making them impossible to recreate.
“Wickr is a messaging app that allows you to send pictures, videos and files, but the only difference is that only you have the keys, so we don’t see who any of our users are, or what they are sending. We are essentially just a transports of gibberish, and it’s used by a lot of human rights fighters around the world for those reasons”, Sell told Index on Censorship.
Wickr’s secure encryption and lack of a central database distinguishes it from similar apps such as Snapchat, which was hacked in January 2014 and had its users’ details posted online. After the breach, downloads of Wickr increased by 50 per cent.
Files leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the extent to which the US National Security Agency had covertly retrieved users’ personal data from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and others. Many other countries were also shown to be extracting information from tech companies: the Venezuelan government, for example, has been accused of broadcasting human rights activists’ Skype calls on national television to intimidate them.
But Wickr was designed to run without a master key that could decrypt its users’ messages, which means it has no user information to hand over to the authorities if they demand it. Indeed, in early 2014 Sell rebuffed an FBI agent who informally requested that she implement a backdoor into Wickr, so that its data could be acquired if necessary.
Wickr has been downloaded more than three million times since launching in 2012. Since then it has added secure photo- and video-sending features. In December 2014 it was launched in desktop form. Sell hopes that billions of people will eventually use either Wickr or services incorporating it, and envisions its technology being used for “all the financial transactions in the world”.
Sell has also acted as a venture catalyst for more than 20 successful digital security companies and has co-organised Defcon, the largest hacker conference in the world, for over a decade. She is the group’s liaison with federal agencies seeking the services of white-hat hackers, who probe organisations’ websites for flaws in their security systems.
Sell told Index that she got involved with this field of work when was introduced to The Dark Tangent, founder of Defcon, about 15 years ago. She began working with him, and was “educated by the very best hackers in the world.”
“That’s where they taught me things like why lawful intercepts is something we don’t want to do, because if you can break into it, what that means is a backdoor for the good guys will always mean a backdoor for the bad guys,” she said.
“I think security and privacy naturally go in hand together, but I think just understanding the underlying technology and what’s going on making privacy obvious.”
Every year at Defcon, Sell runs a nonprofit training camp for children and teenagers called R00tz Asylum, which she is also CEO and co-founder of, in which digital skills such as white-hat hacking techniques are taught.
“So we teach them things like how to eavesdrop on cell phone calls, look at other people’s text messages that are going over the wireless network, turning on your interfacing camera on your computer or smartphone or smartTV, and how to break into lawful intercept machines,” Sell said. She added that the point of this, is that people need to understand hacks so that better systems can be built.
Sell raises awareness of the need for individuals to take more care over their digital privacy through frequent public engagement talks. At these talks, she hands out stickers for her audience to place over all their front-facing cameras. She also explains why she always wears sunglasses in public – to block facial recognition software – and keeps her phone and passport in an unhackable Faraday cage.
When asked about the relationship between online privacy and freedom of expression, Sell said:
“I think it’s vitally important. 52 per cent of the world still lives under dictatorship, and I think that what brought my founders together is that there was the belief that private correspondence is a universal human right, and in fact, the most important human right that we have for the next decade as we’re bringing all of these billions of people online and having a way for them to have private conversations without interference from government, or even a bigger threat, is corporations who are buying and selling this information.
“It’s our belief that if we can provide this vital right to everyone no matter our frontier, then we can have more evolution instead of revolution, because you don’t get pent up energy and people backed in a corner if there is open communication and education. So we think it’s vitally important in society as we all get connected over the next decade.”
Syria Tracker is a crisis mapping platform which collates and exhibits live data on human rights abuses and other welfare issues brought about by the Syrian conflict. Reports of killings, rapes, water and food tampering, and chemical attacks ongoing in Syria are geolocated and collated onto a live map by US-based volunteers.
Syria Tracker synthesises two pre-existing data-sourcing platforms: Harvard University’s Healthmap, which mines online sources to monitor disease outbreaks; and the crowdsourcing tool Ushahidi, originally built in 2008 to monitor post-election violence in Kenya.
The combination makes for meticulous accuracy, since data from one source is triangulated with the other, and unverified information is discarded – the volunteers behind Syria Tracker estimate that they only use 6 per cent of on-the-ground reports received. The news-tracking tool covers anti- and pro-Assad news sources to reduce potential bias.
The bloody conflict between the Syrian government and opposition groups, sparked by the 2011 protests across the Arab world and reignited in 2014 by the advance of IS, has made the country one of the deadliest in the world for journalists, with one of the worst records for free press. Syria Tracker’s founders encourage its civilian reporters to contribute anonymously, using encryption software such as Tor.
It uses a combination of user-generated reports, photos and videos – more than 80,000 of which have been sent to Syria Tracker since the conflict broke out in 2011 – and computer-aggregated data. The tool has digitally mined 180,000 articles from 2,000 news sources, and has also searched through more than 80 million tweets.
The map aims to provide Syrians and external relief-providers with a holistic depiction of the conflict, which is more accurate and up-to-date than traditional news sources are able to supply. In early 2014, for example, Syria Tracker warned of an outbreak of polio days before other news outlets, thanks to early civilian reports.
By assembling otherwise diverse data, the map has also illustrated developing trends in the country’s violent fighting. For example, in 2014 Syria Tracker showed a rise in the percentage of total deaths which were of women or children, indicating a rise in civilian targeting.
“It’s such a great honour to be nominated for the award,” said Taha Kass-Hout, founder of Syria Tracker, in a recent interview with Index on Censorship. “It shows that those voices on the ground that are sharing with the rest of the world are not going unheard. It shows them that the data that they are sharing means something,”
A coalition of international press freedom organisations has hit out at a move to force some Russian “government-controlled” TV stations off Lithuanian airwaves.
Lithuania’s Committee on Radio and Television is reportedly considering, at the request of the government, to ban two Russian television channels from broadcasting to the Baltic country.
“If a ban is imposed on the whole channel due to repeated violations, I believe it should be longer … I believe it should be up to one year,” Vaitiekunas added in comments to the Baltic News Service earlier this year.
Russian state-owned media such as RT (formerly Russia Today), has come under fire for alleged distortion of facts in the their coverage, especially in relation to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
In a letter this week to the Lithuanian President, media freedom organisations including the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and the World Press Freedom Committee, argued that while they understand the objection to certain Russian broadcasts in “the current tense situation”, they consider a ban to be counterproductive and in contradiction of international free speech standards.
“If put into effect, bans on broadcasts across frontiers would almost inevitably be seized upon by the Russian authorities to justify bans on broadcasts by independent news media from other countries,” the letter states.
“It is an established conviction in free societies that the best answer to bad speech is more speech. We can see from the reaction to recent events in Moscow that there is a large public that is open to arguments, news reports and information to counteract official propaganda. The risk should not be taken to cut off such audiences from the free flow of information from outside their borders,” the group added.
Valor por Tamaulipas is a crowd-sourced news platform, based in Mexico and set up in 2012 to fill the void created by the region’s cartel-induced media blackout.
Valor’s online followers – more than half a million on Facebook and 125,000 on Twitter – send in reports of cartel-related violence, such as shootings, robberies, or missing people. These reports are immediately curated and disseminated by the page administrator, with a hashtag such as #SDR (situación de riesgo ie “situation of risk”) attached.
From its inception, Valor por Tamaulipas (which means Courage for Tamaulipas) has been under constant threat by cartels. In 2013 leaflets were distributed throughout the state offering 600,000 pesos (~£25,000) to anyone with information on the page’s management. This prompted Valor’s administrator – whose identity has always been a closely kept secret – to temporarily suspend activities and relocate their family to the US.
A representative from Valor por Tamaulipas told Index, “The nomination is important for people in the state of Tamaulipas, and for those who see this community as a dependable way of showing what criminals and corrupt authorities are doing.”
The Mexican government is also criticised for trying to cover-up the extent of the situation and seeking to present a more positive image to the outside world. As a result, citizens of this state have looked increasingly to social media channels and blogs, which may have flaws and bias, but professional journalism is severely restricted to the point of near blackout.
“The principle motivation is to give citizens a voice, and other objectives arise from here – such as spreading the word on missing people, on the modus operandi of criminals, on corrupt authorities and on current ‘risk situations’, so people know about insecurity in certain areas,” added the representative.
“The community is also a space for those from small or rural areas; crimes that happen there are equally despicable, but people who live there have an disadvantage as there are less people who share and retweet information.”
María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, co-administrator of a similar page Esperanza por Tamaulipas, was kidnapped and murdered by cartel members in October 2014. Rubio had frequently shared up-to-date information about violent incidents in Tamaulipas to her thousands of Twitter followers, using an anonymous Twitter handle. Her killers used her Twitter account to reveal her identity, post her “confession”, and give warnings to other Valor administrators to keep silent. They also posted pictures of her dead body.
Rubio’s death temporarily halted activity at Valor por Tamaulipas, and in November the administrator suggested that control of the pages would be transferred to someone associated with the authorities. But after complaints from followers that the page’s content would suffer, the previous anonymous administrator has taken charge of the page once again, and has been posting dozens of alerts each day since.
Under the famous ceiling of room XX created by Miquel Barcel in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, the on-going session of the Council is no different. Some of those unnoticed statements deserve our attention.
One in particular.
On Thursday, 5 March, one of the United Nations’ chief human rights voices, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, presented his first annual report to the council. It is his first since he took up the position of high commissioner for human rights in September 2014. From terrorism, torture and harassment of human rights defenders to the reorganisation of his office, the high commissioner’s report aims at presenting the state of human rights, the major threats against them and how he aims at building up his office to face those realities.
Al Hussein’s mandate, which Norway at the council called “an authoritative voice on human rights, built on […] repeated confirmation of its independence,” is what the Russian Federation in fact wants to silence.
Russia, which is today one of the 47 members of the council, was infuriated at the high commissioner’s statement presenting his report. It is traditional for states mentioned by international human rights mechanisms to accuse such instruments for being politicised and obeying “double standards.”
Russia went a step further by “condemning the high commissioner’s attempts to stigmatise any states for their acts or omissions in the field of human rights, even if they indeed took place.” Russia does not refer to politicisation or to attention the high commissioner would be giving to situations in certain countries only, but instead calls upon the United Nations voice for human rights to stop mentioning any country all together, whatever human rights violation took place in the country. In fact, Russia calls for the high commissioner to be silent.
Such a statement should not remain unnoticed because it sheds light on how Russia sees the international system; not one of standards and principles challenging states but rather one of obedience and muteness serving the states. The challenge Russia is facing with the high commissioner’s report is in fact a reflection of its disrespect for international law, be it in the way it has led suppression of civil society at home or its military activities in Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.
Because we must applaud those who stand firm for rights, we must also make sure that declarations by states who aim at silencing them do not go unnoticed. This one in particular.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The 2015 Freedom of Expression Campaigning Award-winner is activist Amran Abdundi, who, through various channels, has worked to make life safer in northeastern Kenya – supporting women who are vulnerable to rape, female circumcision and murder.
The women’s rights activist runs the Frontier Indigenous Network, an organisation which mobilises female peace builders and activists along the dangerous border with Somalia.
“The award ceremony was aired by all community radios in northern Kenya and reached many people. I am happy because it will give women courage to stand up for their rights.”
Atlatszo.hu is an investigative news outlet founded and managed by Tamas Bodoky, the main goal of which is to promote free, transparent circulation of information in Hungary. The website, which receives around 500,000 unique visitors per month, acts as watchdog to a Hungarian government which has increasingly tightened its grip on press freedom in the country.
Atlatszo.hu produces investigative reports based on FOI requests, and instigates FOI lawsuits in cases where its requests are refused. In 2014, it has uncovered cases of state control of the media, election fraud, government corruption, tax fraud, and misuse of public funds.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who announced intentions to build an “illiberal state” in summer 2014, has in the past year overseen the unexplained dismissal of a news editor who revealed expenses fraud within the government, and the introduction of new media taxes designed to cripple independent news outlets. His proposed “internet tax”, which would charge Hungarian citizens 150 forints (£0.37) per gigabyte of downloaded data, prompted countrywide protests in October. Critics saw the move as an attempt to curb freedom of information.
In 2014 the government also initiated a crackdown on Hungarian NGOs which were funded by Norwegian grants aiming to strengthen civil society in the poorer parts of Europe. These NGOs, several of which have been raided by police forces since July 2014, were accused by the government of acting on behalf of “leftist” foreign interests. The smear campaign against these NGOs was taken up by the country’s biggest media outlets, the majority of which are heavily influenced by the government.
Atlatszo.hu was included on the NGO blacklist, and Atlatszo’s partner organisation, the Asimov Foundation, was also investigated. Bodoky has quipped: “We are very glad to be included [on the list]. It would have been most embarrassing to be left out.”
Through the Asimov Foundation, Bodoky runs workshops with citizens and other NGOs in investigative journalism. The Foundation also solicits FOI requests from the general public using a request generator called KiMitTud (“Who knows what?”), through which around 1300 FOI requests are sent each year. In response to this service, the government introduced an amendment to Hungary’s FOI act in 2013 which allowed “excessive” requests for information to be ignored.
Atlatszo.hu also hosts platforms through which corruption can be easily and anonymously reported. MagyarLeaks, a Tor-based whistleblowing service, was launched in 2011 and prompted the government to investigate Bodoky and seize his hard drive. Late in 2013, a crowdsourced platform called Fizettem was launched, which allows everyday corruption such as police bribes to be reported anonymously.
“We are very proud of this nomination. We think that is very important to encourage critical media in Hungary,” Bodoky said in a recent interview with Index.
11 March: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Asimov Foundation’s offices were raided. They were not.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The 2015 Freedom of Expression Digital Activism Award-winner is journalist Tamás Bodoky, who founded the investigative news website Atlatszo.hu to promote a free press in Hungary, a country where journalists and news organisations face recently introduced media taxes, a proposed internet tax for citizens, smear campaigns and police-run office raids.
Atlatszo acts as watchdog to an increasingly authoritarian Hungarian government.
“The recognition is very helpful. We are always afraid of retaliation and this offers us a level of protection… Hungarian authorities are very aware of this international attention and it is less likely that they will attack as we continue with our investigative projects.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1501490756877-e555df5e-425c-3″ taxonomies=”6951″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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The 2015 Freedom of Expression Campaigning Award-winner is activist Amran Abdundi, who, through various channels, has worked to make life safer in northeastern Kenya – supporting women who are vulnerable to rape, female circumcision and murder.
The 2015 Freedom of Expression Digital Activism Award-winner is journalist Tamás Bodoky, who founded the investigative news website Atlatszo.hu to promote a free press in Hungary, a country where journalists and news organisations face recently introduced media taxes, a proposed internet tax for citizens, smear campaigns and police-run office raids.
