![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/Journalism-Kostas-Vaxevanis-credit-to-Demotix-and-Kostas-Pikoulas1.jpg\" "\\"Journalist")
<\/a>The arrest of Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis on 28 October 2012, just days after he published a list of more than 2,000 suspected tax evaders, drew international condemnation.<\/p>\nHe was found not guilty of breaking data privacy laws in November 2012, but the Athens public prosecutor subsequently ordered a retrial. If he is sentenced, he faces up to two years\u2019 imprisonment or a fine.<\/p>\n
Vaxevanis published the so-called \u201cLagarde List\u201d of wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts in his weekly magazine Hot Doc in October 2012. The list is named after IMF head Christine Lagarde, who handed it over to her Greek counterpart in 2010 when she was French finance minister.<\/p>\n
Successive Greek governments have failed to prosecute a single person on the list or any other high-profile individual for tax evasion. Vaxevanis argues that publication of the list was in the public interest. He told the Guardian: \u201cThe country is governed by a poisonous combination of politicians, businessmen and journalists who cover one another’s backs \u2026 Had it not been for the foreign media taking such an interest in my own story, it would have been buried.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dimitris Trimis, head of the Athens Newspaper Editors Union, told the BBC that the pressure on press freedom in Greece was the most intense of his career. Before Vaxevanis\u2019 arrest two state TV presenters were taken off air after discussing a minister\u2019s response to claims by anti-fascist demonstrators that they had been tortured by the police.<\/p>\n
Soon after Vaxevanis\u2019 arrest, journalist Spiros Karatzaferis was detained after announcing he would leak damaging documents about the country\u2019s faltering economy. “The government feels insecure,\u201d Trimis said. The only way it feels it can convince society of its policies is to try to manipulate the media through coercion.<\/p>\n
Photo: Demotix \/\u00a0Kostas Pikoulas<\/em><\/p>\n Working as facilitators, producers and archivists, Mosireen provide both online and offline space to share this wave of citizen news and people\u2019s perspectives with the wider world.<\/p>\n Whilst none of the Mosireen founders were journalists by profession \u2013 they come from a variety of other disciplines, from urban planning to graphic design and mechanics – they recognised the importance of the independent media voices emerging from the revolution.<\/p>\n Mosireen\u2019s media centre in Cairo is a community-supported space, and although professionals also use the centre, the focus is on providing ordinary people with skills, equipment, and know-how. The collective has since trained several hundred people with the output of their work available to download, stream, screen and distribute for free on a non-commercial basis. Footage from the archive is also regularly screened at Tahrir Cinema, a free open-air cinema off Tahrir Square (pictured). It continues to film the on-going discontent to this day.<\/p>\n Mosireen \u2013 a play on the Arabic words for \u201cEgypt\u201d and \u201cdetermined\u201d \u2013 also holds regular public events and talks in its workspace in downtown Cairo. The opportunity for the public to get involved in all aspects of production allows for an unprecedented level of interactivity in the creation of Egyptian history. All of which is in line with another of Mosireen\u2019s objectives: to counter the narratives put forward by state-owned media through the presentation of multiple viewpoints.<\/p>\n Tan (pictured) and her fellow bloggers were arrested in September 2012 and charged with \u2018conducting propaganda against the state\u2019 in articles that allegedly \u2018distorted and opposed\u2019 the Vietnamese government.<\/p>\n In fact in over 700 articles on Tan\u2019s blog Cong Ly va Su That (\u2018Justice and Truth\u2019) she exposed the extent of corruption in the country. She covered a broad range of social issues, including the maltreatment of children, corruption, unfair taxation and illegal land confiscations by local party officials.<\/p>\n Before becoming a journalist, Tan worked as a police woman in Hanoi, giving her an insight into the workings of the system. On 4 October 2012, after a trial lasting just one day, Tan was sentenced to spend the next ten years in jail, with an additional five years of house arrest upon release. She refused to plead guilty.<\/p>\n This month a court in Vinh in Nghe An province, northern Vietnam, sentenced 14 activists, many of them bloggers, to up to 13 years in jail followed by several years of house arrest. The BBC reported that their convictions relied on loosely worded national security laws — in this instance article 79 of the penal code, which vaguely prohibits activities aimed at overthrowing the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that state officials had beaten and stripped online reporter Nguyen Hoang Vi while detained by Ho Chi Minh City police.<\/p>\n \u201cThese shocking prison sentences confirm our worst fears \u2014 that the Vietnamese authorities have chosen to make an example of these bloggers, in an attempt to silence others,\u201d Rupert Abbott, Amnesty\u2019s researcher on Vietnam, told the New York Times, adding that freedom of expression in the country was \u201cdire and worsening.\u201d<\/p>\n Before the trial began, Tan\u2019s mother killed herself in a self-immolation protest against the treatment of her daughter, and the violence, harassment and threats of deportation levelled against the family.<\/p>\n Police asked Eser about political rallies she had covered as a journalist, as well as the notes she had kept on them, according to a statement by the Journalists’ Union of Turkey.<\/p>\n Broadly worded anti-terror and penal code statutes allow the authorities to conflate coverage of banned groups and special investigations with outright terrorism or other anti-state activity.<\/p>\n These statutes ” make no distinction between journalists exercising freedom of expression and [individuals] aiding terrorism,” said Mehmet Ali Birand, an editor with the Istanbul-based station, Kanal D, speaking to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).<\/p>\n Censorship in Turkey remains endemic. CPJ estimated that Eser\u2019s detention brought to 50 the number of people in jail for journalistic activity in the country. Other organisations suggest the number is even higher. Turkey currently is ahead of even Iran and China in the number of journalists it is known to have in prison.<\/p>\n There is also more widely a chilling atmosphere for free expression and press freedom in Turkey leading to sackings of journalists and self-censorship: as the European Commission said in its 2012 progress report on Turkey: \u201cOn a number of\u00a0 occasions journalists have been fired after signing articles openly critical of the government.\u00a0 All of this, combined with a high concentration of the media in industrial conglomerates with interests going far beyond the free circulation of information and ideas, has a chilling effect and limits freedom of expression in practice, while making self-censorship a common phenomenon in the Turkish media.\u201d They also point out that 16641 cases in total were pending against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights in September 2012. In March 2012, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, was charged and fined for a statement in a Swiss newspaper that \u201cwe have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These are the nominees for the 2013 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Journalism Award<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[8935],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78211,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78209\/revisions\/78211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Mosireen, Egyptian citizen media collective<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"\/awards\/shortlist\/mosireen.jpg\")
Founded in Egypt in early 2011, the Mosireen Collective sought to support and promote the growing wave of citizen journalism that had emerged in the lead-up to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, when members of the public captured the protests and police brutality on their mobile phones.<\/p>\nTa Phong Tan, imprisoned Vietnamese blogger<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"\/awards\/shortlist\/taphongtan.jpg\")
Ta Phong Tan is one of three Vietnamese bloggers, collectively calling themselves the \u2018Club for Free Journalists\u2019, at the centre of a draconian clampdown by the country\u2019s authorities. Vietnam is one of the world\u2019s most restrictive countries for freedom of speech and the press. Only China, Eritrea and North Korea come lower on RSF\u2019s press-freedom index.<\/p>\nSadiye Eser and Turkey\u2019s imprisoned journalists<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"\/awards\/shortlist\/sadiye.jpg\")
Sadiye Eser (pictured) who writes for the leftist daily Evrensel (Universal) Newspaper, was arrested on 10 December and is still being held. The most recent reports claimed she is now likely to be being held at Bakirkoy Women\u2019s prison.<\/p>\n