18 Mar 15 | Magazine, mobile, News and features, Volume 44.01 Spring 2015
Women’s Voices by Meltem Arikan
Index on Censorship magazine’s editor, Rachael Jolley, introduces a special issue on refugee camps, looking at how migrants’ stories get told across the world, from Syria and Eritrea to Italy and the UK
Nothing is national any more, everything and everyone is connected internationally: economies, communication systems, immigration patterns, wars and conflicts all map across networks of different kinds.
Those linking networks can leave the world better informed and more aware of its connections, or those networks can fail to acknowledge their intersections, while carrying as much misinformation as information.
Where people are living in fear a connected world can be frightening, it can carry gossip and information back to those who pursue them. Decades ago, when people escaped from their homes to make a new life across the world, they were not afraid that their words, criticising the government they had fled from, could instantly be broadcast in the land they had left behind.
It is no wonder that in this more connected world, those fleeing persecution are more afraid to tell the truth about what the regime that tortured or imprisoned them has been doing. While, on the one hand, it should be easier to find out about such horrors, the way that your words can fly around the world in seconds adds enormous pressures not to speak about, or criticise, the country you fled from.
That fear often produces silence, leaving the wider world confused about the situation in a conflict-riven country where people are being killed, threatened or imprisoned. The consequences of instant communication can be terrifyingly swift.
Yet a different side of those networks, new apps or free phone services such as Skype, can provide some help in getting messages back to families left behind, giving them some hope about their loved ones’ future. That is one aspect that those in decades and centuries past, who fled their homelands, could never do. In the late 19th century, someone who escaped torture in Russia and travelled thousands of miles to the United States, might never speak to the family they had left behind again.
Communication has been revolutionised in the last two decades – where once a creaky telephone line was the only way of speaking to a sister or father across a continent or two, now Skype, Viber, Googlechat, and others offer options to see and speak every day.
In this issue’s special report Across the Wires, our writers and artists examine the threats of free expression within refugee camps, and as refugees desperately flee from persecution. Sources estimate that there are between 15.5 and 16.7 million refugees in the world today. Some are forced to live in camps for decades, others are fleeing from new conflicts, such as three million who have already left Syria. Many of us may know someone who has been forced to flee from another regime, those that don’t may in the future, and have some understanding of what that journey is like.
In this issue, writer Jason DaPonte examines how those who have escaped remain worried that their words will be captured and used against their families, and the steps they take to try avoid this. He also looks at “new” technology’s ability to keep refugees in touch with the outside world and to help tell the story of the camps themselves.
Italian journalist Fabrizio Gatti spent four years undercover, discovering details of refugee escape routes and people trafficking. In an extract from his book, previously unpublished in English, he tells his story of assuming the identity of a Kurdish man Bilal escaping torture, and fleeing to Italy via the Lampedusa detention camp, and the treatment he encountered. He speaks only Arabic and English to camp officials, but is able to hear what they said to each other in Italian about those seeking asylum. He uncovers the inhumanity and lack of rights those around him experienced in this powerful piece of writing.
Some of our authors in this issue speak from personal experience of seeking refuge, not speaking the language of the land they are forced to move to, and the steps they go through to resettle and be accepted in another land. Kao Kalia Yang’s family fled Laos during the Vietnam war, moving first to Thailand and then to the United States. She remembers how the family struggled first without understanding or speaking in Thai, then the same battles with English once they settled in the United States.
Ismail Einashe, whose family fled from Somaliland, talks to those who have escaped from one of the most secretive countries in the world, Eritrea. Einashe talks to Eritreans, now living in the UK, who are still afraid to speak openly about the conditions at home for fear of retribution.
The report also examines how the global media portrays refugee stories, the accuracy of those portrayals and how projects such as a new Syrian soap opera, partly written by a refugee, are giving asylum seekers and camp dwellers more power to tell the stories themselves.
But when people are escaping danger, the natural inclination is to stay quiet and under the radar. Some bravely do not. They intend to alert the world to a situation that is unfolding, and to attempt to protect others. Our report shows how much easier it is for the world’s citizens to find out about terrible persecution than it was in other eras, but how those communication tools can be turned back on those that are persecuted themselves. The push and pull of global networks, to be used for freedom or to silence others, is an on-going battle and one that we can only become more aware of.
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© Rachael Jolley
03 Feb 15
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
I write to Long, asking him to remove his footnotes. The poor man is now the mouse in the middle, caught between an exigent author and equally demanding censors. As we descend into the fine points of Vietnamese history and geography, my editor and I embark on a voluminous correspondence. The nature of this correspondence is exemplified by Rung Sat, the Swamp of the Assassins, which is the first item that Long has tagged for a footnote.
Southeast of Saigon, bordering the city’s main shipping channel to the sea, Rung Sat is the tidal mangrove swamp that for many years was home to the Binh Xuyen river pirates. The French had used the river pirates to help manage their colonial operations in Vietnam. Bay Vien, head of the pirates, had been elevated to the rank of general and given Saigon to run as a personal fiefdom. He owned the Hall of Mirrors, the largest brothel in Asia, with twelve hundred employees. He ran the Grand Monde casino in Cholon and the Cloche d’Or casino in Saigon. Bay Vien’s lieutenant was named chief of police in the capitol region, which stretched sixty miles from Saigon to Cap Saint Jacques. Bay Vien’s most lucrative operation, with a share of the proceeds going to the French government, was the opium trade that stretched all the way from Laos to Marseille. The Swamp of the Assassins also served as a communist staging area during the Vietnam war, and the river pirates themselves had briefly doubled as communists, before they switched to the other side.
Before retiring to Paris, where he could be seen strolling down the Champs Elysees with his pet tiger on a leash, Bay Vien used to hide in the Rung Sat swamp when things got too hot in Saigon. This was the case in 1955, after legendary spook Edward Lansdale arrived in town. Intent on knocking the French from their colonial perch and replacing them with a client government loyal to the United States, Lansdale launched a military campaign against the Binh Xuyen. Vietnamese army troops fought the pirates house-to-house for control of Saigon. More soldiers were involved in this week-long battle than in the famous Tet Offensive of 1968. Five hundred people were killed, two thousand wounded, and another twenty thousand left homeless. This proxy battle between France and the United States marked the transition from the First Indochina War to the Second.
Pham Xuan An claimed that he learned everything he knew about spying from Edward Lansdale. Lansdale was An’s patron as he began his career in military intelligence, and it was Lansdale who recommended that An study journalism in the United States. Because of the Swamp’s importance for colonialists, communists, river pirates, and spies, I had done a lot of archival work to verify its position in Vietnamese history. This is why I was particularly displeased to find a footnote saying, “The author is wrong.”
It is not called Rung Sat but Rung Sac, said Long, thereby turning the Swamp of the Assassins into the Forest of Seacoast Shrubs. (Rung means forest, but when dealing with wet mangrove forests, one might plausibly call them swamps. Sat is a Sino-Vietnamese combining word meaning death, as in am sat, to assassinate.) The government has renamed the Swamp because the government says this was never its correct name. And why is this? Because the government maintains that south Vietnamese have been distorting the country’s language and inadvertently displaying their ignorance for centuries. Southerners pronounce words ending in “t” as if they ended in “k” or a hard “c.” Thus, Rung Sac mistakenly became Rung Sat because southerners can’t spell correctly and are often confused by two words that sound the same. Undoubtedly, the communist officials behind this renaming were also sensitive about having used Rung Sat as a staging area during the American war. They didn’t want to be confused with swamp-dwelling assassins.
The issue might plausibly have been resolved by saying that the area used to be called x and is now known as y. But Vietnamese censors don’t work this way. They have a totalizing view of history. They reach back through time to correct errors retroactively. Even in quoted speech, Bay Vien and Lansdale would be forced to talk about the forest of seacoast shrubs. One can imagine what kind of stilted prose this produces, as anachronisms and communist terminology are inserted into the historical record. I had no choice but to mount a campaign proving, “The editor is wrong.”
I send Long a variety of French and Vietnamese maps, including a 1955 Vietnamese map showing military operations against the Binh Xuyen river pirates. I send maps from U.S. Naval Operations in the area, a copy of President Richard Nixon’s citation to the Rung Sat Special Zone Patrol Group, and a 1974 U.S. Academy of Sciences research report on Rung Sat. I send a 2010 Google satellite map, with the area marked Rung Sat, and I even send a photo of a bus leaving Ho Chi Minh City, with its scheduled destination clearly marked as Rung Sat.
Long comes back with his own “proof and evidence,” including the web site for the Rung Sac Resort and Restaurant, and some real estate prospectuses for housing developments that are financed, I presume, by local Party officials. I press the argument through more emails, until Long eventually writes, “I agree to remove the footnote about Rung Sat entirely.” As we discuss the rest of the footnotes, Long and I return to fighting hand-to-hand in the hedgerows of literature. Every email exchange becomes the Swamp of the Assassins Redux, until finally Long proposes “to remove wrong footnotes or footnotes concerning your mistakes,” I graciously accept his offer.
Next we turn to discussing the title of the book. “The Spy Who Loved Us” could be translated as “The Spy Who Loved America,” or, more poetically, as “America’s Best Enemy,” except that the censors reject these titles. As Long explains, “‘America’s Best Enemy’ is good, but somewhat sensitive. Why ‘best enemy’? Is this implying that Pham Xuan An was not entirely loyal to the revolutionary cause?” After further reflections on “the right viewpoint,” Long admits that “the issue proves to be more intricate than we initially thought.” Later I receive word that “The Spy Who Loved America” has been “immediately rejected” by Vietnam’s “publishing authorities.”
By this time, the people helping me review the manuscript (all of whom wish to remain anonymous) have compiled a list of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that have been bowdlerized or pruned from the text. When I send this list to Long, he replies, “I assure you that the translator did not omit any sentences or paragraphs. He only highlighted sensitive phrases. The omissions or modifications are mine.”
In October 2010, Long writes to say that he is “tired of this project” and discouraged by having the book rejected by two state-owned publishing companies. He is trying to secure a publishing license from a third company, but people are telling him that the upcoming 11th Communist Party Congress, in the spring of 2011, makes it a “sensitive time” for publishing in Vietnam. This is a delicate moment “when everybody takes non-action to avoid complexities,” he says.
Writing to my agent in December 2010, Long says, “We understand the impatience of our author! But the situation is worse than you imagine. Another state-owned publisher has refused to issue a publishing license for our translation. Clearly, it is a highly-sensitive book at this moment in time. Everything is now hanging in the wind.”
When Long writes to tell me that another batch of publishers has refused to give him a license, I imagine the process as something akin to Random House having to clear a book through the Pentagon Publishing Company. If Pentagon Press won’t ink the deal, then Random has to go to publishing houses owned by Homeland Security or the FBI. These negotiations must be prolonged and humiliating, and, in a gift-giving culture like Vietnam, they must also be expensive.
I cool my heels through 2011, waiting for the Communist Party to shuffle a new set of rulers into place. In February 2012, I write to Long, wishing him a happy Water Dragon year and asking if he would kindly provide me with a list of all the governmental bodies that have so far been involved in censoring my book.
A month later, he writes back to apologize for being out of touch. He says he has left Nha Nam to go to work as an editor at a company that publishes math books for children. I feel a twinge of conscience, fearing that I might have been responsible for this change in jobs. “About the license to publish The Spy Who Loved Us,” he writes, “Nha Nam has been applying and still continues to apply to several publishers for a publishing license, not stopping at any time as you maybe think. I have asked for the latest information and was told that officials at Nha Nam still hope that the book will be published.”
“Officially, only state publishing houses are permitted to produce printed books,” Long explains. “So a privately-owned (non-state) company like Nha Nam must participate in so-called joint publication, in order to publish a book under the aegis of a state publishing house and pay a publication fee to this publishing house.”
“Technically, there is no censorship in Vietnam,” he says, “but directors or editors-in-chief of the publishing houses are sometimes required to remove sensitive items, or even are timid enough to let the book go unpublished (this is our case). This kind of action we call self-censorship, and it is the Gordian knot of the Vietnamese publishing industry.”
Long attaches to his email a copy of Vietnam’s Law on Publishing, a twenty-two-page document that does indeed say quite plainly, in Article 5.2, “The State shall not censor works prior to their publication.” The rest of the document is devoted to contradicting Article 5.2, as it enumerates what is “prohibited during publishing activities.” This includes “propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Article 10),” the incitement of war and aggression, the “spread of reactionary ideology, depraved life styles, cruel acts, social evils and superstition, or destruction of good morals and customs.” Other sections are devoted to the protection of Party, military, defense and other kinds of state secrets. Also forbidden is the “distortion of historical facts,” particularly those “opposing the achievement of the revolution.”
Long tells me that my new editor at Nha Nam is Ms. Nguyen Thi Thu Yen, who appears to be doing double duty as the person who negotiates foreign contracts. After our months of emailing back and forth, Long and I had prepared a second set of galleys, stripped of footnotes and corrected, at least as far as my advisors and I could push it. The manuscript is still bowdlerized and rewritten in dozens of places. All criticism of China has been removed. So too are any references to reeducation camps, graft, corruption, mistakes made by the Communist Party, and other “sensitive” subjects. Unfortunately, Long’s text will soon be supplanted by another, officially-licensed version. Again, I have misunderstood the nature of Vietnamese publishing. After all these months, my book has not yet been censored. It has undergone a kind of pre-censorship review, but the serious work of scrubbing sensitive material from the text has yet to begin.
Part 3: Hostage trade
This second installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 3, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
12 May 14 | Gambia, News and features, Religion and Culture
Erykah Badu peforming at the O2 Academy Brixton in 2011 (Image: SANPA Anne/Demotix)
R&B singer Erykah Badu has called off her planned performance for Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh at the 11th edition of the International Roots Festival. This comes after an intense online campaign by Gambian and foreign right groups against her decision to perform for African dictators.
According to Gambia’s pro-government Daily Observer newspaper, the national organising committee of Roots Festival in a press release said two Jamaican acts, Scratchylus and Empress Reggae, will replace Badu, adding that she could not make it due to “unforeseen circumstances”.
What’s On Gambia confirmed that Badu’s manager Paul J. Levanto disclosed to them in a short email that the artist is no longer performing in Gambia. The site also reported that Gambian rapper Gibou Bala Gaye alias Gee, wrote on his Facebook page that political activists are wasting their time trying to convince international artists to cancel their plans to perform at Gambia’s Independence Stadium.
“Going through my tweets and this BS about Erykah Badu not to come to Gambia is pissing me off. Only people saying issh are either on exile or did something here and can’t come back.” He added that: “People like me been waiting my whole life time for this, to actually watch Erykah Badu perform live because I’ve been a fan forever. Plus, it’s her work freaking respect that!”
The Grammy Award-winner was scheduled to perform at the week-long Gambian music festival that kicked off last Friday (9 May). According to the Washington Blade, Badu’s trip to Gambia was scheduled to take place less than a month after she sang at a lavish birthday party for Swazi King Msawti III. The Swazi Observer reported Badu gave Mswati a $100 bill with a “special stone that she said would uplift His Majesty’s spirits when he was feeling down” during the 24 April event at one of the monarch’s numerous palaces, continued the Blade article.
“Erykah Badu has the basic human right to speak and to sing wherever she wants, unfortunately that is not a right that ordinary Swazis or Gambians have,” Jeffrey Smith of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights told the Blade. “Freedom of expression, assembly, association, and freedom of the press are severely restricted in both of these countries.”
Badu is not the only musician who has faced criticism over plans to perform for leaders with questionable human rights records. According to observers, the Gambian dictatorship organises events like the Roots Festival, with the pretext of celebrating African heritage, but there is more to it than celebration. President Jammeh has in recent years invited scores of internationally renowned artists like Jamaine Jackson, Ousman Diallo alias Ouza, Thione Seck and Kumba Gawlo Seck, enticing them with millions of tax payers’ money to repair his tarnished image.
A recent Time article by Thor Halvorssen and Alex Gladstein of Human Rights Foundation states that: “If Badu bristles under criticism for entertaining King Mswati, she’ll really be frustrated by the world’s reaction when she performs at a concert this May sponsored by the dictator of The Gambia. After seizing power in 1994 military coup, Yahya Jammeh is best known for spending millions of dollars on private parties, for promising to inflict “the ultimate penalty” on homosexuals, for warning the UN that gays are “a threat to human existence”, for claiming that he can cure AIDS in three days, and for executing and disappearing hundreds of his critics. After her Swazi quagmire, perhaps Badu will reconsider her scheduled performance in The Gambia, where she would provide cover for yet another despot, this one a lot more murderous than King Mswati.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic Union of Gambian Activists (DUGA) has written an open letter to Jamaican reggae star Matabaruka, calling on him to disassociate himself from the festival organised by the Gambian leader. The human rights body says because of the revolutionary stance Jamaican have taken on issues affecting African people worldwide, it is necessary to inform Matabaruka of the repressive conditions in Gambia since Jammeh’s lift on to the “saddles of power”.
“During the struggle against apartheid, you, like the ‘stepping razor’, Peter Tosh and others took a principled stance without wavering. We believe that, once you become aware of the repressive conditions your Gambians brothers and sisters are subjected to, you will take the same stance as you did against apartheid. Our fight against tyranny in the Gambia must get the same attention as was given to ‘South Africa’ – Azania. The days of fighting in isolation are over; the struggle for African Liberation is one struggle. Touch one! Touch all!,” states the letter.
This article was published on May 12, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
15 Jan 14 | Europe and Central Asia, European Union, Index Reports, News and features, Politics and Society
This article is part of a series based on our report, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression
Beyond its near neighbourhood, the EU works to promote freedom of expression in the wider world. To promote freedom of expression and other human rights, the EU has 30 ongoing human rights dialogues with supranational bodies, but also large economic powers such as China.
The EU and freedom of expression in China
The focus of the EU’s relationship with China has been primarily on economic development and trade cooperation. Within China some commentators believe that the tough public noises made by the institutions of the EU to the Chinese government raising concerns over human rights violations are a cynical ploy so that EU nations can continue to put financial interests first as they invest and develop trade with the country. It is certainly the case that the member states place different levels of importance on human rights in their bilateral relationships with China than they do in their relations with Italy, Portugal, Romania and Latvia. With China, member states are often slow to push the importance of human rights in their dialogue with the country. The institutions of the European Union, on the other hand, have formalised a human rights dialogue with China, albeit with little in the way of tangible results.
The EU has a Strategic Partnership with China. This partnership includes a political dialogue on human rights and freedom of the media on a reciprocal basis.[1] It is difficult to see how effective this dialogue is and whether in its present form it should continue. The EU-China human rights dialogue, now 14 years old, has delivered no tangible results.The EU-China Country Strategic Paper (CSP) 2007-2013 on the European Commission’s strategy, budget and priorities for spending aid in China only refers broadly to “human rights”. Neither human rights nor access to freedom of expression are EU priorities in the latest Multiannual Indicative Programme and no money is allocated to programmes to promote freedom of expression in China. The CSP also contains concerning statements such as the following:
“Despite these restrictions [to human rights], most people in China now enjoy greater freedom than at any other time in the past century, and their opportunities in society have increased in many ways.”[2]
Even though the dialogues have not been effective, the institutions of the EU have become more vocal on human rights violations in China in recent years. For instance, it included human rights defenders, including Ai Weiwei, at the EU Nobel Prize event in Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry responded by throwing an early New Year’s banquet the same evening to reduce the number of attendees to the EU event. When Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton issued a statement in which she expressed her concerns at the deterioration of the human rights situation in China and called for the unconditional release of all political prisoners detained for exercising their right to freedom of expression.[3] The European Parliament has also recently been vocal in supporting human rights in China. In December 2012, it adopted a resolution in which MEPs denounced the repression of “the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly, press freedom and the right to join a trade union” in China. They criticised new laws that facilitate “the control and censorship of the internet by Chinese authorities”, concluding that “there is therefore no longer any real limit on censorship or persecution”. Broadly, within human rights groups there are concerns that the situation regarding human rights in China is less on the agenda at international bodies such as the Human Rights Council[4] than it should be for a country with nearly 20% of the world’s population, feeding a perception that China seems “untouchable”. In a report on China and the International Human Rights System, Chatham House quotes a senior European diplomat in Geneva, who argues “no one would dare” table a resolution on China at the HRC with another diplomat, adding the Chinese government has “managed to dissuade states from action – now people don’t even raise it”. A small number of diplomats have expressed the view that more should be done to increase the focus on China in the Council, especially given the perceived ineffectiveness of the bilateral human rights dialogues. While EU member states have shied away from direct condemnation of China, they have raised freedom of expression abuses during HRC General Debates.
The Common Foreign and Security Policy and human rights dialogues
The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is the agreed foreign policy of the European Union. The Maastricht Treaty of 1993 allowed the EU to develop this policy, which is mandated through Article 21 of the Treaty of the European Union to protect the security of the EU, promote peace, international security and co-operation and to consolidate democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedom. Unlike most EU policies, the CFSP is subject to unanimous consensus, with majority voting only applying to the implementation of policies already agreed by all member states. As member states still value their own independent foreign policies, the CFSP remains relatively weak, and so a policy that effectively and unanimously protects and promotes rights is at best still a work in progress. The policies that are agreed as part of the Common Foreign and Security Policy therefore be useful in protecting and defending human rights if implemented with support. There are two key parts of the CFSP strategy to promote freedom of expression, the External Action Service guidelines on freedom of expression and the human rights dialogues. The latter has been of variable effectiveness, and so civil society has higher hopes for the effectiveness of the former.
The External Action Service freedom of expression guidelines
As part of its 2012 Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy, the EU is working on new guidelines for online and offline freedom of expression, due by the end of 2013. These guidelines could provide the basis for more active external policies and perhaps encourage a more strategic approach to the promotion of human rights in light of the criticism made of the human rights dialogues.
The guidelines will be of particular use when the EU makes human rights impact assessments of third countries and in determining conditionality on trade and aid with non-EU states. A draft of the guidelines has been published, but as these guidelines will be a Common Foreign and Security Policy document, there will be no full and open consultation for civil society to comment on the draft. This is unfortunate and somewhat ironic given the guidelines’ focus on free expression. The Council should open this process to wider debate and discussion.
The draft guidelines place too much emphasis on the rights of the media and not enough emphasis on the role of ordinary citizens and their ability to exercise the right to free speech. It is important the guidelines deal with a number of pressing international threats to freedom of expression, including state surveillance, the impact of criminal defamation, restrictions on the registration of associations and public protest and impunity against human right defenders. Although externally facing, the freedom of expression guidelines may also be useful in indirectly establishing benchmarks for internal EU policies. It would clearly undermine the impact of the guidelines on third parties if the domestic policies of EU member states contradict the EU’s external guidelines.
Human rights dialogues
Another one of the key processes for the EU to raise concerns over states’ infringement of the right to freedom of expression as part of the CFSP are the human rights dialogues. The guidelines on the dialogues make explicit reference to the promotion of freedom of expression. The EU runs 30 human rights dialogues across the globe, with the key dialogues taking place in China (as above), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Belarus. It also has a dialogues with the African Union, all enlargement candidate countries (Croatia, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Turkey), as well as consultations with Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United States and Russia. The dialogue with Iran was suspended in 2006. Beyond this, there are also “local dialogues” at a lower level, with the Heads of EU missions, with Cambodia, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Israel, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Vietnam. In November 2008, the Council decided to initiate and enhance the EU human rights dialogues with a number of Latin American countries.
It is argued that because too many of the dialogues are held behind closed doors, with little civil society participation with only low-level EU officials, it has allowed the dialogues to lose their importance as a tool. Others contend that the dialogues allow the leaders of EU member states and Commissioners to silo human rights solely into the dialogues, giving them the opportunity to engage with authoritarian regimes on trade without raising specific human rights objections.
While in China and Central Asia the EU’s human rights dialogues have had little impact, elsewhere the dialogues are more welcome. The EU and Brazil established a Strategic Partnership in 2007. Within this framework, a Joint Action Plan (JAP) covering the period 2012-2014 was endorsed by the EU and Brazil, in which they both committed to “promoting human rights and democracy and upholding international justice”. To this end, Brazil and the EU hold regular human rights consultations that assess the main challenges concerning respect for human rights, democratic principles and the rule of law; advance human rights and democracy policy priorities and identify and coordinate policy positions on relevant issues in international fora. While at present, freedom of expression has not been prioritised as a key human rights challenge in this dialogue, the dialogues are seen by both partners as of mutual benefit. It is notable that in the EU-Brazil dialogue both partners come to the dialogues with different human rights concerns, but as democracies. With criticism of the effectiveness and openness of the dialogues, the EU should look again at how the dialogues fit into the overall strategy of the Union and its member states in the promotion of human rights with third countries and assess whether the dialogues can be improved.
[1] It covers both press freedom for the Chinese media in Europe and also press freedom for European media in China.
[2] China Strategy Paper 2007-2013, Annexes, ‘the political situation’, p. 11
[3] “I urge China to release all of those who have been detained for exercising their universally recognised right to freedom of expression.”
[4] Interview with European diplomat, February 2013.
