“Digital” means copying. Attempts to defend copyright the old-fashioned way could have unforeseen consequences for the web, says Joe McNamee.
This article was originally published on Open Democracy, as a part of a week-long series on the future digital freedom guest-edited by Index
Twenty years ago, at the UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, an extraordinary group of women activists forced the human rights movement to confont the sexism that had shaped their agenda until that time. The promise of Vienna was that the access to rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration would be made explicit in relation to women and gender.
The conference declaration said: “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.” It went into considerable detail about what this means for women.
However the Vienna Declaration said very little about free expression. Nor was this omission rectified in the Beijing Declaration on Women’s Rights in 1995. The year before, after serving as founding chair of the International PEN Women Writers Committee, I had become President of a new organisation, Women’s WORLD (Women’s World Organisation for Rights, Literature and Development).
Women hold a banner to ‘Save the Girl Child’ during a 2012 International Women’s Day rally in Agartala
Women’s WORLD was set up to investigate and advocate against gender-based censorship, both formal and informal, and to defend feminist writers. We prepared a document for Beijing called The Power of the Word: Culture, Censorship and Voice, emphasising the importance of voice and thus of women writers to the struggle for women’s equality:
“The subordination of women is basic to all social systems based on dominance; for this reason, conservatives hate and fear the voices of women. That is why so many religions have made rules against women preaching or even speaking in the house of worship. That is why governments keep telling women to keep quiet: ‘You’re in the Constitution,’ they will say, ‘you have the vote, so you have no right to complain.’ But having a voice is as important, perhaps more important, than having a vote. When censors attack women writers, they do so in order to intimidate all women and keep them from using their right to free expression. Gender-based censorship is therefore a problem not only for women writers, but for everyone concerned with the emancipation of women.
“Women writers are a threat to systems built on gender hierarchy because they open doors for other women. By expressing the painful contradictions between men and women in their society, by exposing the discrepancy between what society requires of women and what they need to be fulfilled, woman writers challenge the status quo…[and] make a breach in the wall of silence. They say things no one has ever said before and say them in print, where anyone can read and repeat them.”
As President of Women’s WORLD, I produced an analysis of the Declaration and Platform for Action that came out of the Beijing Conference. While recognising the Platform of Action was a huge step forward in translating women’s issues into the language of human rights, I concluded that it fell short in the area of free expression, for these reasons:
Our paper for Beijing said, “While there is no question that indigenous and colonised peoples are under particular cultural assault, all women need cultural rights. We need the time and space and access to means of cultural expression to be able to articulate our own social values. Without attention to culture, sustainable development and real democracy are not possible, because profound changes must necessarily be culture-related. Women’s silence is thus as serious a problem as poverty itself, and is both a cause of poverty and its effect.”
In the years after 1995, Women’s WORLD struggled to raise issues of voice but kept running up against a narrowing of women’s human rights to the issue of violence against women, while we were striving for a more inclusive vision that would connect this violence to culture, religion, economics, power politics, censorship and war. Our work was also affected by a separation within the human rights movement between groups that deal mainly with free expression and the big mainstream multi-issue groups.
This same separation was reflected in the global movement for women’s human rights. For instance, when the Women’s Human Rights Defenders International Coalition released a global report in 2012 on dangers facing feminists in various regions, it did not even think of drawing on the many years of experience of groups that defend writers and journalists, many of whom are women.
In the last few years, the global women’s movement has found itself stonewalled by the rise of religious fundamentalism to the degree that many activists now oppose moves for another UN conference on women, fearing that the gains of the 90s will be undermined.
The UN Council on Human Rights has been a battleground over issues of culture, with a newly religious Russia forming a bloc with many African and Muslim-majority countries, to support a resolution calling for the application of the “traditional values of humankind” to human rights norms. Such “traditional values” are, of course, invoked whenever women, sexual minorities, or religious minorities want equal rights, including the right to free expression.
In the darkness of this backlash against women’s human rights, the UN’s 2009 appointment of Pakistani feminist Farida Shaheed, first as an independent expert and now as the special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, was one of the few rays of light. In her 2012 report, Shaheed flagged ways in which fundamentalism impinges on women’s exercise of their cultural rights, as when “solo female singing has been banned and restrictions have been placed on female musicians performing in public concerts.”
She linked culture to violence against women, pointing out that when women try to deviate from the dominant culture of their communities or interpret and reshape them, “they often confront disproportionate opposition, including different forms of violence, for acts as apparently simple as choosing who to marry, how to dress, or where to go.”
She has taken a proactive approach to women’s cultural production, shifting the perspective from seeing culture as an obstacle to women’s human rights to ensuring that women have equal cultural rights. Hopefully her work as special rapporteur will help turn back the proponants of the “traditional values of mankind,” and encourage a wider recognition that freedom of expression is critical to equality for women.
Meredith Tax, an American writer and activist, is Chair of the Board of the Centre for Secular Space, a new thinktank based in London http://www.meredithtax.org/
Journalist Andrzej Poczobut is getting ready to go to prison — again. He faces criminal charges for libeling Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko. Prosecutors claim that more than 20 articles Poczobut wrote for Belarus websites Charter97.org and Belaruspartizan.org are defamatory. He was arrested on 21 June and his flat was searched. His computers were confiscated, and he spent ten days in detention before being bailed.
Poczobut, who was fined and jailed in 2011 for taking part in protests deemed illegal by the Belarus authorities, believes there is almost no chance he will remain free because he was convicted of libeling the president in July 2011 and given a three-year suspended jail sentence.
“A year ago, I saw a huge file of my articles during an interrogation at the prosecutor’s office,” he says.
That showed they collect everything I had written. But even that did not help them much. I burst into laughter when I learnt what they had based their accusations on. They just picked on a word ‘dictator’ in some of my articles.
Before being sentenced last year, Poczobut spent three months behind bars. Poczobut is a correspondent for the Polish national daily Gazeta Wyborcza in Belarus and his case prompted international protests. It was discussed during a meeting of presidents of the United States and Poland, and the European Parliament and the Council of Europe both demanded his release. As a result, the Belarus authorities dropped some of their charges against him and released him under police supervision. But now the story starts all over again.
Editor Mikola Markevich logging while serving his sentence for insulting the president
Belarus’ criminal code contains six articles related to defamation. It is a crime to insult a state official – and the most serious offence, punishable with up to five years in prison, is defaming or insulting the president.
Belarus has a long history of using the law on defamation to silence journalists and opposition activists. In 1999, one of Lukashenko’s main allies, Viktor Sheiman, then the regime’s security chief, sued the independent newspaper Naviny for libel after it published an article about his luxury houses. The paper was forced to pay massive damages – the equivalent of $50,000 – which led to its closure. Lukashenko gave Sheiman full support, declaring:
Newspapers like that should be closed down juridically, or else!
In 2001, the independent newspaper Nasha Svaboda, launched by the former publisher of Naviny, met the same fate after it was sued by Anatol Tozik, head of the State Control Committee. It was made to pay the equivalent of $60,000 in damages (Tozik had demanded $120,000) and ceased publication. Lukashenko publicly denounced “people who deliberately disseminate distorted facts and intentionally exacerbate tensions in society.” The judge in both the Sheiman and Tozik cases was Anatol Savich, who authorised the seizure of the defendants’ property and freezing of their bank accounts. Both cases were rushed through: the Sheiman case took six days from writ to judgment, the Tozik case five.
Pavel Mazhejka, journalist at Pahonia newspaper serving his sentence
Over the past decade there has been a series of defamation cases against journalists and activists – the most serious of which have landed defendants in jail. Three journalists, Mikola Markevich, Pavel Mazhejka and Viktar Ivashkevich, were jailed in 2002 for insulting the president after they criticised Lukashenko In 2004, in the run-up to the referendum on Lukashenko’s change to the constitution to allow him to serve a third term as president, opposition activists Valery Levaneuski and Aliaksandr Vasilieu were both sentenced to two years in jail for defaming him. They had published a leaflet inviting citizens to an opposition meeting that drew attention to an all-expenses-paid holiday Lukashenko had taken in Austria in 2002.
In 2007, the writer and opposition activist Andrei Klimau was sentenced to two years in high-security prison for publishing critical articles on the internet. He was released in early 2008. Other journalists and activists have been fined for insulting local officials, among them Aliaksandr Ihnatsiuk, editor of Vecherniy Stolin newspaper, and Anatol Bukas, editor of Borisovskie Novosti. In 2010, four journalists from the Charter 97 website, Maryna Koktysh, Sviatlana Kalinkina, Natalia Radzinaand Iryna Khalip, were interrogated and had their offices and apartments searched and their equipment confiscated after Ivan Korzh, a KGB general, filed a libel suit.
The Belarusian Association of Journalists has campaigned to change the law on defamation, but without success. In 2003 it collected 7,000 signatures on a petition calling for the removal of the articles on defamation of state officials from the criminal code, on the grounds that they contravened the constitution’s statement that all citizens are equal before the law – but the constitutional court ruled that the law on defamation was consistent with the principles of the constitution. Until the law is changed, journalists and activists facing defamation actions in Belarus will be up against the might of the whole state machine.
Andrzej Poczobut knows this, but refuses to give up. He says:
When I go out in the street. I meet people who were involved in my case. I don’t avert my eyes while they try to pretend they don’t know me … I keep walking with my head up and a smile on my face because I know I’m fighting for the right cause
Andrei Bastunets is a media lawyer and a Vice Chair of the Belarusian Association of Journalists
Journalist Andrzej Poczobut is getting ready to go to prison — again. He faces criminal charges for libeling Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko. Prosecutors claim that more than 20 articles Poczobut wrote for Belarus websites Charter97.org and Belaruspartizan.org are defamatory. He was arrested on 21 June and his flat was searched. His computers were confiscated, and he spent ten days in detention before being bailed.
Poczobut, who was fined and jailed in 2011 for taking part in protests deemed illegal by the Belarus authorities, believes there is almost no chance he will remain free because he was convicted of libeling the president in July 2011 and given a three-year suspended jail sentence.
“A year ago, I saw a huge file of my articles during an interrogation at the prosecutor’s office,” he says.
That showed they collect everything I had written. But even that did not help them much. I burst into laughter when I learnt what they had based their accusations on. They just picked on a word ‘dictator’ in some of my articles.
Before being sentenced last year, Poczobut spent three months behind bars. Poczobut is a correspondent for the Polish national daily Gazeta Wyborcza in Belarus and his case prompted international protests. It was discussed during a meeting of presidents of the United States and Poland, and the European Parliament and the Council of Europe both demanded his release. As a result, the Belarus authorities dropped some of their charges against him and released him under police supervision. But now the story starts all over again.
Editor Mikola Markevich logging while serving his sentence for insulting the president
Belarus’ criminal code contains six articles related to defamation. It is a crime to insult a state official – and the most serious offence, punishable with up to five years in prison, is defaming or insulting the president.
Belarus has a long history of using the law on defamation to silence journalists and opposition activists. In 1999, one of Lukashenko’s main allies, Viktor Sheiman, then the regime’s security chief, sued the independent newspaper Naviny for libel after it published an article about his luxury houses. The paper was forced to pay massive damages – the equivalent of $50,000 – which led to its closure. Lukashenko gave Sheiman full support, declaring:
Newspapers like that should be closed down juridically, or else!
In 2001, the independent newspaper Nasha Svaboda, launched by the former publisher of Naviny, met the same fate after it was sued by Anatol Tozik, head of the State Control Committee. It was made to pay the equivalent of $60,000 in damages (Tozik had demanded $120,000) and ceased publication. Lukashenko publicly denounced “people who deliberately disseminate distorted facts and intentionally exacerbate tensions in society.” The judge in both the Sheiman and Tozik cases was Anatol Savich, who authorised the seizure of the defendants’ property and freezing of their bank accounts. Both cases were rushed through: the Sheiman case took six days from writ to judgment, the Tozik case five.
Pavel Mazhejka, journalist at Pahonia newspaper serving his sentence
Over the past decade there has been a series of defamation cases against journalists and activists – the most serious of which have landed defendants in jail. Three journalists, Mikola Markevich, Pavel Mazhejka and Viktar Ivashkevich, were jailed in 2002 for insulting the president after they criticised Lukashenko In 2004, in the run-up to the referendum on Lukashenko’s change to the constitution to allow him to serve a third term as president, opposition activists Valery Levaneuski and Aliaksandr Vasilieu were both sentenced to two years in jail for defaming him. They had published a leaflet inviting citizens to an opposition meeting that drew attention to an all-expenses-paid holiday Lukashenko had taken in Austria in 2002.
In 2007, the writer and opposition activist Andrei Klimau was sentenced to two years in high-security prison for publishing critical articles on the internet. He was released in early 2008. Other journalists and activists have been fined for insulting local officials, among them Aliaksandr Ihnatsiuk, editor of Vecherniy Stolin newspaper, and Anatol Bukas, editor of Borisovskie Novosti. In 2010, four journalists from the Charter 97 website, Maryna Koktysh, Sviatlana Kalinkina, Natalia Radzinaand Iryna Khalip, were interrogated and had their offices and apartments searched and their equipment confiscated after Ivan Korzh, a KGB general, filed a libel suit.
The Belarusian Association of Journalists has campaigned to change the law on defamation, but without success. In 2003 it collected 7,000 signatures on a petition calling for the removal of the articles on defamation of state officials from the criminal code, on the grounds that they contravened the constitution’s statement that all citizens are equal before the law – but the constitutional court ruled that the law on defamation was consistent with the principles of the constitution. Until the law is changed, journalists and activists facing defamation actions in Belarus will be up against the might of the whole state machine.
Andrzej Poczobut knows this, but refuses to give up. He says:
When I go out in the street. I meet people who were involved in my case. I don’t avert my eyes while they try to pretend they don’t know me … I keep walking with my head up and a smile on my face because I know I’m fighting for the right cause
Andrei Bastunets is a media lawyer and a Vice Chair of the Belarusian Association of Journalists