11 Feb 2013 | Egypt
Over the weekend, an Egyptian court approved a month-long ban on YouTube, for refusal to remove controversial anti-Islam film the Innocence of Muslims. In addition to a ban on YouTube, the same court ordered a ban on any other website hosting the film.
It’s unclear when the ban is meant to go into effect — and a Google (the owner of YouTube) spokesperson on Saturday said that they have not “received nothing from the judge or government related to this matter.”
The film’s trailer sparked angry protests and calls for its removal in September last year, for its crude depiction of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Cairo was one of the sites of violent protests outside of its American Embassy. Shortly after the start of 11 September protests against the film, Pakistan reportedly blocked YouTube for refusing to remove the video, with Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf declaring that “blasphemous content will not be accepted at any cost.” In addition to Pakistan, Egypt would be joining Bangladesh, Sudan, and Afghanistan in blocking YouTube for hosting clips from the film.
However, Egyptian human rights activist and technology expert Ramy Raoof dismissed the ban as “impractical”, and explained to Egypt Independent yesterday that it would be very difficult — and expensive — for the Egyptian government to actually implement it. Another anonymous expert told the newspaper that even if the ban is implemented, it would be a “very weak solution” as Egyptians “will still find a way around it”.
Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has yet to respond to the rulings, but activists have pointed out that the government body has shown reluctance to enforce such bans in the past. In 2009 Egypt made a decision to ban pornography that went unenforced. Egyptian prosecutor Abdel Maguid Mahmoud ordered the ban to be enforced in early November last year — but Telecommunications Minister Hany Mahmoud said that it would be “technically difficult” to actually block the sites.
Still, even with doubt cast over the feasibility of its implementation, human rights groups have slammed the ruling as a step backwards for internet freedom after the fall of Mubarak two years ago. Bahey Al Din Hassan, the head of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights told the Wall Street Journal that the ruling reflects the ever-increasing influence of Egypt’s religious conservatives — as well as a sign of even more restrictions on freedom of expression in the country.
Sara Yasin is an editorial assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin.
16 Jan 2013 | Uncategorized
A Bangladeshi blogger is in critical condition after being stabbed by three unknown attackers on 14 January in Dhaka, the country’s capital. Asif Mohiuddin, 29, is the author of a blog about atheism widely read in Bangladesh. His posts often satirise religion, with one post referring to god as “almighty only in name but impotent in reality.” Press reports have referred to Mohiuddin as a “militant blogger”, although there is no suggestion that his work incited violence. Shortly after the attack, the South Asian Meeting on Internet and Freedom of Expression was held in Dhaka, and participants called on the government to protect journalist’s human rights under the constitution of Bangladesh, and bring the perpetrators to justice.
– Blogger Asif Mohiuddin was stabbed on 14 January
A Nigerian newspaper editor was shot dead on 12 January. Ikechukwu Udendu was killed in the southeastern city of Onithsa by an unknown assailant, who then phoned the victim’s brother to instruct him to collect the dead body. The editor was on his way to supervise the printing of the mothly newspaper Anambra News when he was attacked. Arrests and attacks on the Nigerian media are frequent but rarely resolved. On 26 April 2012, the offices of daily newspapers in the cities of Abuja and Kaduna were bombed.
Last week saw widespread attacks on the media in Greece, after bombs were placed outside of the homes of five journalists on 11 January. Homemade devices were used to carry out arson attacks on Chris Konstas, Antonis Liaros, George Oikonomeas, Petros Karsiotis and Antonis Skyllakos, members of the Journalists’ Union of Athens Daily Newspapers. Anarchist group Lovers of Lawlessness said they committed the attacks in protest against the journalists for allegedly covering the government favourably since the financial crisis began in 2009.
An editor of investigative weekly Alaan Magazine has been charged with defamation in Morocco, after alleging that a government official had ordered champagne to his hotel room during a business trip. Youssef Jajili printed a hotel receipt under Minister of Manufacture and Trade Abdelkader Amara’s name, which charged him for the alcohol while he was away at the expense of taxpayers. Amara denied the claim, saying that someone had ordered the champagne while he was out of the room. Jajili will appear in court on 28 January, and faces one year imprisonment and if found guilty under section 52 of Morocco’s defamation laws. Even though alcohol is widely available in Morocco, it is forbidden to followers of Islam, who make up the majority of the country.
On 15 January, Facebook announced a new format to its search facilities: “graph search”. The new tool will allow users to search for specific content, people, or images on the site. Critics suggest that the move could undermine Facebook’s privacy policy and allow users less control over their personal information, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the graph search is “privacy aware,” since the new tool will only search content already shared with the user.
1 Jun 2012 | Uncategorized
The Justice and Security Bill was introduced in the House of Lords this week. Should it become law then it will have a devastating effect on the extent to which the public can find out about matters of major importance. These include the activities of those suspected of threatening security and of the authorities who attempt to counter such threats.
Do not be misled by the Daily Mail’s claim that the Bill is a “climbdown” and a victory for their campaign against secret justice. To be sure, the Mail was a key player in the government’s decision to remove inquests from the proposals, but this Bill is not victory. The Justice Secretary Ken Clarke maintains it will not result in the “public finding out less about the truth in important cases”, but that seems unlikely.
Under the bill if information emerged in civil cases that could affect national security, then the government could ask the court to use closed material proceedings (CMPs). The opposing parties and their lawyers would then be excluded from crucial parts of the case; only the judge and government parties would remain, with a special advocate representing the interests of the claimant.
The media will have no access. There is no requirement that the public be notified a CMP will be sought, even though in criminal cases seven days’ notice is required for an application to close a court on national security grounds. The media would be totally excluded from hearings which consider whether CMPs should be used, without even a special advocate representing the public interest in open justice.
It is virtually certain CMPs will become the norm in this area because the proposed rule is that if the judge thinks that a disclosure of information would be damaging to national security, then she or he must order a CMP. The judiciary defer strongly to executive judgments about what will damage national security (and the government tends to set a low threshold for damage) and, once reaching the conclusion national security would be damaged, a judge will have no discretion on the order that follows.
In theory, the legislation would not permit the government to use CMPs to cover up embarrassment. In practice, however, the outcome is likely to be different. A key rationale behind the laws is that the government must protect relationships with other countries, and especially the United States. If embarrassment to the UK government can be claimed to affect those international relationships then, in a kind of legal alchemy, non-damaging embarrassment can be transformed into damage. The result will be secrecy.
We can expect these procedures to apply in many important cases. The Justice Secretary has indicated that it is intended to apply only to a narrow group of cases, such as actions for damages by former Guantanamo Bay detainees claiming British complicity in detention or torture. The Green Paper that preceded the Bill said 27 cases were in issue, though the government refused to say what they were.
In the Law, Terrorism and the Right to Know research programme at the University of Reading, we have tried to identify the cases likely to be affected. Our list is now at around 20 cases where claimants have been subjected to detention, torture, extraordinary rendition and the like. They stretch across the world, alleging British complicity in wrongdoings from Guantanamo Bay to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Uganda, Libya, Egypt and Bangladesh, among others.
But the reach of the Justice and Security Bill is wider than even these cases. It will also include matters that occur solely within the UK. While inquests are no longer to be subject to CMPs, any civil actions which follow inquests could fall within its provisions if intelligence sources or methods could be disclosed. That could well include cases relating to deaths as a result of shootings by police.
If police make arrests in a counter-terrorism operation and are subsequently sued for assault or false imprisonment then CMPs would very likely be sought because the action may well involve disclosure of methods used by the security services.
There will inevitably be other categories of cases in which the laws will be applied. National security is a broad church.
One of the most disturbing provisions in the Bill is the absence of any weighing of competing public interests in the decision to order the use of CMPs. The Bill removes all consideration of competing interests in open justice. No matter how strong the public interest may be in the substantive issues or in process of justice being done in the public eye, a judge cannot take account of that.
Moreover, there will be no recording of how often CMPs are used. There will be no method or point of review to determine when closed judgments can be made open. This Bill proposes that these matters are closed forever.
There is every reason to see this Bill as laying the foundations for a secret state where the executive is able to use national security as a blanket to hide proceedings from the public eye, regardless of how great the public interest in open justice might be.
This Bill will make our governments less accountable. It will make secrecy the norm. Our parliament should oppose it fiercely.
Lawrence McNamara runs the ESRC-funded Law, Terrorism and the Right to Know research programme at the University of Reading. He tweets at @UniRdg_LTRK
Index on Censorship letter to Joint Committee on Human Rights
