26 Jul 2007 | Statements
Jailed Tunisian dissident, writer and lawyer Mohamed Abbou was released from prison in Le Kef, where he had been held since his arrest in March 2005. He was sentenced to prison for three-and-a-half years for exposing torture in Tunisian prisons on the Internet. His release and that of more than 20 other political prisoners came on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic of Tunisia, marked on 25 July.
It led to speculation that the release of the country’s highest profile domestic critic was timed simply to prevent the case from spoiling the international response to the independence celebrations.
Index on Censorship and other members of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG) have long campaigned for his release – including trying to visit him in prison in March.
Index chief executive Henderson Mullin urged the Tunisian authorities to cease the kind of aggressive and intimidating surveillance that Abbou’s wife Samia has endured since he was jailed in 2005.
‘Policemen have been climbing over the Abbou family balconies in the middle of the night, repeatedly, purely to terrorise them,’ said Mullin. ‘Police officers often harassed Mrs Abbou and the friends who accompany her for weekly visits with her husband at Kef prison, and they only let up when representatives of Index and other TMG members were watching in person.
‘It would be a disgrace if this kind of aggressive harassment is allowed to continue now Mr Abbou is free. He must be allowed to express his opinions freely.’
TMG Chair Carl Morten Iversen of Norwegian PEN assured Abbou that the TMG and other human rights groups will keep a close eye on the way Tunisian authorities will treat him and his family in the future. Tunisia’s repression of free expression is seen by many as the sole stain on the country’s otherwise tolerant and peaceful system. Increasingly its poor free speech record has become an issue that obstructs Tunisia’s routine relations with the EU and France.
Significantly, new French president Nicolas Sarkozy had raised Abbou’s case in meetings with Tunisian head of state Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali the week before.
Abbou told al Jazeera TV on the day of his release: ‘As a former prisoner of conscience, I would like to thank all those in Tunisia and the rest of the world who stood by my side during the ordeal I have been through. My release is the result of actions of resistance to oppression undertaken by Tunisians capable of saying no to a regime in violation of basic human rights. The Tunisian Constitution and international human rights law guarantee the right to criticise the government, as long as there are human rights abuses and corruption.’
But he added: ‘The lack of freedom led some young people to use violence which I strongly denounce.’
Abbou was jailed for three-and-a-half-years for posting an article on the Tunisnews website in August 2004 comparing the torture of political prisoners in Tunisia to that perpetrated by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But observers at his trial suspected the sentence was imposed in response to a different article he had posted online a few days before his arrest, in which he criticised an invitation to Israeli leader Ariel Sharon to attend a UN summit in Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG continues to call on the Tunisian authorities to allow writers, journalists, web loggers and publishers to express themselves freely without fear of persecution or imprisonment in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Tunisia is a signatory.
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20 Apr 2007 | Religion and Culture
Loreena McKennitt has become well-known in the UK for all the wrong reasons. The Canadian singer has become embroiled in an unseemly fight over privacy and freedom of speech after her former friend, Niema Ash, published a frank memoir of her time with McKennitt.
On learning of the book, as proofs were about to be sent to the printers, McKinnett telephoned Ash, warning her that she could ‘have it stopped in 24 hours’, says the author. ‘This was back in 2005. I didn’t think she would be able to stop it.
‘I’d had the book looked at by a specialist media solicitor, and my editor was a journalist who had taken courses in media law. Neither saw anything wrong with it.’
McKinnett clearly didn’t see it that way. She at first tried to stop the publication of the book, and then raised objections to 39 separate passages.
As the book stands, now published, eight passages have been deleted due to the injunction.
‘The things they considered private were so petty,’ Ash told Index. ‘Obviously, I can’t repeat exactly what they were, but they were on the level of, y’know, saying someone took vitamin C because they had a cold.’
Does Ash think that it’s an intense need for privacy that led McKevitt to take action against the book?
‘I don’t think it’s about privacy, actually – she’s done hundreds of interviews. I think it’s more about protection of her image. She doesn’t want anything written about her unless she controls it. Loreena has this image of being a Celtic queen, a goddess, and this book, portraying her as a normal person, doesn’t fit in with that.’
The upholding of the injunction could set a dangerous precedent, as it sets the right to privacy above the right to free expression, but Ash is determined not to give up without a fight. She plans to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
‘I belong to the Society of Authors,’ says Ash, ‘and they have been having very serious discussions about this. It could very badly affect biographers. But the worrying thing is, the book ha already been published in Canada and the US. There’s no way what has happened here in the UK could have happened over here.’
1 Jan 2007 | News and features
Back in 2005 Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the UN, stated that the holding of the WSIS in Tunisia offered “a good opportunity for the Government of Tunisia to address various human rights concerns, including those related to freedom of opinion and expression.”
More than one year after the WSIS was held in Tunisia, the Tunisian government has clearly failed to do this, according to members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) Tunisia Monitoring Group (TMG), which includes Index on Censorship.
The 16 members of the IFEX-TMG are appealing to incoming UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to remind the Government of Tunisia of its international obligations. “Tunisia, since being an elected member of the newly-created United Nations Council of Human Rights, has an additional obligation to respect its international commitments in the field of freedom of expression,” say the members of the TMG.
Sadly, the state of freedom of expression in Tunisia is as poor, if not poorer, in early 2007 as it was in late 2005 when the WSIS was held in Tunis,” said Carl Morten Iversen, Secretary General of Norwegian PEN, and Chair of the IFEX-TMG.
Members of the TMG remain deeply concerned by the ongoing harassment of writers, journalists, editors and human rights defenders in Tunisia. Consequently, members of the TMG are once more calling the Tunisian government to bring an immediate end to the persecution of writers, journalists, and human rights defenders, including Sihem Bensedrine, Naziha Rjiba, Moncef Marzouki, Lotfi Hajji and Abdallah Zouari.
n addition, they are repeating their plea for the immediate and unconditional release of internet writer and lawyer Mohammed Abbou who is currently serving a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for criticising Tunisian President Ben Ali in an article posted on the Internet.
To respect its international commitments, the Tunisian government should also release all banned books and publications, should stop censoring books, and should put and end to the blocking of websites,” said Ana Maria Cabanellas, President of the International Publishers Association (IPA).
TMG members also highlighted concerns about the Tunisian government’s censorship of deadly clashes between security forces and armed groups in the end of December 2006 and in early January 2007 in the Southern suburbs of Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG therefore calls on the Tunisian authorities to allow writers, journalists, web loggers and publishers to express themselves freely without fear of persecution or imprisonment in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Tunisia is a signatory.
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15 Apr 1984 | Magazine Editions, Volume 13.02 April 1984
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The April 1984 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
By Olle Wästberg
Index on Censorship has received about fifty letters and postcards about what is called ‘The Felderer Case’.
Swedish courts found Dietlieb Clüwer Felderer guilty of ‘Agitation against an ethnic group’, according to the Swedish Penal Code, Chapter 16, Paragraph 8, which reads as follows:
‘If a person publicly or otherwise in a statement or other communication which is spread among the public threatens or expresses contempt for a group of a certain race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin or religious creed, he shall be sentenced for agitation against an ethnic group to imprisonment for a maximum of two years or, if the offence is petty, to pay a fine.’
The law is very seldom used. Felderer is the first Swedish citizen to get a prison sentence of this length — 10 months.
The charge against Felderer was as follows: ‘Felderer has on each of several copies of written material, dealing with the subject of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, fastened a strand of hair and a piece of soap, and in some cases also a condom, and in one case a piece of a nail. He wrote on each copy that the piece of soap consisted of pure Jewish fat with the scent of Hungarian Jew. In several cases he stapled an apparently used condom and wrote that it had been used by a named representative of Jewish victims on a visit to a Nazi brothel. Felderer sent these communications to recipients in Sweden, Holland, Austria, Germany, Canada and the USA.’
A few examples from Felderer’s mailings: He published a caricature of a Jew, naked, with the following caption (his spelling is given): ‘The naked truth. Childrens’ contest. The name of this handsome-looking fellow is Zyklon B. Goldman. In 1944’s beauty contest at AUSWITCH he was unanimously selected as the prettiest chap of AUSWITCH. Mr Zyklon B. Goldman has just come out of the gas chamber, spick-and span, for his 16th time. Each time he is looking better and better. Each time he is getting healthier and healthier. Mr Zyklon B. Goldman really digs the AUSWITCH gas. How did he look before he entered the gas chamber? Dress Mr Zyklon B. Goldman up and send us your picture. FIRST PRIZE: Sweets for a total of 100 kronor or our book Auschwitz Exit, Vol 1.’
Pamphlets with soap and the text ‘Pure Jewish Fat — Scent: Hungarian Gas Chamber 3, Birkenau’ were posted to different organisations and museums for victims of the Nazi era.
Individual Jews who had been victims of Nazi persecution were sent offensive material. For example, Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor, was sent a used condom with the message that it had been used by Simon Wiesenthal on his 239th visit to a Nazi brothel during the Hitler era.
To see if Mr Felderer’s mental state was such that he should get exemption from punishment the court asked that he be given a psychiatric examination. However, Felderer was found sane. Felderer was not charged for his opinion that Jews were not killed during the Nazi era.
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He was not charged for thinking that ‘what was gassed was lice’. He was charged for the way he was expressing contempt for the Jews and spreading his material.
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NOTE
The letters received by Index support Felderer and characterise him as a victim of the establishment, a political prisoner. A group in Sweden called ‘European Human Rights’ disseminates material on his behalf and claims to be working for freedom of speech. It vilifies Amnesty, PEN and others for ‘working covertly to destroy freedom of speech’. Felderer is an adherent of the ‘Institute for Historical Review’, a US-based group which puts out pamphlets and books denying the existence of the Nazi holocaust and asserting that it is all a hoax by Zionists seeking support for Israel. Felderer is a friend of David McCalden who works from California where he runs ‘Truth Missions’ and promotes the letter campaign for Felderer. These anti-semitic groups use the terminology of liberal protest, human rights bulletins or academic life, as appropriate, to suggest respectability and innocence. The booklists of the Institute for Historical Review, for example, include reputable academic and journalistic books.
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