15 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
IT IS Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
Naturally, about a murder…
So wrote George Orwell in Tribune, 65 years ago. And while Orwell went on to bemoan the decline of the English murder, the English Sunday evening murder TV series thrives.
Of course, all countries have crime series. But while we thrill to Denmark’s dense The Killing, this really is the nation of Morse and Midsomer Murders. Gentle, neat, two-hour Home Counties dramas, all wrapped up by a complex-but-not-too-complex detective, and usually involving a slightly outre academic and/or the hint of a teenage lesbian love triangle.
And no foreigners or minorities (except, occasionally, a charming gypsy).
The latter was the great unsaid, until Midsomer producer Brian True-May went and said it.
True-May told the Radio Times:
“We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work … We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.”
True-May has now been suspended, pending investigation. But has he not just put in words what the show’s policy has been for years? Had anyone ever raised the issue of black or brown faces and the lack thereof on Midsomer before?
15 Feb 2011 | Digital Freedom, Uncategorized
With a crushing majority of 40 in favour, 0 against and 5 abstentions, the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament has voted against a European Commission proposal to introduce mandatory EU-wide web blocking. This comes as a result of a campaign by European Digital Rights, supported by organisations such as the German Association of Child Abuse Victims against Web Blocking and the European ISP Association.
In the year since the original proposal was launched, parliamentarians have grown increasingly concerned by the lack of vision of the European Commission regarding the proposal’s aims. At meeting after meeting, commission representatives and the commissioner herself were unable to provide any evidence that blocking would serve a purpose, they were not even able to be clear on what blocking was meant to achieve.
They started by saying that blocking would “disrupt” commercial child-porn networks, until their own research showed that this is a small and diminishing problem. Then they said it was to stop accidental access, until they were unable to show this was an actual problem or that blocking would help. Finally, they said that it would help victims psychologically — although any policy which leaves abuse images on the internet is hardly likely to do this. The permanent retreat into ever-more facile arguments eventually started grating on parliamentarians who, like the citizens they represent, deserve better. A restriction on the right to communication cannot be based on soundbites and gut reactions.
At the same time, parliamentarians became increasingly aware of the damage that existing blocking systems are doing to both child protection and fundamental rights in those countries where it is already imposed. They saw how countries like Denmark and Sweden create blocking lists outside the rule of law, sometimes leaving whole websites abroad blocked but with no way of even knowing — the accusatory and defamatory blocking page being shown only to people in the countries doing the blocking.
The blocking approach in Denmark, Sweden and the UK breaks every element of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is neither “necessary” nor is it “prescribed by law” in those countries. How can child abuse material have such a low priority that its regulation is the only crime which does not require countermeasures to be laid down in law? Worse still, once the blocking veil is cast thoughtlessly and lawlessly over the allegedly illegal sites abroad and over government inaction to have the websites removed, countries promptly lose the will to take even minimal measures to address the crime. A Danish police official, for example, said in a speech to the German Federal Parliament that they don’t see any need to send reports of these serious crimes to the United States or Russia. Which other serious crime would be treated in this way? Why does blocking destroy the will of governments to treat online child abuse with the seriousness it deserves? Why would child protection organisations ever dream of supporting such a counterproductive measure?
This is the essence of the text agreed by the European Parliament’s Committee on the evening of 14 February. The text demands effective action against the crimes — it demands supervision of the member states’ efforts through a yearly report on their activities. It removes the obligation on member states to introduce blocking and places new measures on member states that insist on blocking in order to at least move in the direction of respect for basic fundamental rights. It chooses concrete child protection measures over symbols, excuses and failure. 14 February… a day to start loving the European Parliament.
Read the European Digital Rights report on web blocking here
Joe McNamee works as Advocacy Coordinatory for European Digital Rights in Brussels (EDRi). He works on issues related to privacy, cybercrime, intellectual property, freedom of information/communication and related topics.
19 Jul 2010 | News and features, United Kingdom
Former Index on Censorship editor Sally Laird died recently after a long battle with cancer. Here, Robert Chandler appreciates an extraordinary translator and journalist
On 15 July I received this message from Mark Lefanu, the husband of Sally Laird: “This is to convey the sad news that Sally died early this morning after a long and gallant battle against cancer. The last days, in hospital, were peaceful and even beautiful, surrounded as she was by the love and care of doctors and nurses, along with the support of beloved daughter and sweet friends.”
Since 1993 Sally and her family had been living in Denmark. I went there to say goodbye to her just two weeks ago. Sally knew she was dying, and she approached death as she approached life — with courage and humour. Towards the end of May, when I was arranging a date for my visit, she wrote, “We have various guests coming off and on through June, but with little gaps in between — and after that — total emptiness from July onwards when I am supposed to be dead but any brave soul is very wecome to plant a flag in my diary.” I replied that, in that case, I would book my train tickets for early July.
Sally was unusually gifted in many ways, probably in more ways than I know. Whatever she set her mind to — a large portfolio of drawings of a family of bears produced at the age of thirteen, her work as chief editor of Index on Censorship in her late twenties and early thirties, the many reviews on Russia-related books that she wrote for Prospect, the TLS, the Guardian and the Observer — she carried out conscientiously and with imagination. Her translations of Petrushevaksaya and Sorokin are note perfect. And I know no book that presents a more nuanced picture of Soviet literary life in the post-Stalin years than Sally’s Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers (OUP, 1999).
The death of a friend always makes one regret lost opportunities. I regret that we never realized our project of collaborating on translating a selection of Ivan Bunin’s short stories — though it is some consolation that I did, at least, have the opportunity to tell her of my regret. I regret that I did not see Sally more often. I do, however, remember all our meetings clearly, and with joy.
Read Sally Laird’s Index on Censorship article “Hope For Dissenters” from 1987 here
24 May 2010 | News and features
Eritrea has held Swedish journalist Dawit Isaak without charge for eight years. The west must stand up to this brutal regime, says his brother Esayas Isaak
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