2 May 2013 | religion & culture
An arm of the US government named 15 nations as the “worst violators of religious freedom”.
The Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent advisory body created by the International Religious Freedom Act to monitor religious freedom abuses internationally, released its 2013 report, which idenitifes “governments that are the most egregious violators.”
The 15 countries are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam, all of which severely restrict independent religious activity and harass individuals and groups for religious activity or beliefs. These nations are classified as Tier 1 “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) in the report.
Despite its recent opening and political reforms, change in Burma have “yet to significantly improve the situation for freedom of religion and belief.” The report states that most violations occurred against minority Christian and Muslim adherents. China’s government is also cited for its ongoing severe abuses against its citizens’ freedom of thought.
The report said that Egypt’s transitional and elected governments have made progress toward religious freedom, it further highlighted the attacks that Coptic Christians have sustained in the period after the Arab Spring that brought down the Mubarak regime. “In many cases, the government failed or was slow to protect religious minorities from violence.”
The former Soviet states of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were included for pursuing state control over religion, targeting Muslims and minorities alike. Iraq was cited for, among other things, tolerating “violent religiously motivated attacks” and Iran for “prolonged detention, torture, and executions based primarily or entirely on the religion of the accused.”
Saudi Arabia continues to suppress religious practices outside of the officially-sanctioned Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, interferes with the faith of guest workers and prosecutes individuals for “apostasy, blasphemy and sorcery”, according to the report. Pakistan has a strict blasphemy law and failure to prosecute acts of religious violence, the report said.
The situation in Sudan has deteriorated since South Sudan gained its independence. Criminalization of apostasy, the imposition of the government’s strict interpretation of Shari’ah on both Muslims and non-Muslims and attacks against Christians, were cited in the report for the decline.
The report also identified Nigeria for continuing religious violence between Muslims and Christians compounded by the government’s toleration of the sectarian attacks. North Korea’s totalitarian regime was also included for its ongoing harassment and torture of citizens based on religious beliefs.
A second tier includes Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Laos and Russia, where abuses of religious freedom are tolerated by the government and meet the threshold for CPC designation by the US Department of State, but don’t meet all of the standards for “systemic, ongoing, egregious” measurements.
Other countries regions being monitored included Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Ethiopia, Turkey, Venezuela and Western Europe.
5 Feb 2013 | Uncategorized
An unknown gunman in Denmark has shot at a prominent writer and historian who is a critic of Islam. Reports said that Lars Hedegaard was not injured. The perpetrator arrived at Hedegaard’s Copenhagen home today (5 February) pretending to deliver a package, instead firing shots at the Danish writer, missing the intended target. Hedegaard is head of the International Free Press Society, a group claiming that Islam threatens press freedom. He was fined 5,000 Kroner (approximately £575) in 2011 for insulting Muslims in a series of statements.
A woman who claimed she was raped by Somalian authorities and the journalist who interviewed her have today (5 February) been jailed in Mogadishu. Judge Ahmed Adan found the woman guilty of offending the state, who will serve one year in prison after she finishes breastfeeding her baby. Freelance journalist Abdiaziz Abdinuur was charged with offending state institutions through false interviewing and entering a woman’s home without the husband present and is to start his one year sentence immediately. Three other defendants, including the woman’s husband and two others who helped introduce her to Abdinuur were found not guilty and freed. The journalist was detained on 10 January for interviewing the woman who had claimed she was raped by soldiers at a displaced person’s camp where she was living in Mogadishu.
A Singaporean photographer was arrested on 4 February in Tokyo for selling books containing pictures of male genitalia. Leslie Kee was arrested along with two members of staff at a publishing firm on suspicion of obscenity and could be jailed for up to two years and / or fined up to 2.5 million yen if found guilty. The trio were detained for selling seven copies of the book to two customers at Kee’s Tokyo gallery — prompting the fashion community in Japan to jump to their defence. The 41 year-old photographer is well known in Japan and has photographed the likes of Naomi Campbell and Beyonce. Japanese domestic law rules that pictures of genitals must be obscured, a method usually practiced through pixelation.
Donald Trump has filed a legal suit against a comedian after proving he is not the spawn of orangutans
The Eritrean government has blocked access to Al Jazeera inside the country. The Qatari TV news network has been unaccessible since 1 February, after the information ministry issued a decree preventing anyone from providing access to its news service. Restaurants, hotels and cafés were particularly targeted and Al Jazeera’s English-language channels were blocked. Eritrean authorities allegedly ordered the ban after Al Jazeera ran stories on demonstrations by Eritrea’s exiles outside Eritrean diplomatic missions in London, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Rome and Cairo in opposition of the government and support of soldiers who staged a mutiny after they stormed the information ministry in Asmara on 21 January. Eritrea holds the highest number of imprisoned journalists in Africa.
Andrew Mitchell, the cabinet minister who resigned following the “plebgate” scandal is to sue The Sun for libel for its reporting of the case. The former government chief whip swore at police officers after they refused him to exit his office through Downing Street’s main gates on 19 September 2012, allegedly saying: “you’re all plebs”. The Conservative MP stepped down from his role a month later. It wasn’t until December that evidence was taken into doubt after CCTV seemed to question the police log and witness reliability. Scotland Yard arrested three police officers in connection with the affair. Mitchell admitted to swearing at the officers but denied using the term “plebs”. He is seeking damages, costs, an apology and an undertaking that the words are not repeated in future.
Donald Trump is suing a comedian after he failed to honour a $5million (£3.1m) lost bet that Trump was the descendent of orangutans. Bill Maher had joked on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show that, if Trump presented him with proof that he was not the product of a tryst between his mother and a primate, he would pay $5million to charity. The business tycoon then proceeded to send a copy of his birth certificate to Maher, along with a note saying “cough up”. Trump said that there was no evidence that the comedian had offered the money as a joke, citing his “pathetic delivery”. Trump then released his birth certificate publicly along with a letter from his lawyer, confirming that he was in fact, entirely human. Maher has failed to offer the cash, prompting Trump to file legal documents in the Superior Court of California on 4 February. Trump has been a prominent voice in the “birther” movement, which claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and hence is not eligible to be president.
17 Jan 2013 | Awards
Kostas Vaxevanis, Greek journalist
The arrest of Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis on 28 October 2012, just days after he published a list of more than 2,000 suspected tax evaders, drew international condemnation.
He was found not guilty of breaking data privacy laws in November 2012, but the Athens public prosecutor subsequently ordered a retrial. If he is sentenced, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment or a fine.
Vaxevanis published the so-called “Lagarde List” of wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts in his weekly magazine Hot Doc in October 2012. The list is named after IMF head Christine Lagarde, who handed it over to her Greek counterpart in 2010 when she was French finance minister.
Successive Greek governments have failed to prosecute a single person on the list or any other high-profile individual for tax evasion. Vaxevanis argues that publication of the list was in the public interest. He told the Guardian: “The country is governed by a poisonous combination of politicians, businessmen and journalists who cover one another’s backs … Had it not been for the foreign media taking such an interest in my own story, it would have been buried.”
Dimitris Trimis, head of the Athens Newspaper Editors Union, told the BBC that the pressure on press freedom in Greece was the most intense of his career. Before Vaxevanis’ arrest two state TV presenters were taken off air after discussing a minister’s response to claims by anti-fascist demonstrators that they had been tortured by the police.
Soon after Vaxevanis’ arrest, journalist Spiros Karatzaferis was detained after announcing he would leak damaging documents about the country’s faltering economy. “The government feels insecure,” Trimis said. The only way it feels it can convince society of its policies is to try to manipulate the media through coercion.
Photo: Demotix / Kostas Pikoulas
Mosireen, Egyptian citizen media collective
Founded in Egypt in early 2011, the Mosireen Collective sought to support and promote the growing wave of citizen journalism that had emerged in the lead-up to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, when members of the public captured the protests and police brutality on their mobile phones.
Working as facilitators, producers and archivists, Mosireen provide both online and offline space to share this wave of citizen news and people’s perspectives with the wider world.
Whilst none of the Mosireen founders were journalists by profession – they come from a variety of other disciplines, from urban planning to graphic design and mechanics – they recognised the importance of the independent media voices emerging from the revolution.
Mosireen’s media centre in Cairo is a community-supported space, and although professionals also use the centre, the focus is on providing ordinary people with skills, equipment, and know-how. The collective has since trained several hundred people with the output of their work available to download, stream, screen and distribute for free on a non-commercial basis. Footage from the archive is also regularly screened at Tahrir Cinema, a free open-air cinema off Tahrir Square (pictured). It continues to film the on-going discontent to this day.
Mosireen – a play on the Arabic words for “Egypt” and “determined” – also holds regular public events and talks in its workspace in downtown Cairo. The opportunity for the public to get involved in all aspects of production allows for an unprecedented level of interactivity in the creation of Egyptian history. All of which is in line with another of Mosireen’s objectives: to counter the narratives put forward by state-owned media through the presentation of multiple viewpoints.
Ta Phong Tan, imprisoned Vietnamese blogger
Ta Phong Tan is one of three Vietnamese bloggers, collectively calling themselves the ‘Club for Free Journalists’, at the centre of a draconian clampdown by the country’s authorities. Vietnam is one of the world’s most restrictive countries for freedom of speech and the press. Only China, Eritrea and North Korea come lower on RSF’s press-freedom index.
Tan (pictured) and her fellow bloggers were arrested in September 2012 and charged with ‘conducting propaganda against the state’ in articles that allegedly ‘distorted and opposed’ the Vietnamese government.
In fact in over 700 articles on Tan’s blog Cong Ly va Su That (‘Justice and Truth’) she exposed the extent of corruption in the country. She covered a broad range of social issues, including the maltreatment of children, corruption, unfair taxation and illegal land confiscations by local party officials.
Before becoming a journalist, Tan worked as a police woman in Hanoi, giving her an insight into the workings of the system. On 4 October 2012, after a trial lasting just one day, Tan was sentenced to spend the next ten years in jail, with an additional five years of house arrest upon release. She refused to plead guilty.
This month a court in Vinh in Nghe An province, northern Vietnam, sentenced 14 activists, many of them bloggers, to up to 13 years in jail followed by several years of house arrest. The BBC reported that their convictions relied on loosely worded national security laws — in this instance article 79 of the penal code, which vaguely prohibits activities aimed at overthrowing the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that state officials had beaten and stripped online reporter Nguyen Hoang Vi while detained by Ho Chi Minh City police.
“These shocking prison sentences confirm our worst fears — that the Vietnamese authorities have chosen to make an example of these bloggers, in an attempt to silence others,” Rupert Abbott, Amnesty’s researcher on Vietnam, told the New York Times, adding that freedom of expression in the country was “dire and worsening.”
Before the trial began, Tan’s mother killed herself in a self-immolation protest against the treatment of her daughter, and the violence, harassment and threats of deportation levelled against the family.
Sadiye Eser and Turkey’s imprisoned journalists
Sadiye Eser (pictured) who writes for the leftist daily Evrensel (Universal) Newspaper, was arrested on 10 December and is still being held. The most recent reports claimed she is now likely to be being held at Bakirkoy Women’s prison.
Police asked Eser about political rallies she had covered as a journalist, as well as the notes she had kept on them, according to a statement by the Journalists’ Union of Turkey.
Broadly worded anti-terror and penal code statutes allow the authorities to conflate coverage of banned groups and special investigations with outright terrorism or other anti-state activity.
These statutes ” make no distinction between journalists exercising freedom of expression and [individuals] aiding terrorism,” said Mehmet Ali Birand, an editor with the Istanbul-based station, Kanal D, speaking to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Censorship in Turkey remains endemic. CPJ estimated that Eser’s detention brought to 50 the number of people in jail for journalistic activity in the country. Other organisations suggest the number is even higher. Turkey currently is ahead of even Iran and China in the number of journalists it is known to have in prison.
There is also more widely a chilling atmosphere for free expression and press freedom in Turkey leading to sackings of journalists and self-censorship: as the European Commission said in its 2012 progress report on Turkey: “On a number of occasions journalists have been fired after signing articles openly critical of the government. All of this, combined with a high concentration of the media in industrial conglomerates with interests going far beyond the free circulation of information and ideas, has a chilling effect and limits freedom of expression in practice, while making self-censorship a common phenomenon in the Turkish media.” They also point out that 16641 cases in total were pending against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights in September 2012. In March 2012, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, was charged and fined for a statement in a Swiss newspaper that “we have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians.”
17 Jan 2013
Kostas Vaxevanis, Greek journalist
The arrest of Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis on 28 October 2012, just days after he published a list of more than 2,000 suspected tax evaders, drew international condemnation.
He was found not guilty of breaking data privacy laws in November 2012, but the Athens public prosecutor subsequently ordered a retrial. If he is sentenced, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment or a fine.
Vaxevanis published the so-called “Lagarde List” of wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts in his weekly magazine Hot Doc in October 2012. The list is named after IMF head Christine Lagarde, who handed it over to her Greek counterpart in 2010 when she was French finance minister.
Successive Greek governments have failed to prosecute a single person on the list or any other high-profile individual for tax evasion. Vaxevanis argues that publication of the list was in the public interest. He told the Guardian: “The country is governed by a poisonous combination of politicians, businessmen and journalists who cover one another’s backs … Had it not been for the foreign media taking such an interest in my own story, it would have been buried.”
Dimitris Trimis, head of the Athens Newspaper Editors Union, told the BBC that the pressure on press freedom in Greece was the most intense of his career. Before Vaxevanis’ arrest two state TV presenters were taken off air after discussing a minister’s response to claims by anti-fascist demonstrators that they had been tortured by the police.
Soon after Vaxevanis’ arrest, journalist Spiros Karatzaferis was detained after announcing he would leak damaging documents about the country’s faltering economy. “The government feels insecure,” Trimis said. The only way it feels it can convince society of its policies is to try to manipulate the media through coercion.
Photo: Demotix / Kostas Pikoulas
Mosireen, Egyptian citizen media collective
Founded in Egypt in early 2011, the Mosireen Collective sought to support and promote the growing wave of citizen journalism that had emerged in the lead-up to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, when members of the public captured the protests and police brutality on their mobile phones.
Working as facilitators, producers and archivists, Mosireen provide both online and offline space to share this wave of citizen news and people’s perspectives with the wider world.
Whilst none of the Mosireen founders were journalists by profession – they come from a variety of other disciplines, from urban planning to graphic design and mechanics – they recognised the importance of the independent media voices emerging from the revolution.
Mosireen’s media centre in Cairo is a community-supported space, and although professionals also use the centre, the focus is on providing ordinary people with skills, equipment, and know-how. The collective has since trained several hundred people with the output of their work available to download, stream, screen and distribute for free on a non-commercial basis. Footage from the archive is also regularly screened at Tahrir Cinema, a free open-air cinema off Tahrir Square (pictured). It continues to film the on-going discontent to this day.
Mosireen – a play on the Arabic words for “Egypt” and “determined” – also holds regular public events and talks in its workspace in downtown Cairo. The opportunity for the public to get involved in all aspects of production allows for an unprecedented level of interactivity in the creation of Egyptian history. All of which is in line with another of Mosireen’s objectives: to counter the narratives put forward by state-owned media through the presentation of multiple viewpoints.
Ta Phong Tan, imprisoned Vietnamese blogger
Ta Phong Tan is one of three Vietnamese bloggers, collectively calling themselves the ‘Club for Free Journalists’, at the centre of a draconian clampdown by the country’s authorities. Vietnam is one of the world’s most restrictive countries for freedom of speech and the press. Only China, Eritrea and North Korea come lower on RSF’s press-freedom index.
Tan (pictured) and her fellow bloggers were arrested in September 2012 and charged with ‘conducting propaganda against the state’ in articles that allegedly ‘distorted and opposed’ the Vietnamese government.
In fact in over 700 articles on Tan’s blog Cong Ly va Su That (‘Justice and Truth’) she exposed the extent of corruption in the country. She covered a broad range of social issues, including the maltreatment of children, corruption, unfair taxation and illegal land confiscations by local party officials.
Before becoming a journalist, Tan worked as a police woman in Hanoi, giving her an insight into the workings of the system. On 4 October 2012, after a trial lasting just one day, Tan was sentenced to spend the next ten years in jail, with an additional five years of house arrest upon release. She refused to plead guilty.
This month a court in Vinh in Nghe An province, northern Vietnam, sentenced 14 activists, many of them bloggers, to up to 13 years in jail followed by several years of house arrest. The BBC reported that their convictions relied on loosely worded national security laws — in this instance article 79 of the penal code, which vaguely prohibits activities aimed at overthrowing the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that state officials had beaten and stripped online reporter Nguyen Hoang Vi while detained by Ho Chi Minh City police.
“These shocking prison sentences confirm our worst fears — that the Vietnamese authorities have chosen to make an example of these bloggers, in an attempt to silence others,” Rupert Abbott, Amnesty’s researcher on Vietnam, told the New York Times, adding that freedom of expression in the country was “dire and worsening.”
Before the trial began, Tan’s mother killed herself in a self-immolation protest against the treatment of her daughter, and the violence, harassment and threats of deportation levelled against the family.
Sadiye Eser and Turkey’s imprisoned journalists
Sadiye Eser (pictured) who writes for the leftist daily Evrensel (Universal) Newspaper, was arrested on 10 December and is still being held. The most recent reports claimed she is now likely to be being held at Bakirkoy Women’s prison.
Police asked Eser about political rallies she had covered as a journalist, as well as the notes she had kept on them, according to a statement by the Journalists’ Union of Turkey.
Broadly worded anti-terror and penal code statutes allow the authorities to conflate coverage of banned groups and special investigations with outright terrorism or other anti-state activity.
These statutes ” make no distinction between journalists exercising freedom of expression and [individuals] aiding terrorism,” said Mehmet Ali Birand, an editor with the Istanbul-based station, Kanal D, speaking to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Censorship in Turkey remains endemic. CPJ estimated that Eser’s detention brought to 50 the number of people in jail for journalistic activity in the country. Other organisations suggest the number is even higher. Turkey currently is ahead of even Iran and China in the number of journalists it is known to have in prison.
There is also more widely a chilling atmosphere for free expression and press freedom in Turkey leading to sackings of journalists and self-censorship: as the European Commission said in its 2012 progress report on Turkey: “On a number of occasions journalists have been fired after signing articles openly critical of the government. All of this, combined with a high concentration of the media in industrial conglomerates with interests going far beyond the free circulation of information and ideas, has a chilling effect and limits freedom of expression in practice, while making self-censorship a common phenomenon in the Turkish media.” They also point out that 16641 cases in total were pending against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights in September 2012. In March 2012, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, was charged and fined for a statement in a Swiss newspaper that “we have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians.”
