19 Feb 2021 | Belarus, Opinion, Ruth's blog
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116024″ img_size=”full”][vc_column_text]Our daily team meetings at Index are an opportunity to touch base, to make sure that everyone is coping in the current lockdown and to discuss the latest aggressions by too many authoritarian leaders. Unfortunately the last of these is never short and sweet.
Where is today’s misery? What has Lukashenko done now? What’s the latest in Hong Kong? What the hell happened in Catalonia? Has anything changed in Kashmir? Where are we with Myanmar?
And it goes on, every day a new atrocity: a new attack on media freedom, another arrest of an artist or an activist, another family devastated, another person hurt.
It would be too easy for Index to become a grievance sheet – just listing country after country and each infringement on freedoms. But behind each repressive action there is a person, a family, a story and we owe it to them to make sure the world knows their names, understands what they are trying to do and of course know how outrageous the treatment is that they are being subjected too.
But sometimes our job is much harder. Sometimes it is one of our correspondents who has been arrested, someone that we know well. And sometimes it is a member of the Index family that is suffering for their commitment to our collective human rights. Every person we cover is special but when it’s someone you’ve been to the pub with it’s just that little bit harder.
Last month I wrote about Andrei Aliaksandrau, a former member of our team. Today marks 39 days since his arrest and incarceration in Belarus. Andrei is one of 255 political prisoners imprisoned by Lukashekno’s regime (as of today) since the crackdown on civil society began 193 days ago. The world has condemned his arrest but he remains in a Belarusian jail.
This simply isn’t good enough. We need action. We need Andrei home. We need the other 254 human rights activists released. We need media freedoms reinstated in Belarus and we need a guarantee that the right to peacefully protest will be protected.
We need action.
This week has seen Lukashenko’s regime double down on their critics. We’ve seen human rights organisations raided across Belarus. The offices of the Belarusian Association of Journalists has been raided. Human rights activists and journalists have had their homes searched by police. This is happening in Europe, in 2021 and the world is simply too distracted to act.
We need to stand in solidarity with the people of Belarus.
You can sign up to support the campaign for Andrei’s release here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
11 Feb 2021 | Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Ambassador Zheng Zeguang
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China
49-51 Portland Pl, London W1B 1JL
Dear HE Ambassador Zheng,
In 1948 the People’s Republic of China was an original signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 of UDHR protects freedom of expression and media freedom.
The actions by your Government today, in banning the BBC World Service, contravene Article 19 and are a direct attack on the plurality of media available to your citizens.
The BBC World Service provides impartial, independent and factual news throughout the world and is a trusted news outlet. This ban is an assault on its integrity as an accurate news source and is a clear effort to further restrict Chinese residents’ access to an independent source of news.
We call on the Chinese Government to immediately re-instate broadcast rights for the BBC and to guarantee ongoing access for BBC journalists both in China and Hong Kong.
As you will know the BBC whilst state funded operates entirely independently from the British Government. There is no justifiable cause for this ban.
Yours sincerely,
Ruth Smeeth
Chief Executive[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
11 Feb 2021 | China, Hong Kong, News
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116226″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]China has banned the BBC in mainland China for breaches of rules on truth and impartiality according to the state news agency.
The report said the British broadcaster would not have its licence renewed by China’s media regulator at the start of the Chinese new year. The move follows the decision last week by the UK regulator, Ofcom, to strip the Chinese state broadcaster CGTN of its licence in the UK.
The Chinese statement said BBC World News “was found to have seriously violated regulations on radio and television management and on overseas satellite television channel management in its China-related reports which went against the requirements that news reporting must be true and impartial, and undermined China’s national interests and ethnic solidarity.”
BBC World News was not available in most domestic news packages in China but could be viewed at some hotels. Recent BBC reports on China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and abuses in Xinjiang’s internment camps are thought to have infuriated the authorities.
In Hong Kong, the publicly funded broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong also said it was suspending the relay of BBC radio news programming.
Index on Censorship CEO Ruth Smeeth said, “Index on Censorship is appalled at the Chinese Government’s announcement today to ban the BBC World Service from broadcasting in China.
“Media freedom is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and as an original signatory the Republic of China has a responsibility to protect media diversity – not attack it.
“We are concerned that this is just the latest in an ongoing crackdown on foreign media outlets in China. Last year foreign journalists, including from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, were effectively expelled from the country allegedly as a result of their reporting.
“The BBC World Service provides impartial and factual news throughout the world and is a trusted news outlet. This assault on its integrity is a clear effort to further restrict access to information to those who reside in China.
“Index will be writing to the Chinese Ambassador in the UK today as we call on the Chinese Government to immediately re-instate broadcast rights for the BBC and to guarantee ongoing access to BBC journalists both in China and Hong Kong and to ensure their safety.”
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the ban was “an unacceptable curtailing of media freedom. China has some of the most severe restrictions on media & internet freedoms across the globe & this latest step will only damage China’s reputation.”
The BBC said in a statement: “We are disappointed that the Chinese authorities have decided to take this course of action. The BBC is the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster and reports on stories from around the world fairly, impartially and without fear or favour.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
29 Jan 2021 | Greece, Opinion, Poland, Ruth's blog, Turkey
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116129″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]The last 12 months have been difficult for everyone. Whilst many of us have lost loved ones and tried to cope with the impact of lockdowns, social restrictions, closed businesses, redundancies, reduced wages, home schooling and the fear of illness, others have sought to exploit the situation – hoping that the world wouldn’t notice.
Our theme for the winter edition of Index on Censorship magazine was Masked by Covid – the underreported stories of 2020 which had been drowned out by the global public health emergency. There were simply too many for one edition of the magazine.
The news cycle has been dominated by Covid, Trump and Brexit with little else being able to break through. This in itself provided the ideal opportunity for leaders of repressive regimes to move against their citizens with impunity; after all the world wasn’t watching. But when you add the ‘legitimacy’ of emergency regulations to the mix under the guise of protecting the population against Covid, the perfect storm for repression and tyranny has been created.
When the virus spread last spring, Index started covering how it was affecting free speech around the world through a project called Disease Control. Documenting new legislation which closed local newspapers, new regulations which restricted or delayed access to government information, limitations on the free press, the end of the right to protest in numerous countries and arrests of political activists in dozens of countries.
As we all now await to be vaccinated and long for a return to normal, you would hope that maybe the dictators and authoritarian leaders, around the globe, would mitigate their actions knowing that the world might start to pay attention. Unsurprisingly that isn’t proving to be the case.
Only this week we have seen the Polish Government ban abortion, the Greek government propose a new university police force to deal with ‘trouble makers’ on campus and, in Russia, the coronavirus restrictions have been used as a cover to arrest Alexei Navalny’s allies – in the wake of his detention and the subsequent protests.
And it hasn’t just been Covid that has provided cover for oppression. In Turkey, on 27 December – when many of us were more focused on Netflix then the news – the government passed a new piece of anti-terrorism legislation, Preventing Financing of Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. I think most of us would welcome legislation that sought to stop the proliferation of WMDs.
Whilst this legislation has ostensibly been introduced to meet a United Nations Security Council counterterrorism resolution, unfortunately this new law actually goes well beyond that. It is an unfettered attack on civil society organisations across Turkey – with a clear emphasis on undermining those organisations which seek to protect minorities, especially the Kurdish population.
The legislation enables the Interior Ministry to replace board members of NGOs with state-appointed trustees. They can also suspend all operations and activities of an NGO if members are being prosecuted on terrorism charges – this would seem completely reasonable in many nation states, but as over 300,000 people are arrested for being a member of a terrorist group in Turkey every year, the definition of terrorist isn’t quite the global standard.
The legislation also gives the Governor’s office the right to undertake annual inspections of NGOs adding a new admin burden, international NGOs are also covered by new provisions and unsurprisingly financial assets and online donations to individual campaigns can be blocked by the government to “prevent terrorist financing and money laundering”.
Erdogan has just doubled down as an authoritarian leader and did so without global condemnation or even notice. It simply isn’t good enough…
All of these actions, and the many others from Hong Kong to Uganda, seek to cause division, undermine hope in the domestic population and entrench control. The world is getting smaller, technology means that we can know what is happening, as it happens, in every corner of the world. But too many people have stopped paying attention.
For Index it means that we have to double down and keep finding new ways to tell people’s stories so no one can claim ignorance.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”41669″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
