27 Sep 2024 | News, Newsletters, United Kingdom
Today two young British activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, have been sentenced to prison after being found guilty of criminal damage following a stunt at London’s National Gallery. The pair, part of Just Stop Oil (JSO), famously threw Heinz tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers back in October 2022. At Southwark Crown Court, Judge Christopher Hehir sentenced Plummer to two years in prison while Holland was jailed for 20 months. Judge Hehir said the pair “couldn’t have cared less” if the painting had been damaged. But please note no person or painting was harmed in the making of this protest. The iconic painting’s frame, however, was (hence the charges). Should they be punished for the damage caused? Perhaps. But surely a simple fine, a suspended sentence, or community service would do? Jail time (and quite significant jail time at that) is problematic to say the least and follows a pattern of climate protesters being punished harshly in a way that makes it harder for others to join their cause and chorus.
Under the last government a series of legislation was introduced (the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023 and Serious Disruption Prevention Orders), each with the aim of restricting peoples’ right to protest and increasing the punishment for those who fall foul of the new laws. Their scale was evidenced earlier this summer when other JSO protesters were sentenced to four and five years’ imprisonment respectively for planning protests on the M25. Commenting at the time of the sentences Michel Forst, the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, said they should “put all of us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom.”
It’s not just in the UK that the rights of non-violent protesters are being threatened. As Mackenzie Argent reports for Index here, it’s happening throughout Europe, Australia and North America. And while Argent’s article argues that it’s most pronounced in the UK, if the current Italian government gets its way the UK won’t be the worst for long. There, a new security bill proposes outlawing hunger strikes, one of the most powerful forms of protest open to a political prisoner, amongst other measures. All of the countries cited above claim to be democracies and yet these actions make the label look more decorative than substantive. It’s the same story in Israel. Last weekend soldiers marched into the Al Jazeera office in Ramallah, confiscated equipment and closed it for an initial 45 days. Israel’s military said a legal opinion and intelligence assessment determined the offices were being used “to incite terror” and “support terrorist activities”, and that the Qatari-owned channel’s broadcasts endanger Israel’s security. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been pressed on these points by organisations like the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) but has not responded (and indeed when the IDF has made similar accusations in the past, it has provided little evidence to hold them up to scrutiny. See the BBC report here for example). So it simply looks like another attack on media freedom, a way to silence an outlet that can (and should) report to the world what is happening in the West Bank.
People need to be able to protest and they need to be able to report the news. When these two essential pillars are shut down in countries like the UK, the USA, Israel and Italy, the dividing line between democracies and autocracies becomes thinner and the former’s ability to call out the latter on their human rights violations becomes weaker.
26 Sep 2024 | Europe and Central Asia, News, United Kingdom
On Monday 16 September, the United States imposed financial sanctions and visa restrictions on Georgians who they believed to be involved with violent crackdowns on peaceful protests that had occurred in the country’s capital Tbilisi in the spring. The protests were sparked in resistance to the passing of a “foreign agents law”, which shares similarities with an existing law in Russia – raising concerns that the Georgian government is aligning more closely with the Kremlin.
These demonstrations were led by young adults. University students organised and turned out in their thousands, and the majority of protesters on the streets were members of Gen Z. It is commonplace for young people to be vocal about what they believe in, but despite the US supporting the struggle of the youth against their government in Georgia, when it comes to home soil, their commitment to free speech isn’t so steadfast. The US drew condemnation from UN human rights experts regarding the aggressive and harsh measures used by authorities against pro-Palestine protesters on US university campuses – many peaceful demonstrations were met with surveillance and arrests across the country. Further measures are being taken to prevent protests ahead of the 2024/25 academic year, and these have been met with disdain from the American Association of University Professors in a statement made last month.
The USA is far from alone when it comes to recent crackdowns on the right to protest. As Index has previously covered, there have been multiple arrests at both climate protests and pro-Palestine protests in the UK in recent years, and the Conservative government led by Rishi Sunak introduced the much criticised Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023, and Serious Disruption Prevention Orders, all of which significantly inhibit people’s right to protest. This crushing of demonstrations even breached the realms of legality when Suella Braverman was ruled to have passed unlawful anti-protest legislation in 2023. In recent times, the sheer scale of punishment for non-violent protesters in the UK has been brought into the public eye with the sentencing in July of Roger Hallam of Just Stop Oil (JSO) to five years imprisonment, and four other JSO members to four years, for coordinating protests on the M25.
Lotte Leicht, a Danish human rights lawyer who holds the position of advocacy director at Climate Rights International – a monitoring and advocacy organisation that recently put out a statement outlining hypocrisy from western governments regarding climate protests – spoke to Index on this issue, and she believes that the UK is the worst offender.
“The crackdown, and particularly the use of law to sentence non-violent disruption by climate protesters in the UK has stood out as the most severe and most extraordinary measure [from any country]. And one thing that’s very disappointing from our point of view is not to see the new Labour government tackling these draconian laws from the previous government, and taking steps to revoke them,” Leicht said.
She added: “The prevention of UK activists from explaining their motivations for their actions in court, and judges actually preventing them from doing so… As a lawyer, I would say this prevents people from having a fair trial.”
This crackdown on protests has become prevalent in many democracies within ‘the Global North’ in recent years, and examples are not hard to come by. On 11 September, thousands of anti-war protesters in Melbourne, Australia gathered outside a weapons expo, protesting the government’s stance on arms, and the use of such weapons in Gaza. The protests quickly became the subject of great scrutiny when there were violent clashes between Melbourne police and demonstrators, with police allegedly using excessive “riot-type” force, resulting in multiple injuries.
In Germany, pro-Palestine protests have also repeatedly been met with harsh measures, such as bans. The country’s history of anti-Semitism has impacted its attitude towards protests and events that are critical of Israel, causing police to be more heavy handed than in other democracies.
Leicht, who is also the council chairwoman at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), a nonprofit dedicated to enforcing civil and human rights globally, told Index that this increasing anti-protest action from western democracies sets a very worrying precedent.
“This represents a massive deployment of double standards. Because these are the same governments that rightfully stand up for freedom of expression, association and assembly in different corners of the world when authoritarian governments are cracking down horrifically on dissent in their countries,” she said.
“These countries are usually there to say ‘Oh, that’s not good’, and we want them to do that! But by not practising what they preach and undermining these principles at home, they will lose that credibility. In a way, they will provide a green light to authoritarian governments to do the exact same for those that they don’t like. I mean, why not?”
Leicht does, however, believe that a continued struggle against these litigations will not be in vain.
“Protests in the past have also been disruptive, annoying and irritating for those in power — look at the Suffragettes. Now, is that something that we today would say ‘That’s just annoying and irritating’? Many felt so at the time. They were disruptive, they were irritating, they were strong, they were principled – and they were successful. And I think history will tell the same story about courageous climate protesters,” she said.
It is clear that countries positioning themselves as “champions of democracy” must truly allow freedom of expression within their own borders, especially when they set the tone globally. If they continue to infringe upon the rights of people to demonstrate their beliefs and advocate publicly for change, then the future will be silent.
20 Sep 2024 | News, Newsletters, United Kingdom
News – or more specifically the ownership of newspapers – has featured strongly in the headlines this week.
Last Friday, The Jewish Chronicle (JC) – the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper – issued a terse statement saying it had removed articles written by freelance journalist Elon Perry from the paper’s website and ended its association with the writer.
In the aftermath, four long-time JC columnists – David Aaronovitch, David Baddiel, Jonathan Freedland and Hadley Freeman – resigned over the scandal.
Aaronovitch, a former Index chair, wrote on his Substack that he was leaving the periodical after 20 years. He said he “really did not want to stop writing for The Jewish Chronicle” but cited the Perry case as the main reason.
He explained: “For six weeks Perry – who no one had ever heard of – broke a series of front-page exclusives supposedly involving captured Hamas information, most of which managed to justify a current twist in Bibi Netanyahu’s Gaza policy. Eventually journalists in Israel managed to establish that the security services believed these stories to be fake and that Perry himself was a fraud. It was a monstrous failure of editorial standards.”
Aaronovitch has also, along with other writers, asked for more clarity on the paper’s ownership. The JC recently announced the creation of a named board of trustees, but did not identify them. Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger wrote a piece in Prospect trying to shed some light on this and in particular the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.
In the article Rusbridger writes, “Sir Robbie Gibb, who, in his November 2023 BBC Declaration of Personal Interests stated that he was the 100 per cent owner of The Jewish Chronicle. As far as I’m aware, he does not have the funds to be the actual owner of the paper, so we might think of him as the frontman for the funder(s). Whoever they are.”
People become newspaper proprietors for many reasons but being able to use them as megaphones for your own views is usually high on the list, and has been for the past few centuries.
Following on from the JC appearing in its own headlines, we learned that Tortoise Media, the slow news company, was in talks with Guardian Media Group to buy The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.
On Tuesday, Tortoise issued a statement in which the company’s editor and founder James Harding said: “We think The Observer is one of the greatest names in news. We believe passionately in its future – both in print and digital. We will honour the values and standards set under The Guardian’s great stewardship and uphold The Observer’s uncompromising commitment to editorial independence, evidence-based reporting and journalistic integrity.”
The company said it would invest £25 million over five years into ”the editorial and commercial renewal of the title”.
According to the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), journalists at both The Observer and The Guardian oppose the plan.
This week also saw the publication of the last ever daily edition of the 200-year-old Evening Standard in London. Like the JC, The Evening Standard is a “local” newspaper with influence that goes way beyond its region.
The paper will now be replaced by a weekly publication, called The London Standard, each Thursday.
Editor-in-chief Dylan Jones writes that the paper “doubles down on the newspaper qualities the title is known for: sharp opinion, analysis, interviews, deeply researched features, scoops and the strong record in campaigning that is now part of its DNA”.
Writing in The Guardian, former Evening Standard opinion editor James Hanning wrote, “Often the Standard really did provide the first draft of history. If it thought something important, rightly or wrongly, other papers would follow.”
He added, “Politicians wanted our good opinion, to write for us, to have lunch with us. We seemed to know what was going on, were able to make the right calls and had a mild bearing on which way stories ran.”
It was this influence that appealed to proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, who now appears to have bowed to pressure over the daily title from Saudi investors brought into the paper six years ago.
Ownership is a key thread between these stories but they also show the dwindling influence of newspapers in a world dominated by the internet and social media in particular.
In countries where press freedom is cherished, newspapers are a vital part of the system of checks and balances that supports democracies. The best newspapers, which are driven by their journalists rather than their owners, have always held their politicians, businesses and individuals to account for actions that affected their readership.
Newspapers are in a worrying death spiral, due to falling circulation figures and loss of revenue. Research by UK media publication Press Gazette earlier this year revealed the precipitous decline of regional media in the UK.
In 2007, the nine companies that made up the majority of the UK’s regional media generated revenues of £2.4 billion and employed 9,000 journalists. By 2022, revenues had plummeted to £590 million and the number of journalists slashed to just 3,000. Adjusting for inflation, the size of the sector is just one seventh of its size 15 years earlier.
If newspapers continue to disappear, who is left to hold the powerful to account?
5 Aug 2024 | News, United Kingdom
Two UK photo-journalists have recently been arrested while covering an ecological protest and a pro-Palestine demonstration, in the latter case prior to the protest even taking place. The arrests, which come despite the police having been reprimanded for a similar series of ‘unlawful’ arrests of journalists covering protest actions in 2022, have raised fresh concerns over heavy-handed police tactics targeting the press.
“Police over-reach poses real harms to the perception of journalists’ roles, particularly in public order situations, and therefore poses real risks to their safety,” National Union of Journalists (NUJ) general secretary Michelle Stanistreet told Index. “Of particular concern… are instances where the UK Press Card Authority press card has been shown to officers and been dismissed, where journalists have been arrested and the equipment they rely upon for their livelihood seized.”
Guy Smallman, a veteran photojournalist and NUJ member whose coverage of protest activity appears throughout the UK press, was arrested on 25 June for aggravated trespass while standing on what he says was a public footpath, covering an ecological protest at a boating lake near former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire residence. He has since been released on bail, with the police retaining £14,000 worth of camera equipment. He has not been charged.
“The police are using criminal powers which don’t apply to [journalists], vindictively harassing people like us for covering issues they find embarrassing,” Smallman said.
It’s not an isolated incident. Martin Pope, a British Association of Journalists (BAJ) member, spent 20 years working for the Daily Telegraph and has also contributed photography to The Guardian, The New Yorker and The Sunday Times. In April 2024, he was swept up in a pre-emptive arrest of protesters planning to target an arms company implicated in Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
“Police came flying into the house,” he said, referring to the home of one of the protesters, where they had all gathered prior to the demonstration. “I identified myself as a journalist, but it didn’t make any difference.”
As noted by both of the veteran photojournalists, who work as freelancers rather than being employed by a newspaper, their arrests suggest that lessons have not been learned following a controversy where police were forced to apologise for what they admitted were ‘unlawful’ and excessive arrests directed by senior officers, targeting journalists documenting Just Stop Oil protests, including LBC reporter Charlotte Lynch.
Pope was himself previously arrested at the end of 2023 and held for 18 hours, before being released without charge. Police wrongly asserted that he was directly involved in the Palestine Action protest he was covering as a journalist.
When asked for comment on Pope’s latest arrest, Avon and Somerset police said: “The arrests were made with the purpose of attempting to prevent criminality… We fully appreciate the important role journalists have in documenting and reporting real-time events. Officers receive training to ensure the media are able to carry out their work fairly and without hindrance.”
North Yorkshire police did not respond to requests for comment on Smallman’s arrest.
Both arrests point to a concerning new range of tactics being applied to journalists covering protest activity in the UK.
“It is right that journalists act on information shared by sources including on the location of protests and any suggestion that doing so could risk detention must be condemned and rejected by all who support and value a free press,” Stanistreet said.
Yet in both of the recent arrests, police cited the journalists’ foreknowledge of the time and place of the protests as evidence of direct implication in the protest activity.
“The police said: if you’ve got a tip-off, you’re obviously part of the [protest] team,” Pope said. His detention marks the first time a journalist has been detained during a wave of recent pre-emptive arrests, a tactic which London’s Metropolitan Police have declared they plan to use more frequently in response to ongoing protests over a range of hot-button political and social issues.
There are also particular concerns around the police’s disregard for both journalists’ press cards. When Pope attempted to identify himself as a journalist, he was told: “Maybe you’re just an activist with a press card.”
Pope said: “But I’m not trying to be anonymous – I don’t have a balaclava! I’m not at all secretive about what I’m doing.”
Smallman faced similar treatment, saying he identified himself as a journalist but was arrested regardless.
There’s a parallel with prior arrests. In 2022, photojournalist Tom Bowles tried to show officers his press card and was detained anyway. Despite subsequent apologies, Smallman reports that the arresting police in his case had “no idea what journalistic privilege was”.
A final issue of key concern highlighted by the NUJ is the confiscation of equipment from both journalists, preventing them from carrying out future work. Though the investigation into Pope was ultimately dropped he also spent months under restrictive bail conditions further prohibiting his ability to work and earn a living. The statement given by police notes that “items belonging to the journalist, including camera equipment, laptop and a mobile phone have been returned. No material stored on them was downloaded or recorded in evidence.”
Smallman, whose equipment was also confiscated, has already raised money through crowd-funding to replace his confiscated equipment, and promises to donate the new gear to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate once he receives his own equipment back from the police.
Pope and Smallman both said that arresting officers also demanded they hand over their phone passwords, raising further concerns over attempts to access confidential journalistic material. Smallman was threatened with a five-year jail sentence if he didn’t comply and hand over his passcodes, using a little-known and far-reaching police power. To Smallman, the police are “using criminal powers which don’t apply to [journalists], vindictively harassing us for covering stuff they find embarrassing”.
Stanistreet agrees, saying: “We have been vocal on the chilling effect caused by the targeting of journalists and continue to condemn the harm to media freedom where public interest journalism is impeded because of the wrongful use of police powers.”
In their most recent review of press freedoms in the UK, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) cited the 2022 arrests of journalists as demonstrating a continued “lack of pluralism” and “restrictive political climate” in the UK. The recent arrests add further weight to these concerns. What Smallman calls an attempted, “gradual erosion of any kind of [press] impartiality” by the UK police has not yet been halted by public, professional and union opposition to the harassment and detention of professional journalists. It is vital that journalists are allowed to report safely, without the risk of arrest weighing on their minds.
