3 Jul 2024 | Albania, Europe and Central Asia, Kosovo, News, Serbia, Switzerland
Following the controversy of the 2022 World Cup when organising body FIFA faced major criticism over the decision to hold one of the biggest sporting events on the planet in Qatar, a state with a terrible record on human rights, governing body UEFA have attempted to steer clear of any politics whatsoever at this summer’s European Championships.
This year’s competition – which is currently ongoing – has stressed a message of unity, togetherness and inclusion, with UEFA being determined to avoid the negative press garnered by FIFA two years ago by remaining tight-lipped on political issues.
However, no matter how hard you try, politics cannot be removed from football. A number of issues related to freedom of speech have given UEFA headaches during the tournament, showing that censorship can be experienced anywhere, even when you try to avoid it.
One of the most significant examples of free speech being curtailed at the Euro 2024 was the case of Kosovan journalist Arlind Sadiku, who was barred by UEFA from reporting on the remainder of the tournament after he aimed an Albanian eagle sign towards Serbia fans during a broadcast.
Kosovo, Sadiku’s home state, has a population made up of 93% ethnic Albanians and the countries have a strong connection. Serbia does not recognise the independence of Kosovo and there is a history of conflict between the two nations, with relations remaining tense since the end of the brutal Kosovo War in 1999. The eagle symbol made by Sadiku represents the one on Albania’s flag and was deemed by UEFA to be provocative.
Sadiku told the Guardian: “People don’t know how I was feeling in that moment because I have trauma from the war. My house was bombed in the middle of the night when I was a child.
“I know it was unprofessional from a journalist’s perspective, but seeing my family in that situation was traumatic for me and I can’t forget it.”
The conflict between Serbia and Kosovo has caused free speech issues in sport before. In 2021, a Kosovan boxing team was denied entry to Serbia for the AIBA Men’s World Boxing Championships. It was a similar story at the European Under-21 Table Tennis Championships in 2022, which were held in Belgrade, as Kosovo athletes were once again not permitted to participate by Serbian authorities.
Even in football this has been a long-standing issue. At the 2018 World Cup, Swiss duo Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka were charged by FIFA for each making the eagle salute after scoring against Serbia for Switzerland. They were each fined £7,600 for their celebrations.
Granit Xhaka’s father spent more than three years as a political prisoner in Yugoslavia due to his support for Kosovan independence and Xherdan Shaqiri came to Switzerland as a refugee and couldn’t go back to visit his family due to the war. Such context was again not enough to mitigate the players’ actions according to FIFA.
Of course, there is an argument to be made that the symbol made by Sadiku, Shaqiri and Xhaka was incendiary and risked provoking aggravation among fans, which could potentially be a safety hazard. However, if those who have personally experienced persecution are then punished when making a peaceful protest, then there is surely no room for any dissent in sport at all.
Many of the other conversations around free speech at Euro 2024 have been centred around nations in the Balkans.
Jovan Surbatovic, general secretary of the Football Association of Serbia, suggested that the country may withdraw from the tournament completely due to hate chants he claimed were made by Croatia and Albania fans. Serbia themselves have been the subject of a number of complaints – they were charged by UEFA after supporters unveiled a banner with a “provocative message unfit for a sports event”, while the Kosovo Football Federation also lodged a complaint about their fans spreading “political, chauvinistic, and racist messages” declaring their supremacy to Kosovo. One Albanian player, Mirlind Daku, was banned for two games for joining in with fans’ anti-Serbia chants after their draw with Croatia.
When nations have such complex relationships and history outside of football it can easily spill out on the pitch. The heightened emotion and passion of sport makes for a compelling watch, but can also increase tensions between nations. In such a convoluted context it is sometimes difficult to know where to draw the line between the right to free speech and the protections against hate speech.
Global conflicts have thrown up more sticking points – when calls were made for Israel to be barred from competing at Euro 2024 due to their ongoing bombardment of Gaza – which has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians – in response to the 7 October attacks by Hamas, UEFA refused. Niv Goldstein, chief executive of the Israel Football Association, told Sky News: “I am trusting Fifa not to involve politics in football. We are against involving politicians in football and being involved in political matters in the sport in general.”
This doesn’t quite match up with the fact that UEFA banned Russia from the competition soon after their invasion of Ukraine, demonstrating the difficulties in finding where to draw the line when attempting to regulate political speech and expression in football. UEFA were spared the headache of dealing with further protest at the tournament after Israel failed to qualify.
Similar issues were raised when German authorities ruled that only flags of participating teams would be allowed into stadiums, which was widely seen as an attempt to avoid potential conflict over Palestine and Israel flags being displayed, but which raised concerns that it would limit support for Ukraine. Blanket bans are often difficult to reconcile with the idea of free speech.
Football can’t ever be fully separated from politics. Just look at the case of Georgian MP Beka Davituliani, who weaponised the country’s shock victory against Portugal in his attempt to roll back on human rights, stating that the country needed defending from so-called LGBTQ+ propaganda like Giorgi Mamardashvili defended his goal. For the most part, fans and players have been able to express themselves freely, but we have a duty to highlight any issues when they arise – and unfortunately, at this summer’s tournament, they have.
11 Jun 2024 | Israel, Moldova, News, Russia, Ukraine
Israel’s High Court of Justice this week heard a petition challenging new legislation allowing a ban on foreign broadcasters deemed a threat to national security.
Known as the Al Jazeera law, in honour of its inaugural target, this allows the communications minister, with the consent of the prime minister and the committee of national security, to impose far-reaching sanctions.
“There is no doubt that there is a violation of freedom of expression here,” the High Court panel’s head, Justice Yitzhak Amit, told the hearing.
Yet Israel’s May shuttering of Al Jazeera – described as a “terror channel” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – passed without much domestic concern.
Any outrage was limited to Israel’s small liberal left wing, even though in banning Al Jazeera, Israel joins the august ranks of countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain.
The issue is, of course, rife with politicisation. Al Jazeera is headquartered in Qatar, as is part of the Hamas leadership, and is hardly free from bias. Nonetheless, this law can be used in the future to ban other foreign broadcasters that are deemed to pose an amorphous “threat to national security”.
And crucially, it includes an “override clause” that even Israel’s high court cannot overturn.
It’s important to note that countries often introduce special legislation affecting media in times of war and crisis, amid legitimate national security considerations.
Ukraine is an obvious case in point, not least because it faces such a particularly sharp threat from Russian disinformation.
A year before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky moved to shut down three pro-Russian TV channels judged to effectively be weapons in Russia’s information war.
Immediately after the full-scale invasion, all national news channels were united into a 24-hour broadcast, and a subsequent newly revised media law was intended to be muscular enough to withstand Russian malign influence.
Yet while criticism of the government in times of war – especially one being fought with a citizen’s army – is not easy, Ukrainian journalists have quite effectively held their leaders to account.
Reporting on corruption in the defence ministry, for instance, heralded the minister’s resignation of defence minister Oleskiy Reznikov and government pledges for greater transparency.
And critically, the Government’s moves in the information sphere have not gone unchallenged. Ukraine, with its history of authoritarian government and a media scene under the sway of oligarchs and political interests, knows all too well how fragile free expression can be.
While officials made clear that the telethon would be completely free of government intervention, not all outlets were included, and critics note that some of those excluded such as Espresso, Channel 5, and Priamyi, had often criticised Zelensky and to varying degrees were associated with his predecessor Petro Poroshenko.
And there was widespread criticism of the March 2023 media law for handing too much power to government intervention, with the same measures to counter Russian disinformation all too easily abused to limit critical voices.
In neighbouring Moldova, scores of pro-Russian outlets were banned under the state of emergency declared immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than two years later, the TV channels and websites remain blocked despite the end of the state of emergency, and many critics would argue that the country remains as vulnerable as ever to Russian propaganda.
What is needed to ensure that national security considerations do not become a tool to control free expression is a robust civil society push back and an ongoing debate on the boundary between freedom of speech and the fight against fake news.
In Israel, where the national narrative has become an inextricable part of the conflict itself, the public appears increasingly supine in the face of the official version of events.
Israel has long championed its diverse and outspoken media sector as a sign of a vibrant democracy, alongside robust laws that purport to protect free expression. But civil society and media are now experiencing repression from both official and non-state sources, with Palestinian citizens of Israel bearing the brunt.
Anti-war protests have been curtailed and violently repressed; Jewish and Arab teachers fired over left-wing posts on social media, while students have faced disciplinary actions for simply supporting a ceasefire.
Dissenting voices and journalists are being directly targeted and doxxed. Just after 7 October, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi suggested police be empowered to arrest those accused of spreading information that could harm morale or fuel enemy propaganda.
Haaretz journalist Rogel Alpher this week noted a column in Yisrael Hayom which called for articles in the penal law that mandate execution or life imprisonment enforced on those disseminating “defeatist propaganda” or “abetting the enemy”.
Of course, Israel is not about to start executing journalists. The vast majority of extreme proposals do not make it into law, just as most anti-war arrests do not lead to indictments. Even bans on specific outlets are not total; Al Jazeera can still be accessed with absolute ease online.
But this all helps create a chilling atmosphere, serving to normalise such actions and increasing self-censorship.
Israel’s Hebrew-language media has chosen to self-censor to such a large extent that Jewish Israelis experience what Esther Solomon, editor-in-chief of Haaretz English, describes as a “cognitive gap” between the content they consume and what the rest of the world sees.
This means that anything confronting the profoundly uncomfortable reality of war and contradicting the accepted IDF narrative is seen as traitorous and a threat to national security.
The public acceptance of vaguely worded censorious media laws seems to fit all too well with the ongoing slow and creeping deterioration of Israel’s democracy.
3 May 2024 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News
We at Index on Censorship were rocked by last week’s news that Iranian rapper and human rights defender Toomaj Salehi has been sentenced to death for “spreading corruption on earth” following his involvement in the country’s Woman, Life, Freedom protests. The news was widely received with outrage and triggered significant pushback. Protests took place in cities all over the world, while a social media campaign calling for his release led to the hashtag #FreeToomaj trending on X (formerly Twitter). We joined with organisations PEN America and Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) to voice our condemnation of the Iranian’s sentence.
At Index we are committed to campaigning for Toomaj – the winner of Index’s 2023 Arts Freedom of Expression Award – to be freed from his unjust and outrageous sentence. However, this is not an isolated case. Another Iranian, Abbas Daris, was also sentenced to death for his role in the protests in 2021, although he was granted a retrial in 2023. Iran Human Rights director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said in a statement: “There’s no evidence against him but torture-tainted forced confessions, his sentence is unlawful not only according to international laws but even according to the Islamic Republic’s own laws.”
Similarly, in October 2023 Iranian Kurdish man Reza Rasaei, who was involved in the protests, was sentenced to death after being convicted of murder in a trial described by Amnesty International as “grossly unfair” due to the use of Rasaei’s confessions obtained through torture as evidence.
Other citizens have been jailed for their part in advocating for human rights. Asghar Nikoukar, a musician who played music at the graves of those killed during the protests, was sentenced to five years in prison. He has now been released but with an electronic tag, meaning he will spend the remainder of his sentence outside jail with limited mobility.
Earlier this week, news broke of one Iranian woman who had endured an even worse fate. A leaked document understood to have been written by Iran’s security forces revealed that Iranian teenager Nika Shakarami, who disappeared from an anti-regime protest in 2022 and whose body was found nine days later, was sexually assaulted and killed by three men. The Iran government claimed she took her own life.
The government has targeted those in the state fighting for women’s rights and human rights for many years, a worrying trend that has significantly increased since the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022. The protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa “Jina” Amini in September of that year after being detained by Iran’s “morality police” for not wearing a headscarf. According to human rights groups, during the protests security forces used lethal force on protesters and killed more than 500 people.
Some of those who participated in the protests have already been executed by the Iranian regime. A report from two campaign groups – Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and France’s Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) – found that at least eight protesters were executed in 2023, six of whom had been arrested in relation to the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations and sentenced after unfair trials.
“Instilling societal fear is the regime’s only way to hold on to power,” Iran Human Rights Director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam told the BBC in the wake of the report.
Salehi was already a well-known rapper who was renowned for his songs critiquing the Iranian regime, and had been arrested and imprisoned in 2021 for “propaganda against the regime” and “insulting the supreme leadership authority”. His decision to continue to throw his weight behind the Woman, Life, Freedom protests despite this is a testament to his incredible bravery. His case is incredibly important and urgent, as are the cases of the many others who have been punished for peaceful protesting.
There is a risk that external affairs, such as the state’s current involvement in the Israel-Gaza war, has overshadowed the injustices faced by those inside the country. We published an interview with Iranian film-maker Vahid Zarezadeh last week, who expressed his concern that the fate of protesters in Iran are being forgotten under the circumstances.
“Governments often utilise external conflicts to divert attention from domestic issues,” Zarezadeh said.
Toomaj’s case cannot be viewed as a one-off, but as a result of the actions of an authoritarian state systematically persecuting those who speak out against the regime, whether or not they have a large profile. We can’t allow the extent of the issue to go under the radar.
19 Apr 2024 | Iran, News
While Iran and Israel continue to provoke each other in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks by Hamas, there are concerns that the fate of protesters in Iran, particularly those that started after the murder in custody of Jina ‘Mahsa’ Amini, are being forgotten as the Iranian leadership cracks down.
“Governments often utilise external conflicts to divert attention from domestic issues,” says exiled Iranian film-maker Vahid Zarezadeh. “In Iran, while the government addresses threats from abroad, it simultaneously intensifies its grip on civil liberties at home, particularly targeting women’s freedoms. This approach helps consolidate power internally by rallying nationalistic sentiments while suppressing dissent.”
Zarezadeh, who made the documentary White Torture in collaboration with the jailed 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi and Gelareh Kakavand, says, “Given the complexities of the current events in Iran and the ongoing regional tensions, it’s crucial to understand the multifaceted nature of the strife affecting the nation, particularly its impact on women and civil society. As Iran navigates its ongoing conflict with Israel, another critical issue persists domestically: the war against women in the streets of Tehran and other cities. This battle is intensifying with new legislative measures concerning the hijab, marking the beginning of a renewed phase of systematic suppression.”
Last September, Iran’s parliament passed a bill with a huge majority that meant that refusing to wear a hijab, either in person or even on video on social media, was considered as nudity. The bill allows for jail sentences of up to ten years for those who fail to adhere to the new measures. Iranian businesses that “promote or allow immoral behaviour”, including not wearing the hijab, are also targeted by the bill.
Zarezadeh says that pressure from the Iranian authorities on protest and dissent has increased markedly.
“A stringent crackdown on dissent has emerged, characterised by the systematic suppression of women and civil activists,” he says. “While the massive protests have lessened in visibility due to severe governmental crackdowns, underlying discontent remains. The fear of reprisal, particularly the death penalty, has tempered the public’s willingness to protest as openly as before.”
Even with the new stricter laws on dress code, he says that resistance against the compulsory hijab continues as a symbol of wider discontent with systemic gender-based restrictions.
“Despite the risks, including severe penalties such as the death penalty, the spirit of dissent still simmers, manifesting in smaller, yet persistent protests,” he says.
The resistance is still being kept alive through social media, and X in particular, where the hashtag #جنگ_علیه_زنان (“war against women”) has gained traction. Its widespread usage serves as a barometer for the internal sentiment against the current regime’s policies.
Videos showing women being violent attacked in broad daylight by the morality police and being thrown into the backs of vans are being widely shared using the hashtag, such as this:
Many women human rights defenders and activists have been thrown in prison, and face dire conditions with no adequate medical or sanitary provisions.
“A poignant example is Bahareh Hedayat, a prominent student activist who was temporarily released for medical treatment due to uterine cancer but has since been returned to prison,” says Zarezdeh. “Such cases underscore the severe and deteriorating conditions faced by women behind bars.”
One powerful symbol in the protests over the last two years were the actions of schoolgirls in protesting against the restrictions on women.
However, young protesters, including many schoolgirls, have since faced detention and other forms of intimidation. Detailed follow-ups on their situations are scant due to restrictions on information flow within the country.
The fate of the Iranian woman climber Elnaz Rekabi is also far from clear. Rekabi competed in a climbing tournament in South Korea in 2022 without a hijab.
“After her act of defiance by competing without a hijab, Elnaz Rekabi faced both support and significant pressure upon her return to Iran,” says Zarezdeh
When she flew home from South Korea, Rekabi said that her hijab had fallen off inadvertently. Her family’s villa in Iran was subsequently demolished, seemingly in punishment.
Zarezdeh says, “The full extent of Rekabi’s current situation remains unclear with concerns about her freedom and well-being continuing to linger.”
There continues to be a hunger for reform despite the crackdown. “The initial surge in hope for a potential regime change has been dampened by the forceful response from the authorities,” says Zarezadeh. “However, the desire for reform and change persists among various sectors of the society.”
