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Free expression in the news

13 Aug 2013 | In the News

#DONTSPYONME
Tell Europe’s leaders to stop mass surveillance #dontspyonme
Index on Censorship launches a petition calling on European Union Heads of Government to stop the US, UK and other governments from carrying out mass surveillance. We want to use public pressure to ensure Europe’s leaders put on the record their opposition to mass surveillance. They must place this issue firmly on the agenda for the next European Council Summit in October so action can be taken to stop this attack on the basic human right of free speech and privacy.
(Index on Censorship)

CANADA
Censorship Can’t be Our Default Internet Setting
Who should decide what websites you can access online? The answer is obvious: You.
(Huffington Post)

CHINA
What a murder mystery reveals about Chinese censorship
At first glance, the only thing out of place in the photograph of a dim, dingy bedroom in Kabul, Afghanistan, released last week by Xinhua, China’s state-controlled news agency, is the giant fluorescent bulb hanging inexplicably below a gilded, five-branch chandelier. It is not: the room is a crime scene, the place where, this past Thursday, an attack left three Chinese nationals dead and two more people missing.
(The New Yorker)

How Censorship Hurts Chinese Internet Companies
Beijing’s block of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter has allowed domestic equivalents to grow. But by shunning global markets, their long-term outlook is uncertain.
(The Atlantic)

INDIA
Indian court orders Facebook, Google to offer plans for protecting children
The New Delhi High Court has given Facebook and Google one month to submit suggestions on how minors can be protected online in India.
(Index on Censorship)

Freedom of Expression: Indians are Becoming Increasingly Intolerant
Instead of nurturing the spirit of debate, we have become aggressive, bigoted and abusive
(Forbes India)

TAIWAN
Censorship quietly flourishes amid outrage
Taiwan’s once-famously freewheeling press is becoming more reliant on China as cross-strait cultural and media exchanges grow
(Index on Censorship)

UKRAINE
TVA channel still off the air, censorship suspected
Nearly three weeks after local TVA channel was forced to suspend its broadcast, a group of 28 deputies from local councils of Chernivtsi Oblast asked the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting to intervene.
(Kyiv Post)

UNITED KINGDOM
Artificially inadequate: we should never let machines rule on censorship
One of the great irritations about freedom of speech is that the people who demand it most are the ones who deserve it least. The very worst, I reckon, are the oxygen thieves who demand complete freedom for themselves but try to silence others.
(TechRadar)

UNITED STATES
The Business of Financing Hate Groups: Legal to Censor, but Unwise
It’s so tempting to go for the easy answer. Credit card companies are private businesses. They generally have the right, including possibly the First Amendment right, to refuse to deal with anyone. (Exceptions might include a collusive financial blockade of any group, which could violate antitrust law, and of course there are anti-discrimination laws.) That should apply all the more to bigots, right?
(ACLU)

Strip Club Owner Brings Epic Free Speech Fight To The US Supreme Court
The owner of an Albany, N.Y. strip club called Nite Moves has hired one of America’s best free speech lawyers to help him convince the Supreme Court that taxes on lap dances should be illegal, The Daily Gazette reports.
(Business Insider)

Free expression in the news

12 Aug 2013 | In the News

AUSTRALIA
Party profile: The Pirate Party
The Pirate Party of Australia will be fielding eight Senate candidates at the upcoming federal election.
(World News Australia)

BAHRAIN
Teacher ‘should have faced trial’
An American kindergarten teacher, who was deported for having links with radical opposition groups, should have been put on trial, according to political societies.
(Gulf Daily News)

CHINA
Popular China bloggers should ‘promote virtues’
Chinese Internet celebrities have been told to “promote virtues” by a leading official, state media said Sunday, after a singer sparked a free speech debate by venting about bombing government offices.
(Yahoo)

GLOBAL
The Pirate Bay Launches Censorship-Dodging Web Browser
Notorious torrent-sharing site The Pirate Bay is 10 years old today, and they got you a little something. They launched PirateBrowser, a custom Firefox browser that skirts Internet censorship and lets you access the Pirate Bay from anywhere. We should at least send them a card or something.
(Geekosystem)

INDIA
Stand up for freedom of expression: Anand Patwardhan
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker AnandPatwardhan believes civil society groups in Gujarat must unite to defend the right to free expression, especially of oppressed sections.
(Times of India)

Freedom of Expression: Indians are Becoming Increasingly Intolerant
Instead of nurturing the spirit of debate, we have become aggressive, bigoted and abusive
(Forbes India)

RUSSIA
Russia asked by IOC about gay propaganda law
Mr Rogge said in Moscow that Russian written reassurances over the Winter Olympics in Sochi needed clarification. “We don’t think it is a fundamental issue, more a translation issue.”
(Radio New Zealand)

SOUTH AFRICA
Fear of offending betrays hard-won rights
When President Jacob Zuma and the ANC calls on “intellectuals” not to be “antagonistic”, it raises several questions, says Judith February and Richard Calland.
(St Kitts News)

ST KITTS
Press Freedom and Freedom of Information Act
Press freedom and Freedom of Information Act are like two wings on which transparency, accountability and openness in government rises to the needs of democracy and good governance.
(St Kitts News)

SWITZERLAND
The power of pictures
Swiss photographer Christian Lutz began a reportage on the International Christian Fellowship (ICF) more than two years ago after gaining explicit approval from the founder of the community, its managers and event organisers. But more than 20 legal complaints stopped the publication of Lutz’s book, In Jesus’ Name.
(Swiss Broadcasting Corporation)

UNITED STATES
‘Boobies,’ the courts and free speech
The courts must protect the rights of students to express themselves on social and political issues.
(Los Angeles Times)

Political signs are free speech, not a blight on suburban lawns
While many consider political signs ugly and annoying, they are free speech at its purest. In case after case, courts have struck down efforts to limit this most basic form of political speech. In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in City of Ladue et al. v. Gilleo that curbs on political lawn signs were unconstitutional.
(Syracuse.com)

Free expression in the news

9 Aug 2013 | In the News

CHINA
Fault Lines Laid Bare in Hong Kong
To her supporters, Alpais Lam Wai-sze, an award-winning primary schoolteacher who shouted obscenities at the Hong Kong police last month over their handling of a street dispute between a pro-Chinese Communist Party group and an anti-Communist group, is a free-speech heroine.
(The New York Times)

GAZA
Gazans Use Satire to Bypass
Political Censorship
Cynical television presenters such as Egyptian Bassem Youssef may soon no longer appear on Palestinian television outlets as a result of the increased censorship imposed on local media. Yet, this same censorship has stood helpless with the spread of sarcastic literature and media published on social networking sites.
(Al Monitor)

MEXICO
Mexico: self-censorship for survival
Journalists in Mexico are increasingly publishing their articles anonymously. Attaching your name to a report, an article or a picture is an obligation and a right. But doing so in Mexico can cost journalists their jobs or their lives. The biggest danger facing reporters there is not being hit by a stray bullet. No, the main peril is being murdered in order to silence and censor the media.
(Radio Netherlands)

PAKISTAN
Pakistani artists challenging YouTube ban
YouTube is a source of entertainment and news for billions around the world, but Pakistanis have lost access to the video site for almost a year after clips of the controversial film “Innocence of Muslims” prompted a government ban.
(CNN)

SINGAPORE
Singapore: End ‘Scandalizing the Judiciary’ Prosecutions
Singapore’s Attorney General’s Chambers should cease using contempt of court charges to muzzle critics of the judiciary.
(HRW)

TURKEY
Singapore: End ‘Scandalizing the Judiciary’ Prosecutions
Singapore’s Attorney General’s Chambers should cease using contempt of court charges to muzzle critics of the judiciary.
(HRW)

UNITED STATES
The more nefarious US foreign policy, the more it relies on media complicity
Americans are shielded from the ugly consequences of US military power by our journalists’ self-censorship
(The Guardian)

National Park Service’s First Amendment Violations Covered Up by Hometown Paper
During the Saint Augustine Tea Party’s month-long saga of standing up for Free Speech, the Right of Assembly and the American way, the local print newspaper, The St Augustine Record, remained elusive and nowhere to be found.
(Examiner.com)

States take aim at sex-ad websites, but run into resistance
A two-word change proposed to one of the nation’s first online laws has triggered a battle between law enforcement and Internet libertarians.
(The Free Press)

Edward Snowden helps France rediscover its own whistleblowers

8 Aug 2013 | France, News and features, Politics and Society

Irène Frachon is a French pneumologist who discovered that an antidiabetic drug frequently prescribed for weight loss called Mediator was causing severe heart damage.

The French term “lanceur d’alerte” [literally: “alarm raiser”], which translates as “whistleblower”, was coined by two French sociologists in the 90’s and popularised by scientific André Cicolella, a whistleblower who was fired in 1994 from l’Institut national de recherche et de sécurité [the National institute for research and security] for having blown the whistle on the dangers of glycol ethers.

While the history of whistleblowing in the United States is closely associated with the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, exposing US government lies and helping to end the Vietnam war, whistleblowing in France was first associated with cases of scientists who raised the alarm over a health or an environmental risk.

In England, the awareness that whistleblowers needed protection grew in the early 1990s, after a series of accidents (among which the shipwreck of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise ferry, in 1987, which caused 193 deaths) when it appeared that the tragedies could have been prevented if employees had been able to voice their concerns without fear of losing their job. The Public Interest Disclosure Act, passed in 1998, is one of the most complete legal frameworks protecting whistleblowers. It still is a reference.

France had no shortage of national health scandals in the 1990s, from the case of HIV-contaminated blood to the case of growth hormone. But no legislation followed. For a long time, whistleblowers were at the center of a confusion: their action was seen as reminiscent of the institutionalised denunciations that took place under the Vichy regime when France was under Nazi occupation. In fact, no later than this year, some conservative MPs managed to defeat an amendment on whistleblowers’ protection by raising the spectre of Vichy.

For Marie Meyer, Expert of Ethical Alerts at Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO, this confusion makes little sense: “Whistleblowing is heroic, snitching cowardly”, she says.

“In France, the turning point was definitely the Mediator case, and Irène Frachon,” Meyer adds, referring to the case of a French pneumologist who discovered that an antidiabetic drug frequently prescribed for weight loss called Mediator was causing severe heart damage. In 2010, Frachon published a book – Mediator, 150mg, Combien de morts ? [“Mediator, 150mg, How Many Deaths?”] – where she recounted her long fight for the drug to be banned. Servier, the pharmaceutical company which produced the drug, managed to censor the title of the book and get it removed from the shelves two days after publication, before the judgement was overturned. Frachon has been essential in uncovering a scandal which is believed to have caused between 500 and 2000 deaths. With scientist André Cicolella, she has become one of the better-known French whistleblowers.

“What is striking is that people knew, whether in the case of PIP breast implants or of Mediator”, says Meyer. “You had doctors who knew, employees who remained silent, because they were scared of losing their job.”

This year, the efforts of various NGOs led by ex whistleblowers were finally met with results. Last January, France adopted a law (first proposed to the Senate by the Green Party) protecting whistleblowers for matters pertaining to health and environmental issues. The Cahuzac scandal, which fully broke in February and March, prompting the minister of budget to resign over Mediapart’s allegations that he had a secret offshore account, was instrumental in raising awareness and created the political will to protect whistleblowers.

For Meyer, France’s failure to protect whistleblowers employed in the public service has had direct consequences on the level of corruption in the country.

“Even if a public servant came to know that something was wrong with the financial accounts of a Minister, be it Cahuzac or someone else, how could he have had the courage to say it, and risk for his career and his life to be broken?” she says.

In June, as France discovered Edward Snowden’s revelations in the press over mass surveillance programs used by the National Security Agency, it started rediscovering its own whistleblowers: André Cicolella, Irène Frachon or Philippe Pichon, who was dismissed as a police commander in 2011 after his denunciations on the way police files were updated. Banker Pierre Condamin-Gerbier, a key witness in the Cahuzac case, was recently added to the list, when he was imprisoned in Switzerland on the 5th of July, two days after having been heard by the French Parliamentary Commission on the tax evasion case.

Three new laws protecting whistleblowers’ rights should be passed in the autumn. France will still be missing an independent body carrying out investigations into claims brought up by whistleblowerss, and an organisation to support them, like British charity Public Concern at Work does in the UK.

So far, French law doesn’t plan any particular protection to individuals who blow the whistle in the press, failing to recognise that, for a whistleblower, communicating with the press can be the best way to make a concern public – guaranteeing that the message won’t be forgotten, while possibly seeking to limit the reprisal against the messenger.

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