22 Dec 2014 | Europe and Central Asia, Magazine, News, Politics and Society, United Kingdom, Volume 43.04 Winter 2014
2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. Index on Censorship magazine’s winter issue has a special report that examines all ways in which the document affected modern freedoms. Here John Crace kicks us off with a tongue-in-cheek trip through history
Call it a free for all. Call it an innate sense of fair play. Call it what you will, but the English had always had a way of making their feelings known to a monarch who got a bit above himself by hitting the country for too much money in taxes or losing overseas military campaigns or both. They rebelled. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t but it was the closest medieval England had to due process. Then came John, a king every bit as unloved – if not more so – as any of his predecessors; a ruler who had gone back on many of his promises and was doing his best to lose all England’s French possessions and all of a sudden the barons had a problem. There wasn’t any obvious candidate to replace him.
So instead of deposing him, they took him on by limiting his powers.
Kings never have much liked being told what to do and John was no exception. If he could have got out of cutting a deal with the barons he would have done. But even he understood that impoverishing the people he relied on to keep him in power hadn’t been the cleverest of moves, and so he reluctantly agreed to take part in the negotiations that led to the sealing of The articles of the Barons – later known as Magna Carta – at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Which isn’t to say he didn’t kick and scream his way through them before agreeing to the 61 demands which were the bare minimum for his remaining in power. He did, though, keep his fingers cunningly crossed when the seal was being applied. As soon as the barons had left London, King John announced — with the Pope’s blessing — that he was having no more to do with it. The barons were outraged and went into open rebellion, though dysentery got to King John before they did and he died the following year. Don’t shit with the people, or the people shit with you. Or something like that.
With the original Magna Carta having lasted barely three months, there were some who reckoned they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort by topping King John rather than negotiating with him. But wiser – or perhaps, more peaceful – counsel prevailed and its spirit has endured through various subsequent mutations – most notably the 1216 Charter, The Great Charter of 1225 and the Confirmation of Charters of 1297 and has widely come to be seen as the foundation stone of constitutional law, both in England and many countries around the world. It was the first time limitations had been formally placed on a monarch’s power and the rights of citizens to the due process of law and trial by jury had been affirmed. Well, not quite all citizens. When the various charters talked of the rights of Freemen, it didn’t mean everyone; far from it. Freemen just meant that small class of people, below the barons, who weren’t tied to land as serfs. The Brits have never liked to rush things. They like their revolutions to be orderly. The underclass would just have to wait.
Magna Carta and its derivative charters were never quite the symbols of enlightened noblesse oblige they are often held to be. The noblemen didn’t sit around earnestly thinking about how they could turn England into a communal paradise. What was the point of having fought and back-stabbed your way to the top only to give power away to the undeserving? The charters were matters of political expedience. The nobles needed the Freemen on their side in their face-off with the king and an extension of their rights was the bargaining chip to secure it. Benevolence never really entered the equation. Nor was Magna Carta ever really a legal constitutional framework. Even if King John hadn’t decided to ignore it within months, it would still have been virtually unenforceable as it had no statutory authority. It was more wish-list than law.
Ironically, though, it is Magna Carta’s weaknesses that have turned out to have guaranteed its survival. Over the centuries, Magna Carta has become the symbol of freedom rather than its guarantor as different generations have cherry-picked its clauses and interpreted them in their own way. While wars and poverty might have been the prime catalyst for the Peasant’s Revolt against King Richard II in 1381, it was Magna Carta to which the rebellion looked for its intellectual legitimacy. The Freemen were now seen to be free men; constitutional rights were no longer seen as residing in the few. The King and his court were outraged that the peasants had made such an elementary mistake as to mistake the implied capital F in Freemen for a small f and the leaders were executed for their illiteracy as much as their impudence.
Bit by bit, starting in 1829 with the section dealing with offences against a person, the clauses of Magna Carta were repealed such that by 1960 only three still survived. Some, such as those concerning “scutage” — a tax that allowed knights to buy out of military service — and fish weirs, had become outdated; others had already been superseded by later statutes. Two of those that remained related to the privileges of both the Church of England and the City of London — a telling insight into the priorities of the establishment. Those who still wonder, following the global financial collapse of 2008, why the bankers were allowed to get away with making up the rules to suit themselves need look no further than Magna Carta. The bankers had been used to getting away with it for the best of 800 years. You win some you lose some.
The survival of clause 39 of the original Magna Carta has been rather more significant for the rest of us. “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.” Or in layman’s terms, due process: the legal requirement of the state to recognise and respect all the legal rights of the individual. The guarantee of justice, fairness and liberty that not only underpins – well, most of the time – the UK’s constitutional framework, but those of many other countries as well.
Britain has no written constitution. Not because parliament has been too lazy to get round to drawing one up, but because one is already assumed to be in the lifeblood of every one living in Britain. Queen Mary may have had “Calais” written on her heart, but the rest of us all have “Magna Carta” inscribed there. It can be found on the inside of the left ventricle, for those of you who are interested in detail. Other countries haven’t been so trusting in the genetic inheritance of feudal England and have insisted on getting their constitutions down in non-fugitive ink.
That Magna Carta has also been the lodestone for the constitutions of so many other countries, most notably the USA, is less a sign of the global reach of democratic principles – much as that might resonate with romantic ideals of justice — than of the spread of British people and British imperial power. After the Mayflower arrived in what became the USA from Plymouth in 1620, the first settlers’ only reference point for the establishment of civil society was Magna Carta. The settlers had a lot of other things on their minds in the early years — most notably their own survival and the share price of British American Tobacco — and they hadn’t got time to dream up their own bespoke constitution. If they had, they might have come up with something that abolished slavery and gave equal rights to black people sometime before the 1960s. So they settled for an off-thepeg version of Magna Carta, with various US amendments. And some poor spelling. In 1687 William Penn published the first version of Magna Carta to be printed in America. By the time the fifth amendment — part of the bill of rights – was ratified four years after the original US constitution in 1791, Magna Carta had been enshrined in American law with “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
The fact that the American idea of Magna Carta was not one that would necessarily have been recognised in Britain was neither here nor there. For the Americans, the notion of the rights of a people to govern themselves was more than something that had been fought for over many centuries – a gradual taking back of power from an absolute ruler — that had been ratified on paper. They were fundamental rights that pre-existed any country and transcended national borders. And even if there was no one left alive on Earth, these rights would remain. They might as well have been handed down by God, though it’s probably just as well Adam hadn’t read the sections on the right to defend himself and bear arms. If he had shot the serpent, the whole history of the world might have been very different. As it is, when the Americans took on the British in the War of Independence, they weren’t fighting against a colonial overlord so much as for their basic rights to freedom.
The distinction is a subtle but important one. For though the more recent constitutions of former British colonies, such as Australia, India, Canada and New Zealand, more closely reflected the way Magna Carta was understood back in the mothership, those interpretations of it were still very much a product of their time. As a historical document, Magna Carta remains fixed in the 13th century: a practical solution to the problem of an iffy king. But as a concept it is a shifting, timeless expression of the democratic ideal. It can mean and explain anything. Up to and including that Britain always knows best.
Yet the appeal of Magna Carta endures and it remains the gold standard for democracy in any debate. Whatever side of it you happen to be on. British eurosceptics argue that the UK’s continuing membership of the European Union threatens the very parchment on which it was written; that Britain is being turned into a serf by a European despot. Pro Europeans argue that the EU does more than just enshrine the ideals of Magna Carta, it turns the most threatened elements of it into law.
Eight hundred years on, Magna Carta remains a moving target. Something to be aspired to but never truly attained. A highly combustible compound of idealism and pragmatism. Somehow, though, you can’t help feeling that King John and the feudal barons would have understood that. And approved.
This article is from the Winter 2014 issue of Index on Censorship magazine as 1215 and all that.
This article was originally posted on Dec 22, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
5 Aug 2014 | Australia, Digital Freedom, News, Politics and Society
(Image: Shutterstock)
A piece of proposed legislation in the senate in Australia is attempting to wrestle with the legacy of the Snowden leaks with potential implications for media freedom.
In late 2013 information was released to the world that revealed the depth and breadth of the covert architecture in place to monitor and harvest personal data. The unprecedented capabilities and actions of surveillance agencies the world over ignited debate around the nature of privacy in our digital age. But the emergence was not manufactured by the security apparatus or by governments; it was the result of leaked information being published by the press.
Now, a new law proposed by Attorney-General, George Brandis, the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (no.1) outlines a number of reforms to “modernise and improve” Australia’s capabilities to tackle national security threats. If passed, it could have significant implications for Australian media.
The creation of Special Intelligence Operations (SIO) – covert operations that offer limited immunity for its participants to engage in unlawful conduct – as well as the expansion of computer access warrants are among the sweeping reforms contained within the bill.
Further reforms outline new offences for “unauthorised dealings with an intelligence-related record, including copying, transcription, removal and retention”. But as highlighted by publications such as The Guardian, the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA) and members of the opposition, including Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, the bill opens up the possibility for criminal culpability to lie beyond the security operatives dealing with intelligence-related records, to journalists and media outlets who report on information they receive about SIOs. The bill’s explanatory memorandum states that the offence applies to:
“[D]isclosures by any person, including participants in an SIO, other persons to whom information about an SIO has been communicated in an official capacity, and persons who are the recipients of an unauthorised disclosure of information, should they engage in any subsequent disclosure.”
The transcript of the bill’s second reading demonstrates Brandis’s opinion of Snowden, dismissing him as a “so-called ‘trusted insider’” (he has previously referred to the NSA whistle-blower as an “American traitor”). But while he has stated that the bill is not intended to threaten media outlets or limit media freedom, the wording of the bill has set alarm bells ringing. Quoted in The Guardian, ALA spokesperson Greg Barns stated that this bill “takes the Snowden clause and makes it a Snowden/Assange/Guardian/New York Times clause.”
He goes further, explaining how the structure of approving SIOs, threatens media coverage: “ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] could secretly declare many future cases to be special intelligence operations. This would trigger the option to prosecute journalists who subsequently discover and report on aspects of these operations.” This lack of clarity in the wording of the bill, as well as the limited oversight as to how the bill can be used – political appointees have the final say – sets a precedent for potential restrictions on media freedom both in Australia and, as a template for action, globally.
The size and scale of the surveillance network, involving governments worldwide, most notably the “five eyes” countries, the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia raises uncomfortable questions, with no forthcoming answers. The reforms proposed by Brandis seem to suggest that the best way of satisfying these questions is to ensure they are not asked in the first place.
Restricted by inadequate whistle-blower protections, due in part to his status as a private contractor, as well as the national security implications of the leaked documents, reaching out to the media provided to be the sole outlet for Ed Snowden. But it seems now that it could be the media who will be punished for such inadequate protections.
After two readings in the Senate, the bill is poised to be debated in September. And although Brandis has set his sights elsewhere, having mentioned data retention in an interview to ABC, the precedent set by Australia, were this bill to pass, could resonate throughout the world. Scott Ludlam outlined his concern: “I can’t see anything that conditions it or carves out any public interest disclosures. I can’t see anything that would protect journalists.”
This concern does not seem to be shared across the political spectrum. The Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott called on journalists for a “sense of responsibility, a sense of national interest”, and the Liberal senator, Cory Bernardi went further by stating that “we need to make sure the press are free to report within the constraints of what is in, I’d say, the national interest”.
Would protecting national interests include the refusal to publish information surrounding the allegations that the Defence Signals Directorate, or DSD, (now called the Australian Signals Directorate) attempted to monitor the calls of the Indonesian president, his wife and senior politicians? What about the DSD’s desire to share harvested online data (or “unminimised” metadata) with other governments without any privacy restraints?
If decisions such as these are left to those who define the role of the press as one of propagating national interests, then the freedom that Bernadi speaks of is surely no freedom at all.
This article was published on August 5, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
19 Feb 2014 | Asia and Pacific, Australia, Digital Freedom, News
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When will Australian governments leave the internet alone? Successive governments have shown an inability to allow Australians to go about the business of using the web and browsing at will. Under previous Labor governments, an obsession grew about the need for a mandatory internet filter system. The system would have screened out sites falling into the “Refused Classification” category. Internet activists and the political opposition guffawed at the suggestion. It was deemed excessive and unworkable.
Australia’s new attorney-general, the prickly George Brandis, claims to be interested in freedoms. He certainly spends time talking about it, having established the new office of “Freedom Commissioner” and claiming that the political left has lost sight of traditional civil rights in favour of select, marginal entitlements. His appointee to the position, Tim Wilson of the libertarian Institute of Public Affairs, is meant to signal a policy shift.
Such a move does little to suggest how actual “freedoms” are going to be protected, let alone promoted. Australia’s legislative regime on rights, in the absence of a constitutionally protected bill of rights, is a quilt work of regulations. These are, as ever, the subject of parliamentary change.
When it comes to internet freedoms, Brandis shows a slightly different suspicion of its workings than his predecessors. But in targeting a form of behaviour he cannot accept, he proves to be on familiar ground. The focus here is not morally righteous in the manner of the pornography filterers, but it is righteous in the sense of protecting financial and economic rights. “The illegal downloading of Australian films online is a form of theft.” Both views share a common strand: a desire to circumscribe the way the net, and information, is used.
Before an audience at the Australian Digital Alliance copyright forum last week, Brandis made mention of how he might go about this. The government will consider various legal means to provide a “legal incentive” for ISPs to collaborate with copyright owners to combat infringements. “This may include looking carefully at the merits of a scheme whereby ISPs are required to issue graduated warnings to consumers who are using websites to facilitate piracy.”
A three-strikes system is being pushed, part of a global drive by developed countries to exert greater control over internet content. France, New Zealand, the United States and Britain are all in the stages of implementing such a program. Users of Australia’s broadband system who allegedly download pirated content will be warned before authorities intervene. This can involve threats of discontinuation from the use of the internet after three warnings. So far, owners of content in Australia have been pressing the government to use a warning system short of disconnection.
The effects of this have already been outlined in some detail. Internet service providers such as iiNet and Optus claim that such a policy move will shift the onus on them to police content. That is Brandis’ suggestion: to convert ISPs into cyber policing outfits that will remove websites hosting “illegitimate” material, thereby restraining downloads by customers.
A few points are worth mentioning. The first is how accountability for infringements can be attributed to an ISP. A ruling by the Australian High Court on the liability of an ISP for allowing the downloading of infringing content is instructive. In 2012, the court unanimously found in a case mounted by 34 studios and television companies against iiNet that the ISP was not liable for authorising copyright infringement.
Roadshow Films v iiNet proved to be a global test case on illegal downloads. It found that iiNet did not have direct power to prevent infringements given its lack of control over the BitTorrent protocol. The only way to prevent violations would have been excessive: eliminating a customer’s Internet access altogether, which would also prevent legitimate uses of it. Indifference to cases of infringement was not the same as authorisation of it. And expecting iiNet to do what the plaintiffs wanted would have resulted in heavy expense, inconvenience and liability for terminating customer accounts.
The other point to make is that such graduated systems are set to fail even as they unduly burden the industry. The experiences in France, New Zealand and the UK have shown them to be counterproductive. Steve Dalby, chief regulatory officer of iiNet, forcefully argues that content should be made available via a system of timely release using such streaming services as Netflix and Hulu. “It can’t be a coincidence that graduated response doesn’t work anywhere else in the world, and making content available in a timely fashion in the US market does work.”
Such suggestions by Brandis cast light on preliminary moves on the part of Australia to import American models of intellectual property law into the domestic system. Australia has been the least disagreeable of the countries involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement with the United States, which contains a substantive chapter on intellectual property.
The intellectual property chapter of the secretly negotiated agreement, obtained by WikiLeaks, suggests the extent the TPP will control the way “protected” content, be it technology, medicine and publishing, will be controlled. Mandatory removals and targeting copyright infringements are fundamental to the changes. The main investors in such an arrangement are US companies who will seek, through the legal regulations in other countries, to control the release of protected material. Aspects of the contentious Digital Millennium Copyright Act have found their way into the agreement.
While the interests of copyright are important to consider, the tendency to control the global Internet via an internationalised copyright regime that coopts ISPs into the role of monitors serves no useful role in preventing infringements. This has the effect of turning a provider of such services into a security service for corporate rights. But it is a trend proving irresistible to all governments, especially those in industrial countries.
This article was posted on February 19, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
15 Jan 2014 | Europe and Central Asia, European Union, Index Reports, News, Politics and Society
This article is part of a series based on our report, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression
Beyond its near neighbourhood, the EU works to promote freedom of expression in the wider world. To promote freedom of expression and other human rights, the EU has 30 ongoing human rights dialogues with supranational bodies, but also large economic powers such as China.
The EU and freedom of expression in China
The focus of the EU’s relationship with China has been primarily on economic development and trade cooperation. Within China some commentators believe that the tough public noises made by the institutions of the EU to the Chinese government raising concerns over human rights violations are a cynical ploy so that EU nations can continue to put financial interests first as they invest and develop trade with the country. It is certainly the case that the member states place different levels of importance on human rights in their bilateral relationships with China than they do in their relations with Italy, Portugal, Romania and Latvia. With China, member states are often slow to push the importance of human rights in their dialogue with the country. The institutions of the European Union, on the other hand, have formalised a human rights dialogue with China, albeit with little in the way of tangible results.
The EU has a Strategic Partnership with China. This partnership includes a political dialogue on human rights and freedom of the media on a reciprocal basis.[1] It is difficult to see how effective this dialogue is and whether in its present form it should continue. The EU-China human rights dialogue, now 14 years old, has delivered no tangible results.The EU-China Country Strategic Paper (CSP) 2007-2013 on the European Commission’s strategy, budget and priorities for spending aid in China only refers broadly to “human rights”. Neither human rights nor access to freedom of expression are EU priorities in the latest Multiannual Indicative Programme and no money is allocated to programmes to promote freedom of expression in China. The CSP also contains concerning statements such as the following:
“Despite these restrictions [to human rights], most people in China now enjoy greater freedom than at any other time in the past century, and their opportunities in society have increased in many ways.”[2]
Even though the dialogues have not been effective, the institutions of the EU have become more vocal on human rights violations in China in recent years. For instance, it included human rights defenders, including Ai Weiwei, at the EU Nobel Prize event in Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry responded by throwing an early New Year’s banquet the same evening to reduce the number of attendees to the EU event. When Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton issued a statement in which she expressed her concerns at the deterioration of the human rights situation in China and called for the unconditional release of all political prisoners detained for exercising their right to freedom of expression.[3] The European Parliament has also recently been vocal in supporting human rights in China. In December 2012, it adopted a resolution in which MEPs denounced the repression of “the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly, press freedom and the right to join a trade union” in China. They criticised new laws that facilitate “the control and censorship of the internet by Chinese authorities”, concluding that “there is therefore no longer any real limit on censorship or persecution”. Broadly, within human rights groups there are concerns that the situation regarding human rights in China is less on the agenda at international bodies such as the Human Rights Council[4] than it should be for a country with nearly 20% of the world’s population, feeding a perception that China seems “untouchable”. In a report on China and the International Human Rights System, Chatham House quotes a senior European diplomat in Geneva, who argues “no one would dare” table a resolution on China at the HRC with another diplomat, adding the Chinese government has “managed to dissuade states from action – now people don’t even raise it”. A small number of diplomats have expressed the view that more should be done to increase the focus on China in the Council, especially given the perceived ineffectiveness of the bilateral human rights dialogues. While EU member states have shied away from direct condemnation of China, they have raised freedom of expression abuses during HRC General Debates.
The Common Foreign and Security Policy and human rights dialogues
The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is the agreed foreign policy of the European Union. The Maastricht Treaty of 1993 allowed the EU to develop this policy, which is mandated through Article 21 of the Treaty of the European Union to protect the security of the EU, promote peace, international security and co-operation and to consolidate democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedom. Unlike most EU policies, the CFSP is subject to unanimous consensus, with majority voting only applying to the implementation of policies already agreed by all member states. As member states still value their own independent foreign policies, the CFSP remains relatively weak, and so a policy that effectively and unanimously protects and promotes rights is at best still a work in progress. The policies that are agreed as part of the Common Foreign and Security Policy therefore be useful in protecting and defending human rights if implemented with support. There are two key parts of the CFSP strategy to promote freedom of expression, the External Action Service guidelines on freedom of expression and the human rights dialogues. The latter has been of variable effectiveness, and so civil society has higher hopes for the effectiveness of the former.
The External Action Service freedom of expression guidelines
As part of its 2012 Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy, the EU is working on new guidelines for online and offline freedom of expression, due by the end of 2013. These guidelines could provide the basis for more active external policies and perhaps encourage a more strategic approach to the promotion of human rights in light of the criticism made of the human rights dialogues.
The guidelines will be of particular use when the EU makes human rights impact assessments of third countries and in determining conditionality on trade and aid with non-EU states. A draft of the guidelines has been published, but as these guidelines will be a Common Foreign and Security Policy document, there will be no full and open consultation for civil society to comment on the draft. This is unfortunate and somewhat ironic given the guidelines’ focus on free expression. The Council should open this process to wider debate and discussion.
The draft guidelines place too much emphasis on the rights of the media and not enough emphasis on the role of ordinary citizens and their ability to exercise the right to free speech. It is important the guidelines deal with a number of pressing international threats to freedom of expression, including state surveillance, the impact of criminal defamation, restrictions on the registration of associations and public protest and impunity against human right defenders. Although externally facing, the freedom of expression guidelines may also be useful in indirectly establishing benchmarks for internal EU policies. It would clearly undermine the impact of the guidelines on third parties if the domestic policies of EU member states contradict the EU’s external guidelines.
Human rights dialogues
Another one of the key processes for the EU to raise concerns over states’ infringement of the right to freedom of expression as part of the CFSP are the human rights dialogues. The guidelines on the dialogues make explicit reference to the promotion of freedom of expression. The EU runs 30 human rights dialogues across the globe, with the key dialogues taking place in China (as above), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Belarus. It also has a dialogues with the African Union, all enlargement candidate countries (Croatia, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Turkey), as well as consultations with Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United States and Russia. The dialogue with Iran was suspended in 2006. Beyond this, there are also “local dialogues” at a lower level, with the Heads of EU missions, with Cambodia, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Israel, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Vietnam. In November 2008, the Council decided to initiate and enhance the EU human rights dialogues with a number of Latin American countries.
It is argued that because too many of the dialogues are held behind closed doors, with little civil society participation with only low-level EU officials, it has allowed the dialogues to lose their importance as a tool. Others contend that the dialogues allow the leaders of EU member states and Commissioners to silo human rights solely into the dialogues, giving them the opportunity to engage with authoritarian regimes on trade without raising specific human rights objections.
While in China and Central Asia the EU’s human rights dialogues have had little impact, elsewhere the dialogues are more welcome. The EU and Brazil established a Strategic Partnership in 2007. Within this framework, a Joint Action Plan (JAP) covering the period 2012-2014 was endorsed by the EU and Brazil, in which they both committed to “promoting human rights and democracy and upholding international justice”. To this end, Brazil and the EU hold regular human rights consultations that assess the main challenges concerning respect for human rights, democratic principles and the rule of law; advance human rights and democracy policy priorities and identify and coordinate policy positions on relevant issues in international fora. While at present, freedom of expression has not been prioritised as a key human rights challenge in this dialogue, the dialogues are seen by both partners as of mutual benefit. It is notable that in the EU-Brazil dialogue both partners come to the dialogues with different human rights concerns, but as democracies. With criticism of the effectiveness and openness of the dialogues, the EU should look again at how the dialogues fit into the overall strategy of the Union and its member states in the promotion of human rights with third countries and assess whether the dialogues can be improved.
[1] It covers both press freedom for the Chinese media in Europe and also press freedom for European media in China.
[2] China Strategy Paper 2007-2013, Annexes, ‘the political situation’, p. 11
[3] “I urge China to release all of those who have been detained for exercising their universally recognised right to freedom of expression.”
[4] Interview with European diplomat, February 2013.
