Nabeel Rajab, BCHR - winner of Bindmans Award for Advocacy at the Index Freedom of Expression Awards 2012
OPINION This week Bahrain continued its game of cat and mouse with human rights defender Nabeel Rajab, releasing him once more on Wednesday after re-arresting him on 6 June. The outspoken activist and president of Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) has been arrested, released, and arrested again — all in the past two months. Although Rajab is now free, he still faces four charges, two of them for posts he made on the social networking site Twitter, and two others related to organising protests. Charges were brought against the activist for allegedly insulting and publicly defaming the Sunni citizens of the village of Muharraq on Twitter, as well as insulting an authority on the popular social networking site. According to his lawyer, Rajab will stand trial on 9 July.
Rajab’s fearlessness in speaking out against the regime’s human rights abuses mean that the Index on Censorship Award winning activist could very well land in prison again. Still, it is promising that Rajab’s release came after the government announced that it would finally begin compensating families of the 35 individuals killed during a brutalcrackdown on the country’s anti-government protests that began on 14 February last year. Shortly after the announcement, human rights activist Zainab Alkhawaja was injured after a tear gas canister was allegedly fired directly at her hit her in the thigh. Alkhawaja is the daughter of well-known dissident and founder of BCHR Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, who is currently serving a life sentence for participating in anti-government protests last year.
Last November Bahrain released the findings of its much vaunted Independent Commission for Inquiry (BICI) but the country’s sluggish progress in implementing the report’s recommendations calls into question the country’s commitment to genuine reform. Whenever Bahraini officials are confronted with evidence of human rights violations they respond with statements about reform and dialogue but little action is taken.
On Thursday, 27 United Nations member states released a joint statement calling on the Human Rights Council to push Bahrain to end human rights violations. Noticeably missing from the list of countries — which included Switzerland, Mexico, Denmark, and Norway — were close allies the United States and the United Kingdom, despite having made statements about helping the country commit to reform. Bahrain responded to the statement by saying that the information in the statement is “inaccurate” and that the countries that signed the statement did not understand the “reality” of the human rights situation in the country.
Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin
If the ignominy of coming last in the Eurovision Song Contest was not enough, Norway suffered a further humiliation when it was alleged that a journalist from their official delegation was threatened, stripped to his underwear and told to stamp on an Iranian flag by police at Baku airport. Norway’s Tooji received only seven points on Saturday’s final for his song “Stay”, ensuring that Englebert Humperdinck did not come last. However, this poor showing apparently did not quell the Azerbaijani authorities’ interest in the country.
On Friday, a crew from Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) arrived at Baku airport to catch a flight back to Oslo, among them was Iranian-Norwegian comedian Amir Asgharnejad. Asgharnejad apparently attracted the ire of figures in the Caspian state with his satirical videos around Baku during the week of the Eurovision. Playing a character called Bijan Samami, reminiscent of Sacha Baron Cohen’s creation “Borat”, he jokingly extolled the virtues of Iran and maligned neighbouring Azerbaijan. In a clip of him performing a dance routine, his foot appears to touch a nearby Azerbaijani flag. At passport control, Asgharnejad was taken to a room for questioning while his three colleagues were taken to the plane.
Director of Communications at NRK, Tommy Hansen said: “Between six and seven uniformed police questioned Amir for ninety minutes. They first accused him of possessing narcotics, before ordering him to strip down to his underwear. They then forced him to stamp and spit on the Iranian flag.” Mr Asgharnejad also claims that the officers filmed this event and just before he left the interrogation, he was informed: “If you tell anybody in Norway about this, we will hunt you down and kill you.” A spokesman for the Azerbaijan government, Elman Abdullayev, called the allegations “lies” and “fabrications”.
“This was a routine security procedure because Mr Asgharnejad’s passport photo was taken fifteen years ago and he looked different. This journalist made a video where he kicked the Azerbaijan flag and for this reason, he should not be taken seriously. If someone kicked the British flag, what would you do?”
Tommy Hansen added: “We are curious as to whether this is official policy of Azerbaijani authorities or just a group of police officers behaving badly. We consider this inappropriate to the working conditions of journalists and against human rights.” If true, the incident will no doubt sour relations between Norway and the oil-rich post-Soviet nation, to say nothing of the frosty situation with Iran. Recently the two neighbouring countries have traded insults after Ayatollah Sobhani, a senior cleric, accused Azerbaijan of organising a “gay parade” alongside the song contest. Ali Hasanov, an Azerbaijani government official, retorted: “Azerbaijan does not even have a word for ‘gay parade’. Unlike Iran.” Subsequent demonstrations outside the Iranian embassy in Baku, where protesters allegedly held placards insulting supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, caused Tehran to withdraw its ambassador on Tuesday. Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hanne Melfald referred to the alleged treatment of Mr Asgharnejad as a “serious incident”.
Andrew Connelly is a freelance journalist based in London and currently in Baku. You can follow him at @connellyandrew.
There is a dilemma for journalists covering the trial of Anders Behring Breivik — the man who has admitted killing 77 people on 22 July in Norway last summer.
On the one hand, Breivik is gaining another bout of publicity for his crimes. On the other, the journalist’s role is to document a trial which inevitably has attracted significant public attention.
Although Twitter’s use in court is not new, this is a particularly high profile case which also presents a wealth of potential ethical issues for journalists using the microblogging tool to cover the trial.
Reporting Breivik’s trial: Banning “old'”broadcasting while allowing “new” broadcasting
Some parts of the trial are being broadcast by Norway’s NRK television, although a number of key elements will not be shown.
Some of the haunting recordings of those who lost their lives are not being aired. Breivik’s own testimony yesterday was not televised. And the evidence given by witnesses will not be broadcast in the future either.
In yesterday’s press conference, the prosecution was asked how the media should report Breivik’s evidence.
“Q: Is it right for him to testify in court about his political agenda? How should the media report it?
A: It is important that he explain his views and many other people share those views. It also impacts on whether he is sane or insane. We don’t want his testimony to be directly broadcast because it needs to be digested after being put in context by media organisations.”
If the point of not allowing the evidence to be broadcast is to allow an opportunity to put everything in context, it leaves question marks over whether journalists should still be allowed to use Twitter from court.
In short, does it make sense to ban the cameras but not the tweeters?
Twitter updates: Stripping context?
A number of journalists have been using Twitter to provide updates from the trial.
Tweeting Breivik’s evidence inevitably strips away even more context from it. We lose the audio-visual context of a live broadcast and I would suggest that even the best live tweeters won’t be able to relay a verbatim account.
It could be argued that this can be allayed if a number of journalists are tweeting from court as they will provide different tweets on the trial.
In theory, they could also offer additional contextual tweets which might help audiences make sense of Breivik’s rants against Islam, multiculturalists, Marxists, and feminists; the evils of the Labour party; and his justification of mass murder as necessary for the salvation of Norway.
But I would hypothesise that because journalists are likely to tweet news lines they will probably tweet similar things. There also won’t be much time for fact-checking or the broader context while they are live-tweeting.
Paul Brannan, tweeting for Al Jazeera English, offered this caveat to his followers during the afternoon, for example:
*IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER* I am tweeting the evidence directly. I do not vouch for whether what #Breivik is saying is true.
Of course, tweets stripped of context can be reclothed by their incorporation into more detailed live blogs by media organisations and then articles and longer pieces.
Arguably, when taken as a whole, a stream of Twitter updates from a journalist at a trial may contain more context than a short broadcast report for radio or TV.
It is also not unreasonable to expect people to be aware of the limits of Twitter as a medium. (Is it?)
And if people want more context, they will obviously look elsewhere; but the same could be said of live television coverage.
The case for live tweeting over live TV
Twitter has an advantage, of course, over television in that discerning journalists can exercise their judgement to decide which aspects to cover in an attempt to avoid unnecessary harm.
It was notable earlier today that the Guardian’s reporter covering the trial, Helen Pidd, decided she did not want to provide updates during some parts of Breivik’s evidence:
I’m not tweeting all of Breivik’s statement because some of what he is saying is too heartless
Pidd explained that she would “put it in context in a story at lunchtime”, adding that it “seems irresponsible to just put it out on Twitter unadulterated.”
Twitter users who replied to Pidd’s comments were divided over whether she was making the right call.
When I asked her about this decision, Pidd said she does not think she has a duty to report everything Breivik says:
“In any news broadcast or story there is always an element of selection – whether for reasons of brevity, ethical reasons, concerns about those you are writing about [or other considerations].”
Pidd had also discussed tweeting the proceedings prior to the trial with colleagues at the Guardian.
They had agreed that it was “not morally wrong to live tweet the trial” but that they “needed to be careful”.
There are plenty of things to consider here, but perhaps that is the bottom line at the moment. At least until we have a better understanding of how audiences consume this sort of coverage.
Daniel Bennett recently completed his PhD at the War Studies Dept, KCL. His thesis considered the impact of blogging on the BBC’s coverage of war and terrorism. He writes the Reporting War blog for the Frontline Club.
The horrendous rampage of Mohamed Merah, the French man who killed north African soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children, has brought all the usual responses from the usual corners. Britain’s “anti-Imperialist” left the Stop The War Coalition’s Lindsey German, decided that it must, must be the fault of French institutional racism, the war in Afghanistan and even the 50th anniversary of the Algerian war. All these apparently excuses for the anti-Semitic murder of children.
The French hard right, led by Marine Le Pen of the Front Nationale, has blamed “politico-religious fundamentalists” and the liberal multiculturalists who apparently enable them.
The government, meanwhile, has blamed the internet.
President Sarkozy announced today, shortly after Merah was killed by French security forces, that people who frequent “websites which support terrorism or call for hate or violence will be punished by the law.”
This is now standard: When east London MP Stephen Timms was stabbed by Roshanara Choudhry in 2010, people were quick to point to YouTube as the source of her radicalisation, an argument I was sceptical of at the time (and remain so).
When Anders Brei vik went on his own spree in Norway, again immediate attention was drawn to his online habits, with some eager to make capital out of the fact he’d read populist writers such as Jeremy Clarkson.
A UK parliamentary report into online radicalisation earlier this year raised the spectre of “Sheikh Google“, playing a role in sending young men and women into ever more extreme and violent positions.
And now Sarkozy’s statement.
The web is always brought up in these issues, for two simple reasons: the fear of the new, and the fact that many in power still feel it is possible to stop the Internet. The reaction to the English riots last summer was a perfect distillation of this: Things are happening on social networks: they must by necessity be bad, and they must be stopped.
The thing that fuels this fervour is the fact that, to some extent, the Internet can be stopped. Sites can be blocked, bandwidth can be squeezed, usage can be monitored.
But blaming the web is as facile as it is attractive. Social unrest did not begin with BlackBerry Messenger. And extremist violence was not invented on the Internet.
