2 Jun 2015 | Africa, Angola, mobile, News, Statements
Journalist and human rights activist Rafael Marques de Morais (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
International signatories from the worlds of technology, journalism, publishing, theatre, film and business, including jewellers Tiffany & Co, called on Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos on Tuesday to drop the prosecution of award-winning investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais.
Marques was last week given a six-month suspended sentence following a trial in which he faced criminal defamation charges over his 2011 book on blood diamonds, which was published for the first time in English on Tuesday.
“Rafael’s trial was a sham. He was told charges would be dropped, only for him to be hit with new charges out of the blue, and he was not allowed to present his evidence or call witnesses,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of freedom of expression group Index on Censorship, which organised the letter.
“Rafael is a courageous journalist, working with little support to expose corruption in Angola. This absurd trial and verdict is meant to stop him from speaking out. We want to make sure that does not happen.”
Marques was awarded an Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression award in March for his work. Signatories to the letter include jewellers Tiffany & Co.; tech entrepreneurs Martha Lane Fox, one of the judges of the awards, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; authors Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and Elif Shafak; actors Janet Suzman, Juliet Stevenson, and Simon Callow; playwrights Howard Brenton and Timberlake Wertenbaker; as well as Steve McQueen, director of Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave. Other signatories included journalists Sir Harold Evans and Christina Lamb; and artists and writers with direct experience of censorship, such as Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat and Azerbaijani journalist Idrak Abbasov.
The letter will be delivered by Index on Censorship to the Embassy of Angola in London on Tuesday, June 2.
For more information, contact David Heinemann on 0207 260 2664 or email [email protected].
The letter
We, the undersigned, call on Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos to drop the prosecution of journalist Rafael Marques de Morais.
Marques’ vital investigations into human rights abuses should not be impeded by the threat of jail, which is set to loom over him for two years under the court’s terms.
His conviction and six-month suspended sentence are a clear violation of the rights to free expression, to a free press and to a fair trial.
Marques’ reporting is fundamental not only to Angola, but to the world at large.
We call on you to ensure standards of international law are applied during the appeal process.
Yours faithfully,
Ali Ferzat, cartoonist
Angela Quintal, editor, Mail & Guardian, South Africa
Dame Ann Leslie, journalist
Anthony Barling, lawyer
Art Kaufman, World Movement for Democracy
Bob Fu, founder and president, ChinaAid
Brilliant Earth Jewellery
Carl Gershman, president, National Endowment for Democracy
Chantal Uwimana, Transparency International
Chie Murakami, director general, Diamonds for Peace, Japan
Christopher Hird, film producer
Christophe Deloire, secretary-general, Reporters Without Borders
Christina Lamb OBE, journalist
David Aaronovitch, columnist
David Harewood MBE, actor
David McCune, publisher
David Schlesinger, founder, Tripod Advisors
Dreda Say Mitchell, author
Edward Fitzgerald CBE QC, lawyer
Elaine Potter, journalist
Elif Shafak, author
Geoffrey Hosking OBE, historian
Grigory Pasko, journalist
Sir Harold Evans, journalist
Howard Brenton, playwright
Idrak Abbasov, journalist
Janet Suzman, actor and director
Jesper Højberg, executive director, International Media Support
Jeffrey Smith, Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice & Human Rights
Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia
Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive, Index on Censorship
John Witherow, editor, The Times, UK
Juliet Stevenson, actor
Kamila Shamsie, author
Kostas Vaxevanis, journalist
Lara Pawson, author of In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre
Larry Kilman, secretary-general, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers
Leber Jeweler Inc
Lee Hirsch, film director
Lindsey Hilsum, journalist
Louise Redvers, journalist
Mariane Pearl, journalist
Mark Stephens CBE, senior member, Howard Kennedy LLP
Martha Lane Fox CBE, House of Lords
Mary Lawlor, executive director, Front Line Defenders
Maya Wolfe-Robinson, journalist
Matthew d’Ancona, journalist
Matthew Parris, journalist
Mohamed Al-Dharadji, film director
Neil Gaiman, author
Paul Webster, film producer
Peter Oborne, journalist
Peter Kellner, president, YouGov
Peter Pomerantsev, author
Peter Tatchell, director, Peter Tatchell Foundation
Philip Pullman, author
Rahim Haciyev, editor, Azadliq, Azerbaijan
Richard Sambrook, director, Centre for Journalism, Cardiff University
Ronald Deibert, academic
Robert McCrum, writer and editor
Sanar Yurdatapan, Initiative for Freedom of Expression, Turkey
Shubhranshu Choudhary, journalist
Simon Callow CBE, actor
Steve McQueen CBE, film director
Sue Woodford-Hollick OBE, businesswoman
Sue Valentine, Committee to Protect Journalists Africa Programme
Suzanne Nossel, executive director, PEN American Centre
Stephen Hull, editor-in-chief, Huffington Post UK
Thomas Hughes, executive director, Article 19
Tiffany & Co.
Timberlake Wertenbaker, playwright
Turi Munthe, founder, Demotix
Yoav Shamir, filmmaker
Ziyad Marar, publisher
30 Apr 2015 | mobile, News, United Kingdom
What if your job, your career, was winding up an entire nation?
That’s it. Sure, you have a column in a national newspaper. But what can you really do with it? You can’t really share your thoughts on the common toad, or tell delightful stories about your children misunderstanding foreign words, much less offer some insight into the workings of the modern world. Sure, you can chuck the odd piece of light relief in the sidebar or the basement, but that’s not what people are here for. We’ve come to your column to be thrilled by your outrageous views, and thrilled we will be.
Last time round it was people giving food to, and receiving food from, charity.
“SAY the words food bank” La Dolce ‘Opkina began, “and I am supposed to put on my concerned face and proffer up a can of beans.”
Where’s this going Katie? Where could this possibly be going?
“But all I’ve found in the back of my cupboard is two fingers. And they don’t belong to a Kit Kat.”
BOOM! Gotcha. I mean, it makes no sense. If it’s the fingers at the end of her arm she’s using, why are they in the back of the cupboard? Unless, maybe, she is SO outrageous that she keeps a special V-flipping apparatus in her cupboard, as her doctor has advised her that the constant extension and retraction of her index and middle finger was putting her in serious risk of chronic RSI. But then, if you were using it that much, you wouldn’t keep it in the back of the cupboard. You’d have it on the hall table, perhaps. Or in a little belt-mounted pouch, like a techie’s mobile phone, ready to unleash, cosh-style, upon passing do-gooders, bed-wetters, namby-pambies, oiks, poshos, hippies, liberal elitists, ignorant yokels, EUROCRATS, trendy vicars, Trots, gypsies, useless husbands, trashy wives, “gay rights” activists, lesbo-feminists and everyone else you might bump into at a reasonably-sized community festival in a reasonably-sized town.
It must be exhausting keeping track of this roll call of resentment. It must be wearing to have to be angry every week. How draining to have a public persona dedicated to hating everything and everyone.
And then there is the fact that outrage is a substance which can be addictive, but to which people can also develop a considerable tolerance. In order to keep us interested — and quite possibly to keep herself interested also — Hopkins has to keep upping the dose, until eventually we get to the point where she’s describing poor African people drowning in the sea as cockroaches and everyone suddenly stops and thinks “oh”.
The problem the serial controversialist who has nothing else to trade on faces is that the only way to go is down. The very nature of the job and the stuff you are peddling means you must, inevitably, end up overstepping the mark. In the case of Jeremy Clarkson, a carnival of boorishness ended in violence, where it had to. Hopkins seems to have survived, but she’s Zugzwanged herself: tone down the schtick and she becomes pointless; the only other move available is directly into the abyss. This is the fate of the wind-up merchant.
The exception to this rule is the satirist. The essential difference between the satirist and the controversialist is that the controversialist puts herself forward, from the beginning, as the stoic truthteller, striving alone in a world gone mad. Controversialists tend to be declinists: the world is steadily getting worse. The converse of this is the belief that at some point, usually in the period of the controversialist’s late adolescence, the world was right.
Satirists hold out no such (perverse) hope. The world is awful, the world has always been awful, and the only way to get through it is to laugh and hope we can make some tweaks around the edges. It is curious then, that from Private Eye to Charlie Hebdo, satire is often linked to campaigning journalism in the same publication.
Charlie has once again been in the news after several US-based authors refused to take part in a gala in honour of the magazine hosted by PEN American Center.
The writers’ heckles were raised by what they saw as racist cartoons run by Charlie in the past. Among these were one of a black politician portrayed as a monkey, and Nigeria girl victims of Boko Haram portrayed as “welfare queens”. Of course, at face value, these seem racist (though it is worth noting that it was not racist cartoons that saw Charlie’s staff slain: it was cartoons that refused to obey religious taboo).
What the US critics failed to acknowledge was that all satire is reactive: the cartoons did not simply spring unprompted from the cartoonists’ pens. The case of the ape cartoon was a reaction to far right portrayals of the minister, and the accompanying text very clearly mocked the Front National’s leader Marine Le Pen. As Irish novelist and Charlie columnist Robert McLiam Wilson pointed out:
“Without the snipped-off text underneath, and the knowledge of the lamentable tosh it was lampooning, of course Charlie would seem racist. It would seem racist to me too. But to strip the image of its fundamental components like this is akin to saying the incomparable Jonathan Swift was a baby-eating Nazi and that A Modest Proposal was actually a cookbook.”
Satire must toy with what it sets out to mock: otherwise it is meaningless and unintelligible. Sometimes the controversy of the likes of Hopkins and the irony of Charlie can look, at first glance, identical.
And sometimes not: While Hopkins was describing “cockroaches” drowning in the Mediterranean, Charlie was echoing the refrain of many: “A Titanic every week,” with a cartoon depicting a white woman singing My Heart Will Go On while a despairing migrant begs her to “shut up” (Ta Guelle).
Bracing? Sure. But humanising, too. As satire should be and controversialism never is.
This column was posted on 30 April 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
28 Apr 2015 | Campaigns, Events, mobile
Razan Zaitouneh, above, Samira Khalil, Nazem Hamadi and Wa’el Hamada were abducted on 9 December 2013
To mark the 38th birthday (on April 29) of missing human rights defender and lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, head of the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria (VDC), winner of the 2011 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the 2011 Anna Politkovskaya Award of RAW in WAR (Reach All Women In War), the undersigned human rights organizations today reiterate their call for her immediate release, as well as that of her missing colleagues Samira Khalil, Nazem Hamadi and Wa’el Hamada.
On December 9, 2013, the four human rights defenders, collectively known as the “Duma Four”, were abducted during a raid by a group of armed men on the offices of the VDC in Duma, near Damascus. There has been no news of their whereabouts or health since.
The VDC is active in monitoring and reporting on human rights violations in Syria and the undersigned organizations believe that the abduction of the four activists was a direct result of their peaceful human rights work. Their ongoing detention forms part of a wider pattern of threats and harassment by both government forces and non-state actors seeking to prevent human rights defenders exposing abuses.
In the months prior to her abduction Razan Zaitouneh wrote about threats she had been receiving and informed human rights activists outside Syria that they originated from local armed groups in Duma. The most powerful armed group operating in Duma at the time of the abductions is the Army of Islam headed by Zahran Alloush. In April 2014, Razan Zaitouneh’s family issued a statement saying they held Zahran Alloush responsible for her and her colleagues’ wellbeing given the large presence his group maintained in the area.
The undersigned organizations, as well as other activists, have been calling for the release of the “Duma Four” since their abductions. Today they again urge the Army of Islam and other armed groups operating in the area to take immediate steps to release the abducted VDC staff, or investigate their abduction and work for their release. They further urge governments that support these groups, as well as religious leaders and others who may have influence over them, to press for such action, in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2139, which “strongly condemns” the abduction of civilians and demands and immediate end to this practice.
Razan Zaitouneh has been one of the key lawyers defending political prisoners in Syria since 2001. She has played a key role in efforts to defend the universality of human rights and support independent groups and activists in Syria. Along with a number of other activists, she established the VDC and co-founded the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), which co-ordinate the work of local committees in various cities and towns across Syria. She also established the Local Development and Small Projects Support Office, which assists non-governmental organizations in besieged Eastern Ghouta.
Samira Khalil has been a long-time political activist in Syria and had been detained on several occasions by the Syrian authorities as a result of her peaceful activism. Before her abduction, she was working to help women in Duma support themselves by initiating small income-generating projects. Wa’el Hamada, an active member of the VDC and co-founder of the LCC network had also been detained by the Syrian authorities. Before his abduction he was working, together with Nazim Hamadi, to provide humanitarian assistance to the residents of besieged Eastern Ghouta.
Signatories:
Alkarama Foundation
Amman Center for Human Rights Studies
Amnesty International
Arab Foundation for Development and Citizenship
Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI)
Arab Organization for Human Rights in Syria
Badael Foundation
Bahrain Centre for Human Right
Defending prisoners of conscience in Syria Organization
Cairo Center for Development (CCD)
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE)
Centre for Democracy and Civil Rights in Syria
Committees for the Defending Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria
El-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence
Enmaa Center for Democracy and Human Rights
Fraternity Center for Democracy and civil society
Front Line Defenders (FLDs)
Freedom House
Gulf Center for Human Rights
Human Rights Fist Society , Saudi Arabia
Human Rights Organization in Syria – MAF
Human Rights watch (HRW)
Humanist Institute for Co-operation with Developing Countries (HIVOS)
Hand in Hand Organization , Syria
Monitor for Human Rights in Saudi Arabia
Index on Censorship
International Media Support (IMS)
International Centre for Supporting Rights and Freedoms
International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN)
International Service For Human Rights (ISHR)
The Tunisian Initiative for Freedom of Expression
Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) under the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
Iraqi Women Network
Iraqi Journalists Rights Defense Association(IJRDA)
Iraqi Network for social Media
Kurdish Committee for Human Rights in Syria (observer)
Kurdish Organization for Human Rights in Syria (DAD)
Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation
Lawyers for Lawyers
Lulua Center for Human Rights
Madad NGOs
Maharat Foundation
MENA Media Monitoring group
Metro Centre to Defend Journalists in Iraqi Kurdistan
National Organization for Human Rights in Syria
Nazra for Feminist Studies
No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ)
One World Foundation (OWF)
Omani Observatory for Human Rights
World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) under the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
Pax for Peace – Netherland
Pen International
Reach All Women in War (RAW)
Reporters Without Boarders (RSF)
Sentiel Human Rights Defenders
Syrian American Council (SAC)
Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM)
Syrian Center for Legal Researches & Studies
Syrian Journalists Association
Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR)
Syrian League for Citizenship
Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC)
Yemeni organization for defending human rights and democratic freedom
