6 Feb 2014 | News, Religion and Culture, Russia
Human Rights Watch released a video documenting the treatment of LGBT Russians on 3 February ahead of the opening of the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Drawing a screen around the realities of life for Russian gays and lesbians, Russian president Vladimir Putin and the organizers of the Sochi Winter Olympic games are presenting a decidedly friendly face to international visitors.
Even though Sochi’s mayor, Anatoly Pakhomov, would prefer to believe “there are no gays” in his city, the mayor of the Olympic village, Elena Isinbayeva, offered to make LGBT athletes to feel welcome — despite her earlier homophobic comments. The girl band Tatu, most popular during the early 2000s when they exploited homoeroticism in their live appearances and videos, will perform at the opening ceremonies.
The real Russia has turned ugly and brutish toward its LGBT citizens.
The recent spate of homophobic violence has its roots in a controversial law that bars the promotion of non-traditional relationships as being equal to traditional relationships. While the law’s backers say they are protecting children, the effect has been to silence the push for gay rights by threatening fines for “homosexual propaganda.”
While official Russia will be demonstrating what it sees as tolerance in Sochi, a court in the city of Nizhniy Tagil will issue a ruling on the case of Elena Klimova – a young journalist who created a group on Vkontakte – Russia’s answer to Facebook. Klimova’s group, Children 404, contains letters from young LGBT people, who have been subject to physical and psychological attacks. Their letters to each other, according to Klimova, have been helping them cope with the pressure and continuing struggle for their rights. Klimova’s efforts to ease the isolation of LGBT children has drawn the ire of United Russia’s Vitaly Milonov, a proponent of the gay propaganda law, who has sued Madonna and been exposed as a bigot by Stephen Fry.
Klimova has also been active in raising concerns about the plight of a teen girl in the Bryansk region who has been put under administrative control by a local juvenile commission. Her crime? The girl openly identified “herself as a person with non-traditional sexual orientation and promote[d] information which misinforms minors about social equality of traditional and non-traditional relationship”. She will be monitored as if she were a criminal.
According to the latest Levada-Centre research, some 43% of Russian citizens consider homosexuality a bad habit, 38% reckon LGBT people should be “cured”, 47% say LGBT and heterosexuals are not socially equal and 73% approve the state’s effort to prevent public professions of an LGBT orientation.
The Russian Orthodox Church has done a lot to maintain these numbers.
Patriarch Kirill has repeatedly condemned equal marriage, saying in late January that marriage is “between a man and a woman, based on love, aimed at having children”. Kirill asked law makers to reflect his belief in drafting laws. Moscow Patriarchate’s spokesman Vladimir Legoida called equal marriage and homosexuality a sin in an interview to RIA-Novosti – the former Russian state news agency. Not to be outdone, Ivan Okhlobystin, an actor and former priest, said “gays should be burnt in ovens”.
In the meantime, on 3 February, the regional court of Kamchatka sentenced three people to 9-12 years in prison for the murder of a gay acquaintance.
Homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia in 1993. In 1999 it finally was excluded from Russian official list of mental illnesses. The change in people’s mind is still yet to come.
This article was originally published on 6 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
5 Feb 2014 | News, Russia
Several thousand protesters marched through central Moscow on 2 February 2014 to call for the release of 20 people who were arrested after clashes between police and demonstrators on 6th May of 2012. Photo: Nickolay Vinokurov / Demotix
Media will face increased restrictions in the build up to the Winter Games in Sochi as Russian president Vladimir Putin tries to rehabilitate a damaged domestic reputation, experts suggest.
Tighter controls on dissident media, more proactive use of state news outlets to mold public consensus, and obstacles to foreign reporters operating in the region can all be expected as the games begin on 7 February.
While Russian authorities have hailed the Games as a triumph, ongoing disputes over the payment of migrant workers, the environmental impact of Sochi’s intensive development, forced evictions of residents, intensive security measures, and Russia’s controversial gay propaganda law have all generated a domestic backlash that many believe is being deliberately ignored by state media. On 17 October, 2013, Roman Kuznetsov, a migrant worker from the Russian city of Orenburg who had helped build the Media Centre for the Sochi Olympic Games, sewed his lips shut with a needle and thread in protest against his employer’s failure to pay him several months of wages. He carried a sign that explained “Please help get reporters attention! I am not from around here”.
In an interview with select global media, Putin explained “I would like the participants, guests, journalists and all those who watch the Games on TV and learn about them from the mass media to see a new Russia, see its personality and its possibilities, take a fresh and unbiased look at the country”. Close restrictions recently imposed on press activity suggest otherwise. Only a small number of Olympic Events have been cleared for coverage by local journalists, including the arrival of IOC delegations and formal updates offered by federal officials. Access to government activities is granted only to the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.
In a report produced by the Centre for the Protection of Journalists, a number of local journalists allege a more proactive media strategy in addition to direct censorship. Several reporters suggested that it was fairly common for media that receive funding to be directly censored by the administration. Local journalists also reported that the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company often stage interviews, and had been passing off closely scripted lines as dialogue with ordinary residents of Sochi. According to Russian Government website Zakupki, which details financial transactions at all levels of Russian government, the Sochi administration has distributed some 32,628.600 rubles (US$988,788) to 17 media organisations, including four television channels, six newspapers, one magazine, three radio stations, and one informational agency. It is not clear what form the funds took.
Aleksandr Valov, founder of BlogSochi, which seeks to document the impact of the Games on Sochi’s residents, explains “One begins to understand why Sochi media only talk about the government’s achievements and keep silent about the problems. The popular saying ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’ comes to mind.”
International journalists covering Sochi have also been closely curtailed. Police from the Russian Republic of Adygea neighboring Sochi repeatedly stopped, detained, and threatened a two-person crew from Norway’s TV2- the country’s official broadcaster of the Olympic Games. At every stop and in detention, officials questioned the journalists aggressively about their work plans in Sochi and other areas, their sources, and in some cases about their personal lives, educational backgrounds, and religious beliefs. In several instances they denied the journalists contact with the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow. One official threatened to jail them both, the journalists told Human Rights Watch. Dutch photojournalist Rob Hornstra was denied a Russian visa in an apparent attempt to stop him from doing further work in the turbulent North Caucasus, and American journalist David Satter was forcibly expelled from the country in December.
Since beginning his first term as president in 2000, Vladimir Putin has carefully controlled his media presence, closing a number of independent media outlets and amalgamating others with state bodies, whilst tightly controlling the presence of foreign media. Professor Owen Johnson teaches at the School of Journalism at Indiana University, and has researched the role of media in Russia intensively. He offers a simple explanation for the recent expulsions ‘”While it would seem that this runs counter to other more positive actions by President Putin recently, this might be designed to make visiting journalists more cautious,” Johnson said. “Putin is less concerned about world public opinion than he is about his continued support in Russia.”
Domestic attitudes to Putin are changing fast, according to Mikhail Dmitriev, former director of Russia’s State Run Centre for Strategic Research. Over the past year discontent in the country at large has deepened and broadened, spreading across all social groups and ages. While support for Putin is stable in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where incomes remain high, fluctuating fortunes in Russia’s rural regions is starting to generate distrust. Dmitriev said the latest focus groups show that Putin is less associated with stability and more with uncertainty. His past achievements are becoming a distant memory, and his recent stunts, such as flying with cranes or diving for ancient amphorae, merely cause irritation.
The Sochi Games, Putin explained in a conference with journalists, will be an important global symbol of Russian achievement and resurgence. For Putin, well-managed domestic media coverage seems an important strategic component of his long term success and survival.
This article was originally posted on 5 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
30 Jan 2014 | Ireland, News, Religion and Culture
Rory O’Neill’s alter ego Panti
Irish state-run television broadcaster RTE has come under heavy criticism after offering a full apology and possible financial compensation to the Iona Institute, a conservative Catholic lobby groups declared “homophobic” by a talk show guest.
The decision appears to have been reached under pressure from Irish Broadcasting Authority board member John Waters, who was also declared homophobic during the same segment. The allegations follow RTE’s decision to remove the remarks, made by Rory O’Neill who performs as one of Ireland’s most acclaimed drag queens under the name Miss Panti, and extensive popular debate about the treatment of Ireland’s conservative lobby groups in mainstream media.
On RTE’s The Saturday Night Show, O’Neill declared a number of prominent Conservative advocates, specifically Breda O’Brien, John Waters, and “The Iona Institute crowd” homophobic. RTE removed the segment from its online player the following day, citing legal concerns as well as the recent murder of Iona Institute researcher Tom O’Gorman as a matter of “sensitivity”‘ although later admitting O’Gorman was not relevant to the program content. On January 25th, the show’s host Brendan O’Connor formally apologised for the distress caused to John Waters and other columnists. The Iona Institute has thanked RTE for the apology, which it called “an extremely valuable contribution to a calm and reasonable debate” and explained that RTE had also agreed to pay damages to the injured parties. When asked about the claim that damages would be paid over O’Neill’s comments, an RTE television spokesperson declined to comment. Neither side would confirm the identity of the claimants.
RTE’s sudden condemnation of the remarks has been linked to legal action pursued by John Waters, a conservative Catholic commentator and journalist, and board member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland . The Irish Independent cite anonymous sources confirming that legal representatives of Waters sent a legal letter to the broadcaster seeking the removal of the interview on the popular Saturday Night Show. It has since been restored to the website, though the offending portions of O’Neill’s interview have been edited out. Waters resigned from his position with the Irish Broadcasting Authority on January 23rd, after the letters had been drafted and sent. His decision to legally challenge RTE has been broadly criticized as an abuse of office. As solicitor Simon McGarr explains, this “was not merely a letter from an aggrieved citizen to a broadcaster. It was also a letter from one of that Broadcaster’s regulators seeking to have that broadcaster censor a citizen, who was both contributing to a matter of public debate and engaging in a defence of a minority of which he is a member, bona fide and without malice”. Waters has declined all requests for media comment.
Since his appearance on The Saturday Night Show, O’Neill has confirmed receiving personal legal correspondence from Breda O’Brien, David Quinn, Patricia Casey, and John Murray, all patrons of the Iona Institute. In a statement released on its blog, the Iona Institute defended the measure, explaining: “The problem is that merely believing that marriage is the sexual union of a man and a woman, and that children deserve the love of both a mother and a father whenever possible is automatically deemed to be ‘homophobic’ by those wishing to close down this debate.” This defamation, they claim, is harmful to political discussion.
Any private claims of defamation, explains barrister Brian Barrington, are unlikely to hold up in court, explaining: “Mr O’Neill’s comments arise in a context where the Iona Institute is well known in Ireland for its opposition to affording equal marriage rights to gays and lesbians and also for its opposition to same-sex parenting. It seeks to maintain the current discrimination whereby same-sex couples are prohibited from marrying whereas opposite sex couples are free to do so. In these circumstances, it is clear that Mr O’Neill was entirely entitled to express his honestly held opinion, which was based on facts that were reasonably known to the public.” Criticism of RTE for reacting to such a baseless legal case is well founded. “‘It is astonishing that RTE, a national broadcaster, should apologise for what Mr O’Neill has stated, censor his interview on the internet and award public money to those in the Iona Institute who have sought to prevent a free debate on equal marriage by preventing gay rights campaigners from uttering in future that opposition to same sex marriage is homophobic,” he explains.
Irish media have come under fire for a number of complaints of homophobia in recent weeks, including a discussion on RTE radio program The God Slot that discussed “curing” homosexuality and a Midwest Radio presenter’s decision to read a text on air that suggested children of gay couples could develop Aids. Ireland will legislate on a number of key gay rights issues in the coming years, including full legal recognition of gay adoptive parents, and a constitutional referendum on the legalisation of gay marriage is scheduled for 2015. The imminent debate has many calling for a “homophobia watchdog” to monitor public statements.
Una Mullally, a columnist for the Irish Times, explains: “‘Free speech’ is not a free pass to inflict psychological trauma just because you don’t want lesbians or gay people to get married. Opponents of marriage equality are not the victims in this debate.”
This article was posted on 30 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
30 Jan 2014 | India, News, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
(Image: YRF/YouTube)
It an interesting introduction to his modus operandi, the new CEO of India’s censor board has described his objection to some of India’s recent blockbusters is based on the reactions of his wife and five year old daughter.
In an interview to the Mumbai Mirror, Rakesh Kumar, was quoted as saying: “After watching Shudh Desi Romance, my five-year-old daughter asked me, ‘Dad, isn’t there too much love in this movie?’ More recently, I went to see Yaariyan with her and came out visibly embarrassed. Now, I have decided not to see even a UA film with my kid.”
Predictably, reactions were fierce. Movies with a UA rating in India are tagged for parental guidance, as they might be inappropriate for young children. These movies have mild sex scenes, gory images of violence and crude language. Kumar, a former employee of the Indian Railways, might feel “inappropriate content” is making it to the big screens, however, it only serves to highlight that the censorship of movies cannot be viewed from the perspective of a five year old girl.
Aside from the many jokes being made at Kumar’s expense, a deeper issue has been brought to the surface yet again. A constitutionally mandated body under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) regulates any films that are to be publicly exhibited. In India, there are a number of certificates a film could be given: A for Adult, UA, unrestricted public exhibition with parental guidance, S, restricted to a special class of persons, and the coveted U, which is unrestricted public exhibition, and is also the class of movies that can be shown on Indian television at prime time.
The first question many might ask is, does India need a censor board? With all kinds of content available on television and the internet, is censoring film for “inappropriate” content still valid? However, given that India does have a censor board, the next question is who it is made up of. There are about 500 members of CBFC, who preview around 13,500 films a year. The current chair is a famous dancer, Leela Samson, who controversially commented that almost 90% of her fellow board members were “uneducated political workers who did not understand their responsibility,” for which she later had to apologise. The current, and past, CEO of the board have been serving bureaucrats, on loan for this role. The final and biggest questions of the censor board faces, is how and why films are given the certifications they are.
In a very telling essay after his stint on the CBFC, journalist Mayank Shekhar wrote about the kinds of arguments that would take place at the meetings he attended: “Over the years, the focus of the Censor Board appears to have shifted from sex and violence to people’s “hurt sentiments” – some of it possibly real, but much of it imagined.”
The truth is that there are three broad problems in the certification of Indian films. First, the film board censors movies based on their moral outrage to sex or violence (as exhibited by the new CEO’s reaction), fear of minority groups getting upset (as witnessed by Shekhar), and the attempt to keep films with controversial subjects like the politics of Kashmir away from the mainstream audience, often by giving them A certification (as experienced by filmmaker Ashvin Kumar and reported by Index).
The second is the approach of filmmakers. Some, in order to get their films on TV by getting a U certificate, are only too happy to oblige any cuts the board might suggest, betraying any artist integrity. The other extreme is filmmakers who put in scenes with the intention of crossing swords with the board, thereby garnering some press attention for the movie. Shekhar writes in his essay of producer who was very disappointed that the board was not cutting any of his violent scenes, pleading: “Come on, how will people know this film exists? I’ve made a very violent film. How will I publicise it?”
The third is the allegation that board members take bribes in exchange for lenient certifications, as reported by Mint. Some feel the board goes easy on big production houses. This is because there are great financial implications involved with the certification process. Filmmakers want to make their investments back, both from the box office and lucrative satellite rights should their films be picked up for prime time viewing on television channels — as they can be with a U rating. Five Indian filmmakers have expressed their frustration with the lack of transparency in the decision making process of the CBFC, as well as perceived political interference. “I got an SMS from a senior member of a national political party, who told me that he was now with the Censor Board so to let him know if I needed any help,” revealed filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia.
However, ultimately, the entire argument boils down to the moral order, real or contrived, that Indian films must subscribe to should they want to be seen by the general public — both in movie halls and at a reasonable hour on television. In 1994, the censor board asked the makers of the movie Khuddar to replace the word “sexy” in a song with the word “baby”. So lyrics went like this (translated) – “baby, baby, baby, is what people call me.” In a repeat performance of a kind, in 2009, the world “sexy” was yet again replaced, but this time with “crazy” for the television version of the film. Over the years, kissing and even some sex scenes have slipped into Hindi cinema, as has a lot of cussing and plenty of violence. Nudity is only permitted in certain movies, which is either pixelated or viewed by a long-shot. Freedom of expression certainly seems in line behind the perceived notions of vulgarity of a few.
Thankfully, satire is alive and well in India, and enough websites are taking the CBFC and its new CEO to task. Others, like filmmaker Hansal Mehta, are determined to file an RTI – Right to Information – application to question every decision the board takes. As he says: “It only takes Rs 10 (under 1GBP) to file an RTI application. We live in a democracy, no one can stop me.”
This article was published on 29 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
