12 Apr 2011 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost, News
Zainab Alkhawaja, daughter of human rights activist and former president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, has gone on hunger strike demanding that authorities release her father and three other members of her immediate family.
Security forces are alleged to have used excessive and violent force in apprehending the suspects in their private residence without any search or arrest warrants. Zainab has also written an open letter to US president Barack Obama urging him to help free her family. Meanwhile on Twitter, seven other activists have vowed to join in the hunger strike.
1 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
Hillary Clinton offered a glowing narrative of the US role in Middle Eastern Internet freedom in a speech back in February that championed American values while chastising regimes that trample free expression.
“Our commitment to Internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions,” she declared. “Monitoring and responding to threats to Internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance Internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.”
All of this action certainly sounded good (and the image of America as benevolent global Internet expression cop surely flattered many Americans listening). But Clinton left out of her speech one messier topic – the role of US companies in facilitating those filters, sometimes even in supporting the Internet blockades State Department money then pays to help locals circumnavigate.
That element of the story out of the Middle East over the last few months has been largely obscured from public debate in the US over global Internet freedom. Some Internet advocates lamented that Clinton’s speech didn’t tackle the topic, or propose serious measures the US could take to halt the export of homegrown technology used (often with the knowledge of US companies) in censorship abroad.
Lately, though, this uncomfortable complication has been getting real attention.
“Ethical Quandary for Social Sites,” blared a New York Times headline on Monday. The story recounted the case of Flickr, the photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo), which removed photos uploaded by an Egyptian blogger of images swiped by activists from the State Security Police headquarters. Flickr insisted the photos violated its policy that users may post only their own, original work. But activists jeered what appeared to be selective application of a policy some of Flickr’s own employees don’t follow themselves.
Facebook, meanwhile, was caught this week in a similar awkward spot over a fan page devoted to promoting a Third Palestinian Intifada. Israeli officials demanded Facebook remove the page, which had already amassed more than 200,000 friends. Facebook originally refused, arguing that content that is upsetting to some “alone is not a reason to remove the discussion.” But Wednesday, the social networking site reversed course and yanked the page (now with more than 350,000 followers), on the grounds that its peaceful discourse had dissolved into out-right calls for violence that violated Facebook policy.
That flip-flop has compounded claims that Facebook hinders protesters around the world just as much as it helps them, particularly given the company policy that porhibits activists from signing up for accounts without exposing their true identities.
In the media, stories questioning the role of less visible US technology companies have also proliferated.
“US Products Help Block Mideast Web,” warned the Wall Street Journal this week.
“Censorship: Made in the USA,” read the Huffington Post headline above a story written by Free Press campaign director Tim Karr.
Both pieces relied on revelations unearthed in a new report from the OpenNet Initiative by Jillian C York (a contributor to the new Index magazine) and Helmi Noman. The two found that American and Canadian-made software had been used to block socially and politically objectionable online content for more than 20 million web users in nine North African and Middle Eastern countries: Bahrain, the AUE, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Sudan and Tunisia.
“This is not simply a case of a general purpose, neutral tool being used for an end not contemplated by its maker,” reads the forward to the report. “The filtering products of today engage in regular communications with their makers, updating lists of millions of websites to block across dozens of content categories, including political opposition and human rights. When McAfee Smartfilter or Websense do their utmost to maintain lists of non-profit and advocacy groups their efforts directly affect what citizens in some authoritarian regimes can and cannot access online.”
The discovery is about as embarrassing as those images of Made-in-the-USA tear gas canisters that turned up in Tahrir Square, and US politicians have begun to take notice, too. Earlier this month, Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate human rights subcommittee, wrote an op-ed for the popular Washington-based political site Politico under the banner “Tyrants can use Facebook, too.”
He finally said what Hillary Clinton did not.
“US technology companies allow millions around the world to express themselves more fully and freely,” the senator wrote. “But the industry has a moral obligation to ensure that its products and services do not help repressive governments. If U.S. companies are unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect human rights, Congress must step in.”
1 Apr 2011 | News
In the week that super-injunctions broke new legal ground, John Kampfner attacks a growing threat to press freedom
This article was first published in The Independent
Just when you think you are over the worst, the forces of secrecy bite back. No sooner had the Government published a draft Defamation Bill, going some way to reversing many of the most hideous aspects of Britain’s libel laws, than the judiciary set a dangerous new precedent.
The recent decision by Mr Justice Tugendhat to grant anonymity to a claimant in a libel case is believed to be the first of its kind. The case, the details of which the media are not allowed to report, concerns a wealthy financier, a multimillion-pound family trust, and lurid allegations online.
I have no interest in the tangled web of people involved; nor, I suggest, do most readers. The trouble is that many legal disputes involve dark and often nefarious acts, which individuals might seek to prevent being exposed. Their interests, naturally, should be taken into account, but these should not override other considerations.
The only true justice is open justice, yet increasingly judges in the UK see the right to secrecy as paramount. Super-injunctions and other gagging orders are being handed out with alarming frequency. These forbid not just the revealing of information, but the revealing of the very injunction preventing the release of that information.
Currently one super-injunction prevents the media from calling someone a banker. I can, by law, say no more than that. Super-injunctions have been used by footballers “playing away” with team-mates’ girlfriends, and by companies who believe their reputations could be damaged by newspapers having the temerity to expose their polluting practices. The most outrageous such case involved the oil trading firm Trafigura. In 2009, Carter Ruck, the solicitors’ firm, warned that a newspaper would be in contempt of court if it published a parliamentary question about the company dumping toxic waste in Ivory Coast. This led to a frenetic meeting in the House of Commons which my organisation, Index on Censorship, convened with MPs furious at the attempt to ride roughshod over the longstanding right to parliamentary privilege.
The conclusion drawn then applies equally now: the rich and powerful will do whatever it takes, aided by certain legal firms, to chill legitimate journalistic and public inquiry. Soon we may see public figures taking out super-injunctions or other requests for privacy to prevent the disclosing of their financial affairs. We would not just be denied the right to know about the detail; we wouldn’t know that the cases even exist.
When we asked the Ministryof Justice how many super-injunctions were in place, we were astonished to be told that they had no idea. They apparently hadnever counted them. In one respect that was understandable. It is not easy to count something that,officially, does not exist.
Unofficial estimates put the number of super-injunctions issued over the last 18 months at around 20. Most of them relate to sex and most of them relate to footballers. Some of these gags fail, most famously in the case of John Terry, who was relieved of the England captaincy as a result of newspaper allegations about an extramarital affair.
A special committee, chaired by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, has been looking at the use of super-injunctions. Its findings, due to be published just before Easter, are awaited with interest.
Super-injunctions and other anonymity devices are doing incalculable damage not just to free expression but to the credibility of the legal system.
There are perfectly sound reasons for conventional injunctions to be served – safeguarding evidence deemed unreliable and protecting individuals from blackmail are just two. Perhaps in one or two of the most extreme cases, such as where a vulnerable adult or a child might be imperilled through secondary identification, a super-injunction could be justified. But not otherwise.
There is an important broader debate to be had about privacy. Currently, courts are applying article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees privacy, with greater determination than they are applying to article 10, which enshrines the right to free expression.
Is everyone entitled to privacy, come what may? Should exceptions be made for public figures whose private actions contradict their public pronouncements, or for public figures who seek commercial gain from one kind of private life, only to lead a different one behind the scenes? Is everyone in public life fair game? These are all valid questions, but even the most stringent interpretation of the right to privacy surely does not require the legal process to be conducted in secret.
For years the English courts indulged the wealthy around the world to come to London to sue charities, scientists, doctors and others for libel. The law was skewed against openness, accountability and legitimate investigation. Thanks in large part to our work on the Libel Reform Campaign, the Government was persuaded to rebalance the law. Just as responsible campaigners do not seek to abolish libel or create a free-for-all for scurrilous and malicious accusations, so they do not deny the fundamental right to privacy. That has to be balanced, however, against the needs of a society to an open justice system. Super-injunctions are but the latest tool to chill free speech.
John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship twitter@johnkampfner
The cases
1. A leading sportsman won a gagging order after learning that ‘The Sun’ was planning to publish a story that he had been cheating on his partner with two other women. Lord Neuberger said the sportsman’s private life could be “unlawfully exposed”.
2. A married television broadcaster won a court order in 2008 to prevent public discussion of an affair which he believed had led to the birth of a child. The injunction remains although he has received confirmation that he is not the father.
3. A married public figure won a gagging order to hush up his infidelity after claiming it would be “very distressing” for his family . A judge agreed it would breach his human rights after hearing that the woman was demanding substantial sums of “hush money”.
4. A married football manager gained an injunction banning a cuckolded husband from revealing details of his alleged affair with the man’s wife. The manager argued for privacy because he was trying to rebuild his life.
5. A high-profile television presenter secured an injunction stopping his ex-wife writing about their relationship and claims that they had resumed a sexual affair after he remarried. Neither the star nor his ex-wife can be identified.
6. A high-earning footballer won an injunction preventing the reporting of claims of a “sexual liaison, encounter or relationship” with an international female sports star. The injunction banned publication of “private or personal photographs” on mobile phones.
7. A prominent footballer playing in England won an injunction preventing coverage of an alleged blackmail attempt over sex with three women at a hotel, supposedly recorded on a mobile phone.
8. A world famous sportsman – who was not, on this occasion, a Premier League footballer – and who is married, obtained a gagging order preventing the publication of any suggestions
