13 Nov 2015 | Europe and Central Asia, mobile, News and features, Russia
Archangel on the roof of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, St.Petersburg, Russia. Credit: Akimov Igor / Shutterstock
Since the amended blasphemy law came into force in July 2013, Russian journalists have faced a growth of religious censorship. This is according to a new study by Zdravomyslie, a foundation that promotes secularism.
Insulting religious beliefs of citizens was previously regulated by the Code of Administrative Offences and punishable by a fine not exceeding 1 thousand roubles (around $15). But after the scandal of the punk-prayer of feminist group Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years in jail for a performance in the Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, the Russian parliament adopted amendments that criminalised blasphemy.
Since July 2013, “public actions, clearly defying the society and committed with the express purpose of insulting religious beliefs” has been declared a federal crime and is punishable by up to three years in jail.
Evgeniy Onegin, a Zdravomyslie researcher, said that the imprecise wording of the law and stricter punishments have affected media freedom and resulted in a growth of self-censorship among journalists. His report Limitation of Media Freedom as a Consequence of the Law About Protection of Feeling of Believers was presented at a conference in Moscow at the end of October.
Onegin interviewed 128 employees of dozens of media organizations, including a major national television channel, radio stations, newspapers and websites. The majority, 119, said that after the revised blasphemy law came into force, managers told them not to mention religions, religious problems, traditions and “different manifestations of unbelief”. Some media organisations even prohibited usage of words “God”, “Allah” and “atheist” in headlines.
A journalist at a sports news website told the researcher that censorship had extended to idioms. For example, headlines “Hulk has talent from God” (about a Brazilian forward playing for Zenit Saint Petersburg football club) and “God’s hand helped Maradona” (about the score of the Argentinian forward at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986) were corrected to exclude the word “God”. The second headline was corrected a long time after publication because editorial staff decided to check archived articles.
Media professionals involved in a production of entertaining content also faced censorship. For example, a respondent working for a sketch show told Onegin about a ban on jokes containing phrases like “God will forgive you” or “you are definitely descended from a monkey”.
However, exceptions to the general policy of avoiding religious issues were made for Orthodox Church, which was confirmed by over the half of all respondents. For example, a journalist working for a national television channel said that her colleagues were told not to show “non-traditional for Russia religious symbols and signs”. However, the term non-traditional was not specified, so journalists started to avoid showing any religious objects, except those associated with the Orthodox Christianity.
The authors of the report presented a list of the most undesirable topics, which according to the respondents are potentially violations of the law. First place went to protest actions against the Orthodox Church (according to 84% of respondents), the second was atheism and unbelief (49%) and third place was coverage of religious events (23%).
Journalists also gave Onegin examples of when they were told not to cover stories: cancellation of celebration of Labour Day because of a coincidence with the holy week of Orthodox Lent; cancellation of performances of the Cannibal Corpse rock group due protests by Orthodox activists; protests of Orthodox activists against Leviathan, a movie by Andrey Zvyagentsev; cancellation of an Lord of the Rings-related Eye of Sauron installation on a Moscow tower a critical comment by an Orthodox priest.
The researcher came to conclusion, that the new blasphemy law and political, social and cultural conditions formed around it “have had a serious impact on media organisations, limiting freedom of speech and indirectly turning them into an instrument of a dominating religious organisation – Russian Orthodox church” and prevent audience of Russian media from getting an objective picture of civil society.
However, pressure on the press in Russia comes from other religions too. In January 2015, tens of thousands people gathered at a rally against French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in Grozny, the capital of predominantly Muslim Chechnya region. Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov not only accused European journalists in “insulting feeling of believers”, but also threatened those in Russia who supported Charlie Hebdo, including editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow radio station Alexey Venediktov and former oligarch and vocal Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Earlier, the Chechen prosecutor’s office opened one of the first cases under the article 148 of Criminal Code, the renewed blasphemy law. In April 2014, a user of Live Journal was accused of “negative comments, expressing clearly disrespect for society and containing insulting remarks against people practicing Islam”. It was one of a few blasphemy cases that were opened in 2013-2014. However, in 2015 the use of article 148 of Criminal Code has stopped being a rareness.
In February 2015, another citizen of Chechen Republic was accused of insulting feelings of believers by posting a video on social networks. Also in February, the Investigative Committee began an initial inquiry into Tangazer opera staged in Novosibirsk theatre. In March, the first blasphemy case was opened in Ural region. In April, a user of the largest European social network, the St Petersburg-based VKontakte, was accused of insulting feelings of believers in his comments. At the end of October, VKontakte MDK was blocked by a St Petersburg court decision because it contained content that “insult feelings of believers and other groups of citizens”.
The imprecise wordings of the law and a wide range of its possible interpretations has arisen concerns of human rights activists. The several online campaigns were started to collect signatures under a petition calling for a repeal of the blasphemy law, but all of them failed to gain more than two thousand signatures.
This is one of a series articles on Russia published today by Index on Censorship. To read about the difficulties faced by Russia’s regional media in the face of growing political power, click here.
11 Jun 2015 | Europe and Central Asia, mobile, News and features, Russia
Pope Francis met with Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photos: Pope Francis: Korean Culture and Information Service/Wikimedia Commons; Vladimir Putin: Kremlin.ru/Wikimedia Commons)
What might have happened when the leader of the world’s largest state met the leader of the world’s smallest?
Francis: Welcome to the Vatican, Vladimir. I hope you are not put off by my incredibly humble surroundings, here in my own humble city state. I am very humble, you know.
Vladimir: Yes, so your aides reminded me, several times. It is very important for men as important as ourselves to stay humble, I believe. We would not want to, as they say, “lose the run of ourselves”. Tell me, dear humble priest: I hear you are a communist now?
Francis (laughing, filled with divine light and humility): Haha! Not quite, comrade. The only redistribution I’m interested in is the redistribution of Christ’s love. The only means of production I want to seize control of are the means of production of compassion in men’s hearts. The only permanent revol…
Vlad: Right, yes, I think I get it. So, the whole “praying for the conversion of Russia” thing: that’s not a thing any more?
Frank: Oh that? Lord no. Thing of the past. If anything, we’re praying for the rest of the world to be more like Russia. Look at the rest of the world: secular, godless, decadent, lacking a certain…what’s the word I’m looking for?
Vlad: Humility?
Frank: Yeah, that’s the one. Lacking humility. But Russia. In Russia, the church is still number one. Admittedly, the wrong church, but, well, who am I to be picky?
Vlad: Good to know. So, where did the communist thing come from?
Frank: Ah, the Americans. You know how they are.
Vlad: I see. So you have been defamed by the Yanqui too? I have had my trouble with them. They even claimed I invaded Ukraine. HAHAHA!
Frank (nervously, humbly): HAHAHAHAHAH (hmm). Daft, of course. I mean, you didn’t, did you?
Vlad: Of course not! Why would I do that?
Frank: Well, they might have insulted your mother. In which case you’d have every right, as I outlined in my pamphlet: “Ego In Gutture Ferrum, Punk”
Vlad: Um, right.
Frank: It’s totally theologically sound. As Jesus himself said: “I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, punch them in the throat.”
Vlad (under breath): Catholics are weird
Frank: You talking about my mother?
Vlad: No! No! Lord no. Holy Father, if I may call you that…
Frank: I humbly accept the title
Vlad: Holy Father, it is true, as you said, that if someone insults someone’s mother, they should expect a punch?
Fran: It’s not just me saying that. Jesus says it!
Vlad: I’m almost certain he doesn’t, but hey, you’re the Pope.
Frank: I am, you know.
Vlad: Anyway, what does one do when someone, say, doesn’t insult your mother, but insults you, and you can’t punch them in the throat because they’re women and apparently you’re not supposed to do that anymore?
Frank: Not following.
Vlad: That, group: those awful people whose name I can’t really say in front of a priest.
Frank: Ah! The Pussy Riots band!
Vlad: Well, I was thinking “the feminists”, but yes, them. Was it OK to send them to the Gulag?
Frank: I’m not really sure I’m in a position to comment here. The organisation of which I humbly find myself head doesn’t have…we don’t have a great track record on the whole locking-up-unruly-girls thing.
Vlad: Oh yes, that. You’ve stopped doing that, right?
Frank: Pretty much. How about you? Your lot were pretty keen on the whole packing-em-off thing.
Vlad: Ha, yes. I’ll square with you, Frank. Can I call you Frank?
Frank: No.
Vlad: Ah. Ok. Awks. Er, I’ll square with you, Holy Father: the gulag thing’s a hard habit to break. You know, you’ve got the rigged courts, the fantasy charges… but most of all, I mean…it’s heritage, isn’t it? Tradition.
Frank: Tradition!
Vlad: Tradition, you know…(sings) “Il Papa. Il Papa, Tradition!”
Frank: Stop that.
Vlad: Sorry, can’t help myself. Love that show.
Frank: Yes, we all do. But, y’know, not here. Vatican and all that. Don’t have a great record on those people either.
Vlad. Who? Musical theatre people?
Frank: Well, I was going to say the…but yes, the musical theatre people.
Vlad: We too have our trouble with the musical theatre people. Must they be so theatrical? In front of the children? I mean, what if everyone was theatrical? What then? Everyone would be putting the show on right here and no one would be making babies.
Frank: So true.
Vlad: I mean, it’s not like I’m obsessed or anything. I’m not that bothered by them, honest. Hell, I’ve even been to a few musicals.
Frank: Let he among us who hasn’t been touched by musical theatre throw the first punch.
Vlad: Um, right.
Frank: Ha! I see even you are a bit put out by the constant talk of punching. But I was a bouncer in Buenos Aires. And you know what we say in Argentina? “You can’t spell ‘Bad Boy’ without BA!” Ha!
Vlad: Good one. Back in Leningrad we used to say “You can’t spell ‘Please! Stop! I’ll confess to anything!’ without ‘KGB’”
Frank: ?
Vlad: It works in Russian. Different alphabet.
Frank: Of course.
Vlad: Anyway, where was I? Yes, the musical theatre people. I mean, all very well in it’s place…
Frank: New York?
Vlad: EXACTLY. But why bring it to Russia?
Frank: Exactly. Sometimes its like they think they should have their own stage in their own building in every parish in the world where they can get all dressed up and put on their strange little performances, and we’re all supposed to worship them for it. Such arrogance, a humble man such as I cannot countenance.
Vlad: Quite.
Frank: I’m glad we can agree on so much. Tell me, you seem like a good, God-fearing, throat-punching man…
Vlad: Why thank you
Frank: Why is it you get such bad press?
Vlad: Well, I’ve got a plan to deal with that.
Frank: Really? Me too. I noticed the guy before me came across as a bit austere, so I decided to say all the same things he said, but in a much more liberal-sounding way. The media loves it. So, what’s your plan for dealing with journalists?
Vlad: Kill them.
Frank: Oh! Ah well, suffer little children to come unto me, as the Lord said.
Vlad: I’m pretty sure that doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Frank: Vlad, you’re a pal, but who’s the one with a direct line to God here?
Vlad: Good question, comrade. Good question.
(Lunch is served).
This column was posted on 12 June 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
31 Jul 2014 | Ireland, News and features, Pakistan, Religion and Culture
It was, apparently, the posting of a “blasphemous image” on Facebook that led an angry mob to burn down houses with children inside them.
It’s been suggested that it was a picture of the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, that provoked the mob in Gujranwala in Pakistan. They rallied last Sunday at Arafat colony, home of 17 families belonging to the Ahmadi sect. As police stood by, houses were looted and torched. At the end of the night, a woman in her 50s, Bushra Bibi, and her granddaughters Hira and Kainat, an eight-month-old baby, were dead. None of them had anything to do with the blasphemous Facebook post.
Was the image even blasphemous? In some ways, it doesn’t really matter. What matters was that it was posted by an Ahmadi, whose very existence is condemned by the Pakistani penal code.
Ahmadiyya emerged in India in the late 19th century. It is a small sect based on the belief that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was, in fact, the Mahdi of Muslim tradition. This teaching is rejected by Orthodox Sunni Islam.
In Pakistan, this means that being a member of the Ahmadiyya sect is dangerous. The law says you cannot describe yourself as Muslim. You cannot exchange Muslim greetings. You cannot describe your call to prayer as a Muslim call to prayer. You cannot describe your place of worship as a Masjid.
Any Ahmadi who “any manner whatsoever outrages the religious feelings of Muslims” can be imprisoned for up to three years.
Ahmadis suffer disproportionately from Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, but they are not the only ones who suffer. Accusations of blasphemy are frequently levelled at members of other minorities and at mainstream Muslims too. Often, this is done out of sheer spite. Often it is done to settle scores.
As the New Statesman’s Samira Shackle has pointed out, amid the chaos and fear generated by the law, it’s often difficult to find out what people are actually supposed to have done, as media hesitate to repeat the alleged blasphemy lest they themselves be accused of the crime.
The fevered atmosphere created by the laws mean that to oppose them can be fatal. In Janury 2011, Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer was killed by his own bodyguard after he pledged to support a Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, who had been accused of the crime. Taseer’s assassin claimed that the governor had been an “apostate”. He was widely praised by the religious establishment. Three months later, Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti was killed, apparently because of his belief that the blasphemy law should be changed.
Meanwhile, an amendment proposed by Taseer’s colleague Sherry Rehman, which would have abolished the death penalty for blasphemy, was dropped. Rehman was posted to diplomatic service in the United States later that year, amid allegations that she herself had committed some kind of blasphemy.
The number of blasphemy cases is steadily rising, and Human Rights Watch recently claimed that 18 people are on death row after being found guilty of defaming the prophet Muhammad, though no one has as yet been executed.
The laws may seem archaic, but they are in fact utterly modern. While some of South Asia’s laws on religious offence date back to the Raj, the laws relating to the Ahmadi, and the law making insulting Muhammad a capital offence only emerged in the 1980s, as part of General Zia’s attempts to shore up his religious credentials.
The sad fact is this Pakistan’s new enthusiasm for blasphemy laws is not an international aberration. Nor is this a trend confined to confessional Islamic states.
Ireland’s 2009 Defamation Act introduced a 25,000 Euro fine for the publication of “blasphemous matter”. According to the Act , “a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if—
(a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and
(b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”
Note how similar the wording is to the Pakistani law forbidding Ahmadis from offending Muslims. The Pakistani government repaid the compliment when, along with other members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, it attempted to force the UN to recognise “religious defamation” as a crime, lifting text from the Irish act. Pakistan claimed, grotesquely, that criminalising blasphemy was about preventing discrimination. Cast your eyes back once again to how its blasphemy provisions treat Ahmadis.
Across Europe, more and more blasphemy cases are emerging. In January of this year, a Greek man was sentenced to 10 months for setting up a Facebook page mocking an Orthodox cleric. In 2012, Polish singer Doda was fined for suggesting that the Bible read like it was written by someone drunk and “smoking some herbs”. The trial of Pussy Riot in Russia was heavy with talk of sacrilege.
We tend to believe that the world is moving inexorably toward a secular settlement. The unintended upshot of this prevalent belief is that organised religions, even in countries like Pakistan, get to portray themselves as weak people who need to be protected from extinction, even as they wield power of life and death over people.
Religious persecution is real, and should be fought. Freedom of belief is a basic right. But blasphemy laws protect only power, and never people.
This article was posted on July 31, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
25 Apr 2014 | Americas, News and features, United States, Young Writers / Artists Programme
(Image: Bplanet/Shutterstock)
(a list poem)
Because if you’re an artist, you never know where you’ll go.
Because you need a personal identity number to send a package.
Because an IP address is not a perfect proxy for someone’s physical location, but it is close.
Because I do most of my research online.
Because there hasn’t been a proper rain in California in over three years, and this year may be the driest in the last half millenium.
Because the burning of fossil fuels is destroying our atmosphere.
Because persistent cookies are stored on the hard drive of a computer until they are manually deleted or until they expire, which can take months or years.
Because tracking cookies are commonly used as ways to compile long-term records of individuals’ browsing histories.
Because server farms require massive amounts of energy.
Because the friend who wanted to send the email “Photos from Taksim Square” couldn’t until she changed the subject to “Paris Vacation Photos”.
Because the line between “public” and “private” is tenuous at best.
Because the ACLU is doing its best.
Because a webcam’s images might be intercepted without a user’s consent.
Because a surveillance program code named “Optic Nerve” was revealed to have compiled and stored still images from Yahoo webcam chats in bulk in Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters’ databases with help from the United States’ National Security Agency, and to be using them for experiments in automated facial recognition.
Because it’s sketchy to be a Communist.
Because the Defending Dissent Foundation is all kinds of busy.
Because the U.S. army actively targeted nonviolent antiwar protestors in Washington in 2007.
Because I saw it on Dronstagram.
Because everything will or might end up on the internet.
Because the internet is a wormhole full of parasites.
Because I am trying to connect all of the dots.
Because free speech is a tinted mirror.
Because all mediated information is processed, edited, and altered.
Because Wally Shawn had to bring his play to Glenn Greenwald since the journalist who broke the story about Edward Snowden can’t return to the United States.
Because the author risked his freedom and physical security for the truth.
Because artistic solidarity is framed as criminal complicity.
Because how could I forget that language is always political?
Because Chelsea Manning is still being misgendered.
Because the personal is always political.
Because it’s not just the major political players.
Because of the metadata collection.
Because a local surveillance hub may start out combining video camera feeds with data from license plate readers, but once you have the platform running, police departments could plug in new features, such as social media scanners.
Because the Domain Awareness Center’s focus has been not on violent crime, but on political protests.
Because the collapse of the economy and the devastation of the environment are two sides of the same coin.
Because of the NSA’s presence at UN climate talks.
Because of the vested interests in the oil industry.
Because tell me something I don’t know.
Because my personal information is probably being used not just for advertising purposes.
Because despite Facebook’s rights and permissions policies, I still want to share with my friends.
Because Pussy Riot was imprisoned.
Because the Trans-Pacific Partnership would rewrite rules on intellectual property enforcement, giving corporations the right to sue national governments if they passed any law, regulation, or court ruling interfering with a corporation’s expected future profits.
Because I don’t know who is making money off of my information.
Because Abstract Expressionism was funded by the CIA.
Because of the time-honored tradition of governments keeping tabs on artists.
Because we don’t want jobs, we want to live.
This poem was posted on April 25, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
