9 Jul 2015 | Campaigns, mobile, Statements
“Impunity is a great threat to press freedom in Russia,” said Melody Patry, Index on Censorship’s Senior Advocacy Officer. “Failing to use appropriate measures to investigate the murder of Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev is not only a denial of justice, it sends the tacit message that you can get away with killing journalists. When perpetrators are not held to account, it encourages further violence towards media professionals.”
Statement
On the 2nd anniversary of the murder of independent Russian journalist, Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev, we, the undersigned organisations, call for the investigation into his case to be urgently raised to the federal level.
Akhmednabiyev, deputy editor of independent newspaper Novoye Delo, and a reporter for online news portal Caucasian Knot, was shot dead on 9 July 2013 as he left for work in Makhachkala, Dagestan. He had actively reported on human rights violations against Muslims by the police and Russian army.
Two years after his killing, neither the perpetrators nor instigators have been brought to justice. The investigation, led by the local Dagestani Investigative Committee, has been repeatedly suspended for long periods over the last year and half, with little apparent progress being made.
Prior to his murder, Akhmednabiyev was subject to numerous death threats including an assassination attempt in January 2013, the circumstances of which mirrored his eventual murder. Dagestani police wrongly logged the assassination attempt as property damage, and only reclassified it after the journalist’s death, demonstrating a shameful failure to investigate the motive behind the attack and prevent further attacks, despite a request from Akhmednabiyev for protection.
Russia’s failure to address these threats is a breach of the state’s “positive obligation” to protect an individual’s freedom of expression against attacks, as defined by European Court of Human Rights case law (Dink v. Turkey). Furthermore, at a United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) session in September 2014, member States, including Russia, adopted a resolution (A/HRC/27/L.7) on safety of journalists and ending impunity. States are now required to take a number of measures aimed at ending impunity for violence against journalists, including “ensuring impartial, speedy, thorough, independent and effective investigations, which seek to bring to justice the masterminds behind attacks”.
Russia must act on its human rights commitments and address the lack of progress in Akhmednabiyev’s case by removing it from the hands of local investigators, and prioritising it at a federal level. More needs to be done in order to ensure impartial, independent and effective investigation.
On 2 November 2014, 31 non-governmental organisations from Russia, across Europe as well as international, wrote to Aleksandr Bastrykin calling upon him as the Head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, to raise Akhmednabiyev’s case from the regional level to the federal level, in order to ensure an impartial, independent and effective investigation. Specifically, the letter requested that he appoint the Office for the investigation of particularly important cases involving crimes against persons and public safety, under the Central Investigative Department of the Russian Federation’s Investigative Committee to continue the investigation.
To date, there has been no official response to this appeal. The Federal Investigative Committee’s public inactivity on this case contradicts a promise made by President Putin in October 2014, to draw investigators’ attention to the cases of murdered journalists in Dagestan.
As well as ensuring impunity for his murder, such inaction sets a terrible precedent for future investigations into attacks on journalists in Russia, and poses a serious threat to freedom of expression.
We urge the Federal Investigation Committee to remedy this situation by expediting Akhmednabiyev’s case to the Federal level as a matter of urgency. This would demonstrate a clear willingness, by the Russian authorities, to investigate this crime in a thorough, impartial and effective manner.
Supported by
ARTICLE 19
Albanian Media Institute
Analytical Center for Interethnic Cooperation and Consultations (Georgia)
Association of Independent Electronic Media (Serbia)
The Barys Zvozskau Belarusian Human Rights House
Belorussian Helsinki Committee
Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine)
Civil Society and Freedom of Speech Initiative Center for the Caucasus
Crude Accountability
Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly – Vanadzor (Armenia)
Helsinki Committee of Armenia
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia
Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights
The Human Rights Center of Azerbaijan
Human Rights House Foundation
Human Rights Monitoring Institute
Human Rights Movement “Bir Duino-Kyrgyzstan”
Index on Censorship
International Partnership for Human Rights
International Press Institute
Kharkiv Regional Foundation -Public Alternative (Ukraine)
Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law
Moscow Helsinki Group
Norwegian Helsinki Committee
PEN International
Promo LEX Moldova
Public Verdict (Russia)
Reporters without Borders
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9 Apr 2015 | Lithuania, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News
Lithuania has banned a Russian TV channel for “inciting discord, warmongering [and] spreading disinformation” according to the country’s media regulator.
RTR Planeta, the international broadcasting service for the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), a powerful state run media empire that operates more than a dozen TV channels and radio stations, will be taken off the air after alleged “incitements to hatred” during the Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovjev program.
“This program has repeatedly spread such information, therefore its broadcast was suspended for three months,” Birute Kersiene, a spokesperson for the Radio and Television Commission of Lithuania told AFP.
According to Euro News, which is part-owned by RTR Planeta’s parent company, VGTRK, one bone of contention was the continued presence of firebrand, ultra-nationalist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky who is know for his inflammatory statements on Solovjev’s show.
Last year he was, according to Lithuanian media reports, quoted in an interview with Rossiya 24 as saying: “The Baltic States, Poland – they are doomed. They will be swept away. Nothing will remain there. They should sober up, the leaders of these dwarf nations … Eastern European countries are exposing themselves to, shall I say, the danger of complete annihilation.”
VGTRK is run by one Oleg Dobrodeev, a staunch Putin ally who was appointed chairman in 2000, the same year Putin came to power. “Dobrodeev was one of the founding members of the independent NTV Channel, but under Putin drastically changed his attitude to independent television in Russia,” wrote Oleg Panfilov, a dissident Russian journalist in his 2005 paper titled Putin and the Press: The Revival of Soviet-style Propaganda for London based think tank The Foreign Policy Centre. “Dobrodeev started to consolidate all state provincial television and radio companies, thus creating a massive and powerful propaganda network.”
The ban is the latest move in a rapidly cooling media environment in the Baltic States, where significant numbers of Russian speakers live and whom get most of their news from Russian sources. To counter what they see as pro-Russian propaganda, the three countries – with the help of the European Union – have vowed to set up supposedly impartial Russian language TV stations.
Whilst Russia has frequently been accused by international media watchdogs for its restrictions on the freedom of the press, governments from the Baltic states have responded by threatening suspensions of TV stations and banning prominent pro-Russian journalists, politicians and even singers from entering their borders.
On 9 March a coalition of press freedom groups including the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and the World Press Freedom Committee decried the potential banning of Russian language TV stations in Lithuania. “While we do understand that the objection to their broadcasts is that in the current tense situation in Eastern Europe they are seen as propagandistic and polemical, we view their banning as the wrong approach to counteracting their messages,” they wrote in a letter to Lithuania’s president. “Not only is this in contradiction with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international free speech standards, but we also consider such bans to be counterproductive.”
If any ban was put into effect, the letter continued, they “would almost inevitably be seized upon by the Russian authorities to justify bans on broadcasts by independent news media from other countries”.
But the RTR Planeta ban was confirmed anyway, causing further complications as the station is registered in Sweden, an EU state. The EU has strict rules regulating broadcast freedoms.
When contacted by the Index on Censorship before the ban was announced, the Radio and Television Commission of Lithuania stated that they had contacted their Swedish counterparts about RTR Planeta and reaffirmed their belief that RTR Planeta had broken EU broadcasting rules.
While Article 3 of the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive strictly prohibits the banning of retransmitted programmes, Lithuania’s regulator pointed to Article 6, which states that EU countries must ensure no programmes “contain any incitement to hatred based on race, sex, religion or nationality.”
“It is the first time in the history of the European Union that a regulatory body has taken the decision to take the whole channel completely off-air,” the chairman of Lithuania’s media regulator, Edmundas Vaitiekunas, told Euro News. “Maybe someone will argue over the subtleties of the case, but we think that we addressed all the legal criteria.”
The ban is due to come into effect on 13 April.
This article was posted on 9 April, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
11 Mar 2015 | Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News
A coalition of international press freedom organisations has hit out at a move to force some Russian “government-controlled” TV stations off Lithuanian airwaves.
Lithuania’s Committee on Radio and Television is reportedly considering, at the request of the government, to ban two Russian television channels from broadcasting to the Baltic country.
The channels in question — RTR Planeta and NTV Mir Lithuania — have in the past been handed down temporary suspensions of specific programs, according to the commission head Edmundas Vaitiekunas.
“If a ban is imposed on the whole channel due to repeated violations, I believe it should be longer … I believe it should be up to one year,” Vaitiekunas added in comments to the Baltic News Service earlier this year.
Russian state-owned media such as RT (formerly Russia Today), has come under fire for alleged distortion of facts in the their coverage, especially in relation to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
In a letter this week to the Lithuanian President, media freedom organisations including the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and the World Press Freedom Committee, argued that while they understand the objection to certain Russian broadcasts in “the current tense situation”, they consider a ban to be counterproductive and in contradiction of international free speech standards.
“If put into effect, bans on broadcasts across frontiers would almost inevitably be seized upon by the Russian authorities to justify bans on broadcasts by independent news media from other countries,” the letter states.
“It is an established conviction in free societies that the best answer to bad speech is more speech. We can see from the reaction to recent events in Moscow that there is a large public that is open to arguments, news reports and information to counteract official propaganda. The risk should not be taken to cut off such audiences from the free flow of information from outside their borders,” the group added.
This article was posted on Wednesday March 11 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
10 Mar 2015 | mobile, News, Russia
As so often at the sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Council, some interventions by states go unnoticed.
Under the famous ceiling of room XX created by Miquel Barcel in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, the on-going session of the Council is no different. Some of those unnoticed statements deserve our attention.
One in particular.
On Thursday, 5 March, one of the United Nations’ chief human rights voices, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, presented his first annual report to the council. It is his first since he took up the position of high commissioner for human rights in September 2014. From terrorism, torture and harassment of human rights defenders to the reorganisation of his office, the high commissioner’s report aims at presenting the state of human rights, the major threats against them and how he aims at building up his office to face those realities.
Al Hussein’s mandate, which Norway at the council called “an authoritative voice on human rights, built on […] repeated confirmation of its independence,” is what the Russian Federation in fact wants to silence.
Russia, which is today one of the 47 members of the council, was infuriated at the high commissioner’s statement presenting his report. It is traditional for states mentioned by international human rights mechanisms to accuse such instruments for being politicised and obeying “double standards.”
Russia went a step further by “condemning the high commissioner’s attempts to stigmatise any states for their acts or omissions in the field of human rights, even if they indeed took place.” Russia does not refer to politicisation or to attention the high commissioner would be giving to situations in certain countries only, but instead calls upon the United Nations voice for human rights to stop mentioning any country all together, whatever human rights violation took place in the country. In fact, Russia calls for the high commissioner to be silent.
Such a statement should not remain unnoticed because it sheds light on how Russia sees the international system; not one of standards and principles challenging states but rather one of obedience and muteness serving the states. The challenge Russia is facing with the high commissioner’s report is in fact a reflection of its disrespect for international law, be it in the way it has led suppression of civil society at home or its military activities in Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.
Because we must applaud those who stand firm for rights, we must also make sure that declarations by states who aim at silencing them do not go unnoticed. This one in particular.
This guest post was published on 10 March 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
