In conjunction with the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015, we will be publishing a series of articles that complement many of the upcoming debates and discussions. We are offering these articles from Index on Censorship magazine for free (normally they are held within our paid-for archive) as part of our partnership with the festival. Below is and article by Ismail Einashe on television journalist Temesghan Debesai’s escape from Eritrea, taken from the spring 2014 issue. This article is a great starting point for those planning to attend the A New Home: Asylum, Immigration and Exile in Today’s Britain session at the festival.
Television journalist Temesghen Debesai had waited years for an opportunity to make his escape, so when the Eritrean ministry of information sent him on a journalism training course in Bahrain he was delighted, but fearful too. On arrival in Bahrain, he quietly evaded the state officials who were following him and got in touch with Reporters Sans Frontières. Shortly after he met officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who verified his details. He then went into hiding for two months so the Eritrean officials in Bahrain could not catch up with him and eventually escaped to Britain.
Debesai told no one of his plans, not even his family. He was concerned he was being watched. He says a “state of paranoia was everywhere” and there was no freedom of expression. Life in Eritrea, he explains, had become a “psychological prison”.
After graduating top of his class from Eritrea’s Asmara University, Debesai became a well-known TV journalist for state-run news agency Erina Update. But from 2001, the real crackdown began and independent newspapers such as Setit, Tsigenai, and Keste Debena, were shut down. In raids journalists from these papers were arrested en masse. He suspects many of those arrested were tortured or killed, and many were never heard of again. No independent domestic news agency has operated in Eritrea since 2001, the same year the country’s last accredited foreign reporter was expelled.
The authorities became fearful of internal dissent. Debesai noticed this at close hand having interviewed President Afwerki on several occasions. He describes these interviews as propaganda exercises because all questions were pre-agreed with the minister of information. As the situation worsened in Eritrea, the post-liberation haze of euphoria began to fade. Eritrea went into lock-down. Its borders were closed, communication with the outside world was forbidden, travel abroad without state approval was not allowed. Men and women between the ages of 18 and 40 could be called up for indefinite national service. A shoot-to-kill policy was put in operation for anyone crossing the border into Ethiopia.
Debesai felt he had no other choice but to leave Eritrea. As a well-known TV journalist he could not risk walking across into Sudan or Ethiopia, so he waited until he got the chance to leave for Bahrain.
Eritrea was once a colony of Italy. It had come under British administrative control in 1941, before the United Nations federated Eritrea to Ethiopia in 1952. Nine years later Emperor Haile Selassie dissolved the federation and annexed Eritrea, sparking Africa’s longest war. This long bitter war glued the Eritrean people to their struggle for independence from Ethiopia. Debesai, whose family went into exile to Saudi Arabia during the 1970s, returned to Eritrea as a teenager in 1992, a year after the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front captured the capital Asmara.
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For Debesai returning to Asmara had been a “personal choice”. He wanted to be a part of rebuilding his nation after a 30-year conflict, and besides, he says, life in post-war Asmara was “socially free”, a welcome antidote to conservative Saudi life. Those heady days were electric, he says. An air of “patriotic nationalism” pervaded the country. Women danced in the streets for days welcoming back EPLF fighters. Asmara had remained largely unscathed during the war thanks to its high mountain elevation. Much of its beautiful 1930s Italian modernist architecture was intact, something Debesai was delighted to see.
But those early signs of hope that greeted independence quickly soured. By 1993 Eritreans overwhelmingly voted for independence, and since then Eritrea has been run by President Isaias Afwerki, the former rebel leader of the EPLF. Not a single election has been held since the country gained independence, and today Eritrea is one of the world’s most repressive and secretive states. There are no opposition parties and no independent media. No independent public gatherings or civil society organisations are permitted. Amnesty International estimates there are 10,000 prisoners of conscience in Eritrea, who include journalists, critics, dissidents, as well as men and women who have evaded conscription. Eritrea is ranked the worst country for press freedoms in the world by Reporters Sans Frontières.
The only way for the vast majority of Eritreans to flee their isolated, closed-off country is on foot. They walk over the border to Sudan and Ethiopia. The United Nations says there are 216,000 Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia and Sudan. By the end of October 2014, Sudan alone was home to 106,859 Eritrean refugees in camps at Gaderef and Kassala in the eastern, arid region of the country.
In Ethiopia, Eritrean refugees are found mostly in four refugee camps in the Tigray region, and two in the Afar region in north-eastern Ethiopia.
During the first 10 months of 2014, 36,678 Eritreans sought refuge across Europe, compared to 12,960 during the same period in 2013. Most asylum requests were to Sweden (9,531), Germany (9,362) and Switzerland (5,652). The UN says the majority of these Eritrean refugees have arrived by boat across the Mediterranean. The majority of them are young men, who have been forced into military conscription. All conscripts are forced to go to Sawa, a desert town and home to a military camp, or what Human Rights Watch has called an open-air prison. Many young men see no way out but to leave Eritrea. For them, leaving on a perilous journey for a life outside their home country is better than staying put. The Eritrean refugee crisis in Europe took a sharp upward turn in 2014, as the UNHCR numbers show. And tragedies, like the drowning of hundreds of Eritrean refugees off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013, demonstrate the perils of the journey west and how desperate these people are.
Even when Eritrean refugees go no further than Sudan and Ethiopia, they face a grim situation. According to Lul Seyoum, director of International Centre for Eritrean Refugees and Asylum Seekers (ICERAS), Eritrean refugees in a number of camps inside Sudan and Ethiopia face trafficking, and other gross human rights violations. They are afraid to speak and meet with each other. She said, that though information is hard to get out, many Eritreans find themselves in tough situations in these isolated camps, and the situation has worsened since Sudan and Eritrea became closer politically.
Eritrea had a hostile relationship with Sudan during the 1990s. It supported the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, much to the anger of President Al Bashir who was locked in a bitter war with the people of now-independent South Sudan. Today tensions have eased considerably, and President Afwerki has much friendly relations with Sudan to the detriment of then tens of thousands of Eritrean refugees in Sudan.
A former Eritrean ministry of education official, who is a refugee now based in the UK and who does not want to be named because of safety fears, believes there’s no freedom of expression for Eritreans in Ethopian camps, such as Shimelba.
The official says in 2013 a group of Eritrean refugees came together at a camp to express their views on the boat sinking near Lampedusa and they were abused by the Ethiopian authorities who then fired at them with live bullets.
Seyoum believes that the movement of Eritreans in camps in Ethiopia is restricted. “The Ethiopian government does not allow them to leave the camps without permission,” she says. Even for those who get permission to leave very few end up in Ethiopia, instead through corrupt mechanisms are trafficked to Sudan. According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of Eritreans have been enslaved in torture camps in Sudan and Egypt over the past 10 years, many enduring violence and rape at their hands of their traffickers in collusion with state authorities.
Even when Eritreans make it to the West, they are still afraid to speak publicly and many are fearful for their families back home. Now based in London, Debesai is a TV presenter at Sports News Africa. As an exile who has taken a stance against the regime of President Afewerki, he has faced harassment and threats. He is harassed over social media, on Twitter and Facebook. Over coffee, he shows me a tweet he’s just received from Tesfa News, a so-called “independent online magazine”, in which they accuse him of being a “backstabber” against the government and people of Eritrea. Others face similar threats, including the former education ministry official.
For this piece, a number of Eritreans said they did not want to be interviewed because they were afraid of the consequences. But Debesai said: “It takes time to overcome the past, so that even for those in exile in the West the imprisonment continues.” He adds: “These refugees come out of a physical prison and go into psychological imprisonment.”
Ismail Einashe is a journalist and a researcher, based in London. He tweets@IsmailEinashe
Join us on 25 October at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015 for Question Everything an unconventional, unwieldy and disruptive day of talks, art and ideas featuring a broad range of speakers drawn from popular culture, the arts and academia. Moderated by Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg.
Personally, I don’t believe Satan, or God, exist, so it’s not a question I give a great deal of time to.
Salman Rushdie gave it some thought. The title of The Satanic Verses comes from an old idea that there may have been parts of the Sura that were false. Specifically, a concession to the polytheism of the pre-Islamic Meccans to whom Muhammad preached: “And see ye not Lat and Ozza, And Manat the third besides? These are exalted Females, And verily their intercession is to be hoped for.”
Muhammad was, the story goes, tricked into saying these lines by Satan. The Angel Gabriel later told Muhammad he had been deceived, and he recanted.
For Thought-For-The-Day types, it’s a nice little “don’t believe everything you read” lesson. For literary types, it may even be seen as an interesting early example of an unreliable narrator. Muhammad trusted the angel to tell him the truth: but at that moment, the angel was not who he seemed.
I sincerely doubt Northern Ireland’s Pastor James McConnell has much truck with the idea of unreliable narration. Or even fiction, for that matter. McConnell is the type of person who believes that if someone is going to go to the trouble of writing a thing down in a book, then that thing should be true.
A book? No. The Book. There is one book for the pastor. It’s called the Bible, and it’s got everything you need. You might read other books, but they’ll be books about the Book. Books explaining in great detail just how great the Book is. What there are not, cannot be, are other the Books.
So the Bible can be true, or the Quran can be true: but they can’t both be true. And if the Quran is false, but Islam claims it is true, then Islam must be wicked. Satanic, even.
In May last year, Pastor McConnell, like many of his ilk, was very exercised by the story of Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, who had reputedly been sentenced to death in Sudan after converting from Islam to Christianity. Here was further proof, septuagenarian McConnell preached to the congregation at Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle, that “Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell.” There may be good Muslims in the UK, he said, but he didn’t trust them. Enoch Powell was right, McConnell said, to predict “rivers of blood”.
McConnell seemed to know this was going to get him in trouble. “The time will come in this land and in this nation,” he preambled, “to say such things will be an offence to the law.”
Turns out, the pastor was half-right at least in this much. Last week, Northern Irish prosecutors announced that McConnell would face prosecution for his sermon. For inciting religious hatred? No, too obvious. McConnell, now retired and said to be in declining health, will be prosecuted under Section 127 of the Communications Act.
Section 127 is, free-speech nerds may recall, the piece of legislation that pertains to the sending “by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.
It’s the one that led to the Paul Chambers “Twitter Joke Trial” case, one of the great rallying points of online free speech in recent years. In January 2010 Chambers joked online that he would blow up Doncaster Robin Hood airport if his flight to Belfast (always Belfast!) to meet his girlfriend was cancelled. He was convicted, even though every single person involved in the case acknowledged that he had been joking, including the airport security, who did not for one second treat the tweet seriously, even as a hoax.
Chambers was convicted. Eventually, in June 2012, the conviction was quashed. Questions were raised about why then-Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer had persisted in pursuing the case. For his part, Starmer launched a consultation to draft guidelines on when the Communications Act provisions should and should not be used (this writer took part in the meetings and submitted written evidence).
During that process, Starmer was fond of pointing out (correctly) that the Communications Act had been designed to protect telephone operators from heavy breathers. It had nothing to do with stupid jokes on the internet.
And it certainly had nothing at all to do with the online streaming of sermons by fundamentalist preachers.
Let there be no doubt: the prosecution of James McConnell under the Communications Act is a disgrace and a travesty. It is the action of a prosecution service more interested in appearing to be liberal than upholding justice and rights. If McConnell is suspected of being guilty of incitement, then prosecute him under that law. But the deployment of the catch-all Communications Act, in a situation it was very obviously not designed for, suggests prosecutors were not confident of that case and have instead reached for the vaguest charge possible.
When one combines this latest prosecution with the recent “gay cake” case, in which a Christian bakery in County Antrim was fined for refusing to decorate a cake with a pro-equal marriage message, it’s hard not to think the people of Protestant Ulster may, on this occasion, have some real fuel for the siege mentality that’s kept them going for so very long. It feels as if an attempt is being made to force liberalisation on Christians through the courts. It’s hard to imagine any outcome besides resentment, and Lord knows the “wee province” has enough of that already.
Rafael Marques de Morais, Safa Al Ahmad, Amran Abdundi, Mouad “El Haqed” Belghouat and Tamas Bodokuy (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
A Kenyan woman standing up for women’s rights in one of the world’s most dangerous regions. A Hungarian journalist and his investigative news site. A documentary filmmaker who exposed an unreported uprising in Saudi Arabia. An Angolan journalist who has been repeatedly prosecuted for his work uncovering government and industry corruption. A Moroccan rapper whose music tackles widespread poverty and endemic government corruption.
These were the five individuals named Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award winners on 18 March 2015. Three months later, here are updates on their ongoing work.
Rafael Marques de Morais / Journalism
Rafael Marques de Morais (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
International signatories, from Tiffany & Co and Leber Jewellers to Oscar-winning film director Steve McQueen, and from Blood Diamond film stars David Harewood and Michael Sheen to journalist Sir Harold Evans, recently called on Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos to abandon the prosecution of investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais.
The campaigning journalist returned from collecting his award in London to face trial linked to his book Blood Diamonds. He filed a criminal complaint against a group of generals who he held morally responsible for human rights abuses he uncovered within the country’s diamond trade. For this, they filed a series of libel suits against him in Angola and Portugal.
The media attention that Marques won off the back of his award “helped a great deal” he said. “It raised my profile in the days before my trial and maybe helped to make it an international cause.” In a rare sight for Angola, a number of anti-corruption protesters publicly gathered outside of the Luanda courthouse as his trial opened and covert protests have continued under the cover of darkness since.
Marques’ trial played out in a Kafkaesque way over the subsequent weeks, with behind-the-scenes negotiations leading to criminal defamation charges first being dropped, only for him to suddenly discover that he would instead be sentenced for the alternative crime of malicious prosecution.
The American Bar Association, who monitored the trial throughout, published a report stating that the court had failed to meet international fair trial standards on at least three counts. The ABA Center for Human Rights report found that “throughout the proceedings, the defendant was denied the right to present a defense, induced to make a statement on the basis of false pretenses and compelled to bear the burden of proving his innocence, all in violation of international law.”
Marques’ sentence finally came down on 25 May: six-months imprisonment, suspended for a term of two years. Marques is now appealing against this punishment that effectively seeks to silence him until 2017; coincidentally the same year as Angola’s next elections.
The court also attempted to censor Marques’ book from republication and further distribution but these efforts have blatantly failed with copies of the book widely circulated online and an English language version becoming available for the first time less than a week after his sentence.
Despite the international attention, the situation for Marques and his peers in Angola’s human rights and journalism communities remains grim. Recounting the experience of taking his car to the local garage for repairs recently, the fear is palpable in his voice. “There were two members of the ruling party there, by coincidence. They walked across to the mechanic and warned him not to fix my car unless he wanted to risk becoming collateral damage.”
Marques’ email has also recently been repeatedly hacked and his website www.makaangola.org is presently subject to over 250 attacks per day, forcing him to desist from updating it for the time being.
Marques continues to work closely with Index on Censorship and a number of other international organisations. His recent report on the massacre of a sect at Mount Sumi was published by The Guardian, he continues to keep a close eye on both the persecution of journalists and corruption at the highest levels in Angola, and he is expecting to hear back from the Supreme Court about his appeal in the next few weeks.
Hugely grateful for the support of the international community, Marques remains determined “to continue the good fight for change”.
“I have only the interests of my people at heart,” he says, “and to experience all this persecution, it must mean you are doing something positive, something right.”
Safa Al Ahmad (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
Joint winner of the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Journalism, Safa Al Ahmad has spent much of the past three months in the editing studio.
Applauded for her documentary Saudi’s Secret Uprising, Al Ahmad’s new film The Rise of the Houthis – first distributed at this year’s Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards Gala and since screened by both the BBC and PBS Frontline – has won wide critical acclaim.
Next month, on 6 July, BBC worldwide will also premiere a follow-up film that Al Ahmad has produced and directed, with Gaith Abdulahad exploring the present situation in the south of Yemen.
Now regularly invited to attend international public meetings, from Copenhagen to Geneva to Washington DC, Al Ahmad says she thinks that the award has brought more exposure – both for credible investigative journalism from Saudi Arabia, and for her work.
Is that a good thing for a journalist who has made her name through operating undercover? It is a challenge, she says, to find ways to do credible journalism about Saudi Arabia and the region without being on the ground. But there are complex stories, beyond TV, that Al Ahmad would increasingly like to focus on.
Abdundi, who knows many students from the college, immediately joined with other women leaders to organise strong community protests against Al-Shabaab.
“It was a barbaric attack done by a crazy group who have no respect for human life,” she said. “It was a sad day for the people of Kenya and the victims of the attack. But it will not scare [the] people of northern Kenya as we will continue and fight to overcome them”.
Abdundi hopes to help further through her ongoing work with her grassroots community organisation Frontier Indigenous Rights Network, tracking arms movements across the dangerous border with Sudan and travelling to meetings in Nairobi to report observations. “Security is improving now,” says Abdundi.
Winning the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Campaigning, and sharing the story of the people of northern Kenya with the wider world, “made me so happy” she says. “The award ceremony was aired by all community radios in northern Kenya and reached many people. I am happy because it will give women courage to stand up for their rights”.
Spending a week in Index on Censorship’s office in London was “an opportunity to see how you work” Abdundi said, and has inspired her to want to develop a new website for her work, helping her to “spread her message to all corner[s] of northern Kenya”.
Tamas Bodoky (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
Atlatszo.hu, Tamas Bodoky’s investigative news website in Hungary has continued to gather praise and acclaim, including another award, the Theodor Heuss Medal.
“All of this recognition is very helpful,” said Bodoky. “We are always afraid of retaliation and this offers us a level of protection… Hungarian authorities are very aware of this international attention and it is less likely that they will attack as we continue with our investigative projects.”
Atlatszo continues to publish three to four articles and numerous blog posts each week, including an English newsletter, often drawing on FOI requests to try to bring more transparency to Hungarian public life.
The campaigning journalists scored a major recent success with their campaign to demand political party foundations make information on their beneficiaries, income and spending publicly available. When political party Jobbik’s foundation refused to comply, Atlatszo took action. It began legal proceedings that proved sufficient to make them capitulate.
Bodoky’s organisation is now using this newly available information to research deeper, exploring “far right networks” and, he says, some curious connections between governing party Fidesz and football club Ferencvarosi TC.
As he looks ahead, Bodoky is especially concerned by the looming threat of a foreign NGO law – holding all NGO’s with foreign funding “accountable and transparent” by forcing them to register.
“We don’t know exactly when they will seek to expose and limit foreign funding, but the Russian recipe is definitely on the table,” says Bodoky. Fortunately his organisation has been totally open and transparent since 2013.
Rapper El Haqed (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
Rapper Mouad Belghouat, better known as El Haqed (“the enraged” in Arabic) continues to rail against the endemic corruption and widespread poverty he says he sees in Morocco.
Imprisoned three times since 2011, El Haqed was not only prohibited from performing publicly in his homeland but had also been struggling to obtain visas to travel or perform internationally.
The good news is that his visit to the UK has helped him to overcome this obstacle, recently spending five weeks touring Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Highlights included performing live during Oslo’s 1 May celebrations and working with the organisation Freemuse to record a new Fela Kuti cover as part of a group of Arab and Iranian revolutionary artists (listen here). “It was much easier to be there because I went to England and came back,” said Belghouat.
Until recently limited to publishing and sharing his work via YouTube and Facebook, El Haqed has also begun something of an offline resurgence back home. Approached by promoters in his home town of Casablanca after winning the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Arts Award brought him widespread local media coverage, El Haqed now hopes to stage his first live concert on home soil in a long time this Friday 19 June. (Update 22 June 2015: Morocco: Police block concert by Index award-winning rapper El Haqed)
“Usually people find many excuses not to work with him,” according to Belghouat’s brother and manager Abderrahim Belghouat, “but so far this time no people have yet come and told the venue ‘don’t work with him’…”
Update 23 June 2015: El Haqed has now cancelled his planned tour of five of Morocco’s least affluent towns. The planned series of concerts would have teamed El Haqed with six other local musicians to “bring joy to poorer people in cities without theatres, cinemas and cultural areas, in the old Moroccan way, by making music for free outdoors”.
El Haqed is determinedly hopeful, “the Index award has shown Moroccan authorities that you can’t stop me,” he said, “the more of an effort they make to silence me, the more my voice arrives everywhere.”
Governments don’t really like coming across as authoritarian. They may do very authoritarian things, like lock up journalists and activists and human rights lawyers and pro democracy campaigners, but they’d rather these people didn’t talk about it. They like to present themselves as nice and human rights-respecting; like free speech and rule of law is something their countries have plenty of. That’s why they’re so keen to stress that when they do lock up journalists and activists and human rights lawyers and pro-democracy campaigners, it’s not because they’re journalists and activists and human rights lawyers and pro-democracy campaigners. No, no: they’re criminals you see, who, by some strange coincidence, all just happen to be journalists and activists and human rights lawyers and pro-democracy campaigners. Just look at the definitely-not-free-speech-related charges they face.
1) Azerbaijan: “incitement to suicide”
Khadija Ismayilova is one of the government critics jailed ahead of the European Games.
Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova was arrested in December for inciting suicide in a former colleague — who has since told media he was pressured by authorities into making the accusation. She is now awaiting trial for “tax evasion” and “abuse of power” among other things. These new charges have, incidentally, also been slapped on a number of other Azerbaijani human rights activists in recent months.
2) Belarus: participation in “mass disturbance”
Belorussian journalist Irina Khalip was in 2011 given a two-year suspended sentence for participating in “mass disturbance” in the aftermath of disputed presidential elections that saw Alexander Lukashenko win a fourth term in office.
3) China: “inciting subversion of state power”
Chinese dissident Zhu Yufu in 2012 faced charges of “inciting subversion of state power” over his poem “It’s time” which urged people to defend their freedoms.
4) Angola: “malicious prosecution”
Journalist and human rights activist Rafael Marques de Morais (Photo: Sean Gallagher/Index on Censorship)
Rafael Marques de Morais, an Angolan investigative journalist and campaigner, has for months been locked in a legal battle with a group of generals who he holds the generals morally responsible for human rights abuses he uncovered within the country’s diamond trade. For this they filed a series of libel suits against him. In May, it looked like the parties had come to an agreement whereby the charges would be dismissed, only for the case against Marques to unexpectedly continue — with charges including “malicious prosecution”.
5) Kuwait: “insulting the prince and his powers”
Kuwaiti blogger Lawrence al-Rashidi was in 2012 sentenced to ten years in prison and fined for “insulting the prince and his powers” in poems posted to YouTube. The year before he had been accused of “spreading false news and rumours about the situation in the country” and “calling on tribes to confront the ruling regime, and bring down its transgressions”.
6) Bahrain: “misusing social media
Nabeel Rajab during a protest in London in September (Photo: Milana Knezevic)
In January nine people in Bahrain were arrested for “misusing social media”, a charge punishable by a fine or up to two years in prison. This comes in addition to the imprisonment of Nabeel Rajab, one of country’s leading human rights defenders, in connection to a tweet.
7) Saudi Arabia: “calling upon society to disobey by describing society as masculine” and “using sarcasm while mentioning religious texts and religious scholars”
In late 2014, Saudi women’s rights activist Souad Al-Shammari was arrested during an interrogation over some of her tweets, on charges including “calling upon society to disobey by describing society as masculine” and “using sarcasm while mentioning religious texts and religious scholars”.
Jean Anleau was arrested in 2009 for causing “financial panic” by tweeting that Guatemalans should fight corruption by withdrawing their money from banks.
9) Swaziland: “scandalising the judiciary”
Swazi Human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko and journalist and editor Bheki Makhubu in 2014 faced charges of “scandalising the judiciary”. This was based on two articles by Maseko and Makhubu criticising corruption and the lack of impartiality in the country’s judicial system.
10) Uzbekistan: “damaging the country’s image”
Umida Akhmedova (Image: Uznewsnet/YouTube)
Uzbek photographer Umida Akhmedova, whose work has been published in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, was in 2009 charged with “damaging the country’s image” over photographs depicting life in rural Uzbekistan.
11) Sudan: “waging war against the state”
Al-Haj Ali Warrag, a leading Sudanese journalist and opposition party member, was in 2010 charged with “waging war against the state”. This came after an opinion piece where he advocated an election boycott.
12) Hong Kong: “nuisance crimes committed in a public place”
Avery Ng wearing the t-shirt he threw at Hu Jintao. Image from his Facebook page.
Avery Ng, an activist from Hong Kong, was in 2012 charged “with nuisance crimes committed in a public place” after throwing a t-shirt featuring a drawing of the late Chinese dissident Li Wangyang at former Chinese president Hu Jintao during an official visit.
13) Morocco: compromising “the security and integrity of the nation and citizens”
Rachid Nini, a Moroccan newspaper editor, was in 2011 sentenced to a year in prison and a fine for compromising “the security and integrity of the nation and citizens”. A number of his editorials had attempted to expose corruption in the Moroccan government.
