17 Jan 2013
Kostas Vaxevanis, Greek journalist
The arrest of Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis on 28 October 2012, just days after he published a list of more than 2,000 suspected tax evaders, drew international condemnation.
He was found not guilty of breaking data privacy laws in November 2012, but the Athens public prosecutor subsequently ordered a retrial. If he is sentenced, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment or a fine.
Vaxevanis published the so-called “Lagarde List” of wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts in his weekly magazine Hot Doc in October 2012. The list is named after IMF head Christine Lagarde, who handed it over to her Greek counterpart in 2010 when she was French finance minister.
Successive Greek governments have failed to prosecute a single person on the list or any other high-profile individual for tax evasion. Vaxevanis argues that publication of the list was in the public interest. He told the Guardian: “The country is governed by a poisonous combination of politicians, businessmen and journalists who cover one another’s backs … Had it not been for the foreign media taking such an interest in my own story, it would have been buried.”
Dimitris Trimis, head of the Athens Newspaper Editors Union, told the BBC that the pressure on press freedom in Greece was the most intense of his career. Before Vaxevanis’ arrest two state TV presenters were taken off air after discussing a minister’s response to claims by anti-fascist demonstrators that they had been tortured by the police.
Soon after Vaxevanis’ arrest, journalist Spiros Karatzaferis was detained after announcing he would leak damaging documents about the country’s faltering economy. “The government feels insecure,” Trimis said. The only way it feels it can convince society of its policies is to try to manipulate the media through coercion.
Photo: Demotix / Kostas Pikoulas
Mosireen, Egyptian citizen media collective
Founded in Egypt in early 2011, the Mosireen Collective sought to support and promote the growing wave of citizen journalism that had emerged in the lead-up to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, when members of the public captured the protests and police brutality on their mobile phones.
Working as facilitators, producers and archivists, Mosireen provide both online and offline space to share this wave of citizen news and people’s perspectives with the wider world.
Whilst none of the Mosireen founders were journalists by profession – they come from a variety of other disciplines, from urban planning to graphic design and mechanics – they recognised the importance of the independent media voices emerging from the revolution.
Mosireen’s media centre in Cairo is a community-supported space, and although professionals also use the centre, the focus is on providing ordinary people with skills, equipment, and know-how. The collective has since trained several hundred people with the output of their work available to download, stream, screen and distribute for free on a non-commercial basis. Footage from the archive is also regularly screened at Tahrir Cinema, a free open-air cinema off Tahrir Square (pictured). It continues to film the on-going discontent to this day.
Mosireen – a play on the Arabic words for “Egypt” and “determined” – also holds regular public events and talks in its workspace in downtown Cairo. The opportunity for the public to get involved in all aspects of production allows for an unprecedented level of interactivity in the creation of Egyptian history. All of which is in line with another of Mosireen’s objectives: to counter the narratives put forward by state-owned media through the presentation of multiple viewpoints.
Ta Phong Tan, imprisoned Vietnamese blogger
Ta Phong Tan is one of three Vietnamese bloggers, collectively calling themselves the ‘Club for Free Journalists’, at the centre of a draconian clampdown by the country’s authorities. Vietnam is one of the world’s most restrictive countries for freedom of speech and the press. Only China, Eritrea and North Korea come lower on RSF’s press-freedom index.
Tan (pictured) and her fellow bloggers were arrested in September 2012 and charged with ‘conducting propaganda against the state’ in articles that allegedly ‘distorted and opposed’ the Vietnamese government.
In fact in over 700 articles on Tan’s blog Cong Ly va Su That (‘Justice and Truth’) she exposed the extent of corruption in the country. She covered a broad range of social issues, including the maltreatment of children, corruption, unfair taxation and illegal land confiscations by local party officials.
Before becoming a journalist, Tan worked as a police woman in Hanoi, giving her an insight into the workings of the system. On 4 October 2012, after a trial lasting just one day, Tan was sentenced to spend the next ten years in jail, with an additional five years of house arrest upon release. She refused to plead guilty.
This month a court in Vinh in Nghe An province, northern Vietnam, sentenced 14 activists, many of them bloggers, to up to 13 years in jail followed by several years of house arrest. The BBC reported that their convictions relied on loosely worded national security laws — in this instance article 79 of the penal code, which vaguely prohibits activities aimed at overthrowing the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that state officials had beaten and stripped online reporter Nguyen Hoang Vi while detained by Ho Chi Minh City police.
“These shocking prison sentences confirm our worst fears — that the Vietnamese authorities have chosen to make an example of these bloggers, in an attempt to silence others,” Rupert Abbott, Amnesty’s researcher on Vietnam, told the New York Times, adding that freedom of expression in the country was “dire and worsening.”
Before the trial began, Tan’s mother killed herself in a self-immolation protest against the treatment of her daughter, and the violence, harassment and threats of deportation levelled against the family.
Sadiye Eser and Turkey’s imprisoned journalists
Sadiye Eser (pictured) who writes for the leftist daily Evrensel (Universal) Newspaper, was arrested on 10 December and is still being held. The most recent reports claimed she is now likely to be being held at Bakirkoy Women’s prison.
Police asked Eser about political rallies she had covered as a journalist, as well as the notes she had kept on them, according to a statement by the Journalists’ Union of Turkey.
Broadly worded anti-terror and penal code statutes allow the authorities to conflate coverage of banned groups and special investigations with outright terrorism or other anti-state activity.
These statutes ” make no distinction between journalists exercising freedom of expression and [individuals] aiding terrorism,” said Mehmet Ali Birand, an editor with the Istanbul-based station, Kanal D, speaking to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Censorship in Turkey remains endemic. CPJ estimated that Eser’s detention brought to 50 the number of people in jail for journalistic activity in the country. Other organisations suggest the number is even higher. Turkey currently is ahead of even Iran and China in the number of journalists it is known to have in prison.
There is also more widely a chilling atmosphere for free expression and press freedom in Turkey leading to sackings of journalists and self-censorship: as the European Commission said in its 2012 progress report on Turkey: “On a number of occasions journalists have been fired after signing articles openly critical of the government. All of this, combined with a high concentration of the media in industrial conglomerates with interests going far beyond the free circulation of information and ideas, has a chilling effect and limits freedom of expression in practice, while making self-censorship a common phenomenon in the Turkish media.” They also point out that 16641 cases in total were pending against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights in September 2012. In March 2012, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, was charged and fined for a statement in a Swiss newspaper that “we have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians.”
15 Jan 2013 | Uncategorized
The European Court of Human Rights deemed today (15 January) that a woman working for British Airways was unfairly discriminated against for her religion. Nadia Eweida was fired by BA in 2006 for refusing to stop wearing her crucifix visibly. Judges ruled that Eweida’s rights under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights were violated. Three other Christians who had taken their employees to court lost their cases. Shirley Chaplin, whose employer also stopped her wearing crucifix necklaces, Lillian Ladele, disciplined after refusing to conduct same-sex civil partner ceremonies — and Gary McFarlane, a marriage councillor fired for saying he might object to offering sex advice to gay couples.
Aaron Swartz’s suicide prompted calls for cyber law reform
The suicide of US activist Aaron Swartz on 11 January has prompted calls to reform computer crime laws in America. The 26 year old was awaiting trial, charged with 13 felony counts of wire fraud and hacking two years ago. Swartz had downloaded millions of academic papers from online archive JSTOR and was due to face trial in April, for which he could have been jailed for decades and faced massive fines. Calls for amendments to The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have been widespread, with critics alleging that certain internet hacking laws are too vague and broad, and impose overly harsh penalties.
On 9 January, Iran’s Supreme Court ratified the death penalty of five Ahwazi (Arab-Iranian) human rights defenders. Hadi Rachedi, Hashim Shabani Nejad, Mohammad Ali Amuri Nejad, Jaber Al-Bushoke and his brother Mokhtar Al-Bushoke were arrested by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and National Security in the spring of 2011. They were charged with spawning mischief, threatening national security and inciting propaganda against the Islamic Republic. The activists had been protesting for their right to speak Arabic, rather than the national language of Persian – a right that is written into Iranian constitution. They were allegedly tortured into giving false confessions in detention.
App developers Tencent have apologised to users of social media app WeChat, after the programme appeared to be censoring controversial terms globally. Tencent, China’s most widely used internet portal, blamed a “technical glitch” after it had blocked terms such as Southern Weekend and Falun Gong, a banned group in China often referred to as a sect. Activists have voiced concern that authorities are hacking the app, in order to increase surveillance on some of its 200million users. WeChat has subscribers in the UK and America, and will soon be launched across Asia.
US Vice President Joe Biden met with the president of the Entertainment Software Association on Friday, to discuss the gaming industry’s influence over violence, following a school shooting in Connecticut that prompted calls for reforms on gun policy. Biden’s White House meeting aimed to establish whether America was undergoing a “coarsening of our culture”, discussing how to eliminate the culture of violence, a happening the gaming industry is frequently blamed for. The National Rifle Association (NRA) had accounted the rate of gun crime in America to media and video game violence, which the gaming industry refuted, expressing fears that they could become a scapegoat in the Connecticut debate.
14 Jan 2013 | Uncategorized
There has been a hell of a lot written in the past week or so since the New Statesman published feminist writer Suzanne Moore’s article Seeing red: the power of female anger, and I really do not want to go over the details again. There’s more to be written on transgender issues by people with far better knowledge than I. Suffice to say, people got angry over a phrase in Moore’s piece, she was rather forcefully criticised, responded in kind, and gave up her Twitter account as the weight of group anger became too much. Then Julie Burchill further fanned the flames with a massively controversial article in the Observer.
What I want to briefly focus on here is the frankly disastrous response to the furore over Julie Burchill’s Observer article by International Development minister Lynne Featherstone. Weighing in to the twitter discussion on Sunday evening, Featherstone tweeted that Burchill should be sacked by the Observer, and subsequently implied agreement with another tweet suggesting that Observer editor John Mulholland should also be sacked.
Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that Julie Burchill is not actually on staff at the Observer, and can’t be sacked, and examine just what’s happened here: a government minister in a modern democratic state has demanded that a journalist be punished for writing a contentious article. And then nodded along with the notion that a national newspaper editor be sacked for publishing a contentious article. An article that has not, as yet, been deemed illegal, or even in breach of the Press Complaints Commission code.
Featherstone has made a mockery of Britain and the EU’s declared commitment to promote free speech. Cast your mind back to the 2011 riots, when it was suggested that social networks be shut down to prevent people co-ordinating movements. The state media of regimes such as Iran and China gleefully reported this suggestion, using it both to mock the UK’s hypocrisy and to justify the censorship of their own people.
Now imagine the next time a newspaper such as China’s Southern Weekly steps out of line, and a senior Communist Party member calls for the head of a reporter or editor. Should a Foreign Office official even attempt to condemn such censorship, be in no doubt that the authorities in China will point to Featherstone’s intemperate tweet and say the UK is in no position to lecture.
There’s the international aspect. Now look at the domestic. Independent editor Chris Blackhurst has said he fears that politicians will use post-Leveson statute to “wreak their revenge” on the press. Speaking on Sky News, Blackhurst commented:
“Once a draft Bill goes into the Commons and the Lords and once they get their teeth into it they can add all sorts of amendments.
“That’s where the revenge will happen. That’s one reason why some of us are very keen that there should not be statute.
“It’s not just expenses, let’s not forget there are a lot of MPs, all sorts of shenanigans down the years, many of which we all know about and have been highlighted, and they can’t wait. They are sort of ‘bring it on’.”
Pro-statute campaigners such as Hugh Grant tell us that we should not be alarmed by the prospect of a new press law. But when, even before such a law is debated, a government minister thinks it’s OK to interfere with the press in this manner, why should we trust politicians with free speech?
28 Dec 2012 | India
The film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is set to be released on 1 February. If the team behind the movie adaptation is at all nervous about screening the film they have good reason. Rushdie, who wrote the screenplay, and has been the literary face for freedom of expression for years, has a tumultuous history of censorship with India.
The Booker prize-winning book is about two children, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence. Their lives become intertwined with the life of this new country.
One of the figures in the book, The Widow, was based on former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In the book, the character, through genocide and several wars, helps destroy Midnight’s Children. Gandhi had imposed a widely-criticised State of Emergency in India.
In an interesting turn of events, Gandhi threatened Rushdie libel over a single line. That line suggested that Gandhi’s son Sanjay had accused his mother of bringing about his father’s heart attack through neglect. Rushdie settled out of court, and the single line was removed from the book.
The movie adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
The real controversy that followed, the one that changed Rushdie’s life completely, came after the 1988 release of his book The Satanic Verses. While the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against Rushdie and called for his execution (citing the book as blasphemous), the author saw many countries, including India, indulge in their own brand of censorship.
As has been revealed in Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, the author felt the Indian government banned his book without much scrutiny. The Finance Ministry banned the book under section 11 of the Customs Act, and in that order stated that this ban did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of his work. Rushdie, appalled at the logic penned a letter to the then prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, stating:
Apparently, my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good… From where I sit, Mr Gandhi, it looks very much as if your government has become unable or unwilling to resist pressure from more or less any extremist religious grouping; that, in short, it’s the fundamentalists who now control the political agenda.
Rushdie was right, of course. Years later, in 2007, he attended the first Jaipur Literary Festival in India unnoticed. Without any security or fuss, he arrived unannounced, mingling with the crowd. Things had changed dramatically by 2012, when Rushdie’s arrival to the now must-attend literary festival was much publicised, and predictably attracted controversy.
Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, vice-chancellor at India’s Muslim Deoband School, called for the government to cancel Rusdie’s visa for the event as he had annoyed the religious sentiments of Muslims in the past. (Incidentally, Rushdie does not need a visa to enter India as he holds a PIO — “Person of Indian Origin” — card.)
The controversy escalated quickly, with the organisers first attempting to link Rushdie via video instead of having him physically present, but then cancelling the arrangement when the Festival came under graver physical threat. It was a sad day for freedom of expression in India, especially considering the fact that many, including Rushdie felt these moves were politically motivated because of upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, where the Muslim vote is very important. The government vehemently denied these claims.
Liberals in India were shocked at the illiberal values that the modern India state espoused, feigning to not be able to protect a writer and a festival against the threats of protestors. Shoma Chaudhary of Tehelka wrote:
The trouble is nobody any longer knows what Rushdie was doing in The Satanic Verses: neither those who are offended by him, nor those who defend him. Almost no one, including this writer, was given a chance to read the book.
Later in the year, initial press reports around Midnight’s Children revealed that the film could not find a distributor in India. The production team thought it might be a case of self-censorship as the film featured a controversial portrayal of Indira Gandhi. However, PVR Pictures, a major distributor in India, has plans to release the film in the country in February 2013.
31 years after the Midnight’s Children hit the stands, and the same year as he was bullied into cancelling a visit to a literary festival, it seems Salman Rushdie will yet again challenge Indian society. It remains to be seen if he will, yet again, become a pawn in the internal politics of the country.
