18 Sep 2012 | Uncategorized
A Libyan woman shows her ink-stained finger after voting during the National Assembly election this year. (Demotix)
As protests against the anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims, rage on across the globe, some began to ask if this means that the so-called Arab Spring was a failure, as news from the Arab world is once more dominated by chanting, burning American flags and beards. This conclusion is not only problematic, it is also wrong.
The number of protests only seems to grow, but we aren’t really saying much about the amount of people that are actually participating in them. Take Egypt — protests against the film drew about 2,000 protesters in Cairo Friday. A paltry number compared to the reported 1,000,000 that took to the streets of Cairo to call for the fall of Mubarak’s regime last year. Even now, labour protests have spread across schools, universities, and government bodies in Egypt, with thousands demanding improved pay and rights. The Muslim Brotherhood claimed that it organised 350 protests nationwide, no doubt distracting from some of the growing discontent with Morsi’s presidency.
There is no doubt that religious extremism is very present in the Arab world, but these groups are more interested in power, rather than protecting the integrity of Islam or the Prophet. I think it is no surprise that calls for protests have come from political religious groups like the Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. Religion is a pretty quick and easy tool to gain support and divide populations.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, made a rare public appearance to address tens of thousands of protesters in Beirut, but made it clear that protests were about the age-old enemy: the US and Israel. No doubt an important message for Nasrallah, as his ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad continues to wage a brutal war to stay in power. Focusing on an external threat is a convenient way to distract from an internal struggle.
Sectarianism has been the choice tool of many repressive regimes and political groups. One of the major victories of the so-called Arab Spring was a start of a conversation to push back on those lines — hurting political groups and regimes that draw their loyalty along religious lines. Still, political leaders have clamoured to use the revolutions to their advantage, strategically condemning human rights abuses, and turning a blind eye when similar abuses are inconvenient. In a translation of a speech by Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi, where he condemned Syria’s regime, Iranian state TV replaced “Syria” with “Bahrain”.
Bahrain’s government has painted the country’s ongoing unrest as a Shia uprising, even though the protesters’ demands have been secular, and largely focused on calling for democracy. In addition to a brutal crackdown on protests, state-owned media has depicted the protesters as Shia troublemakers and agents of Iran — a transparent attempt to use religion to crush dissent. While Bahrain has voiced concern over Syria, it has yet to address its own ongoing human rights abuses.
Last year’s uprisings were the start of a long road of change, and religious extremism is another part of those struggles. The Arab world, much like many other parts of the world, is a region that has been rife with corruption, despotism and inequality, as well as groups struggling to gain power with whatever tools they can get, including religious, ethnic or racial identities. Boiling unrest in the region down to Muslim anger or an inherent hatred of the West is short-sighted: it only encourages the flattened image that benefits the groups who wish to exploit it.
Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index on Censorship. She tweets from @MissYasin
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17 Sep 2012 | Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, minipost, News
An Iranian religious group has increased a reward offered for the murder of British author Salman Rushdie after blaming him for an anti-Islam film. As Rushdie recounts in his new autobiography, in 1989 Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned him to death for insulting the prophet in his novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie has no links to the film — which has caused riots across the Middle East— he dismissed it as ‘idiotic’, but Ayatollah Hassan Sanei of the 15 Khordad Foundation said the film would never have been released had Rushdie been killed after the fatwa was declared. Sanei increased the reward by $500,000 USD, making the total sum $3.3million USD.
24 Aug 2012 | Asia and Pacific, Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, News
Search engines and social networking sites are at the heart of Web 2.0. To unreasonably threaten them with liability for user content misses the point, says Marta Cooper (more…)
23 Aug 2012 | Uncategorized
Index on Censorship has submitted our concerns about the UK government’s proposed Communications Data Bill (widely known as the “snoopers charter”). We have several concerns about the government’s proposals, as surveillance and retention of data can undoubtedly have an effect on free expression. I’ll reproduce the introduction to our submission, which outlines our concerns, here, and you can read the full submission below.
The Communications Data Bill as currently drafted would directly undermine both the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression by making surveillance and storage of UK citizens’ communications data the norm. These rights are enshrined in Articles 8 and 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998 and in the European Convention on Human Rights and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UNDR explicitly states that: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence”.
Collection and filtering of communications data across the whole British population would not only represent an unacceptable breach of privacy but would also undermine freedom of expression. Index on Censorship – as one of the world’s leading freedom of expression organisations – has monitored censorship and surveillance around the world for forty years. The goals of widespread monitoring, information-collection and storage, and surveillance of a whole population are aims that are normally found only in authoritarian and totalitarian states, such as Iran and China, not in democracies who are bound, through their accession to the human rights conventions mentioned above, and through their commitments to democracy and freedom, only to limit free expression where it is necessary on clear grounds of national security and public order and to impose any limits in a proportionate and limited manner.
Population-wide collection and filtering of communications data is neither necessary nor proportionate. Monitoring and surveillance of this kind impacts directly and in a chilling manner on freedom of expression, inhibiting and restricting individuals in how they receive, share and impart information and encouraging self-censorship. No other democracy has gone as far as the government proposes in this bill that the UK should go. As well as representing a major undermining of privacy and freedom of expression in the UK, this bill, if it became law, would be a direct encouragement and justification for authoritarian regimes to monitor in detail their entire populations online as well as off. It would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the UK to challenge these regimes on their censorship and surveillance of their populations. It is also remarkable that, in a memorandum attached to the draft bill on the compatibility of the bill with the European Convention on Human Rights, the government sees fit to focus only on the right to privacy and makes no mention of the potentially chilling and damaging impacts of the bill on freedom of expression.
The declared purpose of this bill is to tackle crime and to ensure national security. This type of in-depth monitoring of the entire population has at no point before been used or introduced as an appropriate crime-prevention or security-promoting tool in the UK. It would represent a reversal of the presumption of innocence and an unwarranted intrusion into the privacy of the British population.
Furthermore, the fact that new technology makes such population-wide data collection, filtering and monitoring possible is not a justification for using the technology in that manner. Such data collection would represent a major step-change in the amount of information available on individual citizens and is not, as has been claimed, simply a step to ensure information already available offline is also available from online sources. The distinction between ‘subscriber’, ‘use’ and ‘traffic’ data and data content is also a misleading one. The range of data that would be collected as ‘communications data’ would enable a detailed picture of individual’s habits, activities, interests, and opinions to be built up going well beyond any population-wide accumulation of data that has happened until now in the UK.
If you want to add your voice, you can sign 38 Degrees petition here;
Avaaz also has a petition here;
And Open Rights Group allows you to write directly to your MP here
Comms Data Bill Index Submission 22 August 12
