28 Apr 2011 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa
Nasrin Sotoudeh, 47, writer, lawyer, and women and children’s rights activist, has been awarded PEN’s Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.
The award honours international literary figures who have been persecuted or imprisoned for exercising or defending the right to freedom of expression. Sotoudeh is currently in Tehran’s Evin Prison, serving an 11 year sentence for outspoken advocacy in defence of her clients, she was arrested after the June 2009 presidential elections. Sotoudeh gave interviews to the media and human rights organisations about her client’s cases, the charges against her include spreading lies about the regime, acting against national security, and cooperating with the Center for the Defenders of Human Rights. She has been banned from practicing law and traveling outside the country for 20 years, a term that begins after her release from prison.
“From the start, Nasrin Sotoudeh has insisted on voicing the unspoken realities of post-revolutionary Iran,” Freedom to Write Program Director Larry Siems said.
The struggles of women, the experiences of minors swept up in Iran’s judicial system, the aspirations of writers, journalists and ordinary Iranians to engage in free and open debate about their country’s future — Nasrin has risked her own freedom to make sure these are acknowledged in Iran. That they have been acknowledged by sending her to prison speaks volumes about the Iranian leadership; that she is a hero and an inspiration to millions of her countrymen says even more about the Iranian people.
Nasrin Sotoudeh began her activism in 1991 as the only female writer for the Nationalist-religious publication Daricheh Goftegoo. One of her first projects was to prepare a series of interviews, reports, and articles on Iranian women to mark International Women’s Day, all of which her editor refused to run. After completing her Master’s Degree in International Law at Shahid Behshti University, Sotoudeh passed the bar exam in 1995 but was not permitted to practice law for another eight years. She therefore concentrated on journalism instead, writing for several reformist newspapers, including Jame’e. When she was finally granted a law license in 2003, she specialised in women’s and children’s rights while continuing to write articles addressing these issues, which she also discussed in a recent letter to her daughter.
“Nasrin Sotoudeh not only embodies the spirit of the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, but also the spirit of this remarkable year,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah, president of PEN American Center. “As a writer, as an activist, and as a lawyer she has dedicated herself to a simple and powerful idea: the principle that the rights guaranteed by law are absolute and shared equally by all. At a moment when women and men around the world are standing together peacefully to reclaim this most basic truth, she is in one of the world’s most infamous prisons, to the great shame of the Iranian government. In honoring her with this award, we stand with the millions of Iranians she has stood up for and inspired, and we urge individuals and governments around the world to join us in pressing for her immediate release.”
The Freedom to Write Award is an extension of PEN’s advocacy on behalf of the more than 900 writers and journalists who are currently threatened or in prison. Forty-five women and men have received the award since 1987; 32 of the 36 honorees who were in prison at the time they were honored were subsequently released.
18 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
Freedom House released a report last week offering a kind of product review of internet circumvention tools available to web users living in countries where their access to online content is regularly blocked and filtered.
Circumvention tools — or at least the idea of them — have become a popular cause for politicians and some net freedom activists in the West who see the technology as the best antidote to internet firewalls.
But as Freedom House points out, the array of tools available come with tradeoffs many users may not be considering. Freedom House’s survey of users in Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran, reveals that many are prioritising quick access over personal safety and security — something they may be doing, the authors speculate, “out of ignorance of the risks taken.”
And in a further sign of the fractured debate around such tools — and the high stakes for anyone in, say, Iran trying to use them — a prominent US developer behind one of the tools examined by Freedom House has heavily criticised the report.
Jacob Appelbaum, one of the developers behind the Tor Project (perhaps even better known as a player in the US government’s Twitter confrontation over access to the personal information of users connected to WikiLeaks), has written that the report “in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.”
He critiques Freedom House’s methodology for examining the tools, including Tor’s, and suggests in particular that the report may mislead users on the security level of various circumvention options available to them.
For all their seeming popularity in concept — a theme discussed in the current Index magazine in Danny O’Brien’s profile of the imploded project Haystack — circumvention tools may not even be reaching many of their intended users.
Last year, a Berkman Center circumvention usage report estimated that no more than 3 per cent of internet users in countries with substantial internet censorship use circumvention tools at all. After surveying savvy net users most likely to know about such tools, Berkman concluded that the true usage rate is likely even lower.
These debates about the quality of existing tools and the extent of their actual impact matter for US internet policy for one significant reason: The State Department must decide how to deploy about $25 m in funding to support international Internet freedom, and some — including powerful Republican Senator Richard Lugar — would like to see that money go entirely to develop circumvention tools.
Rebecca MacKinnon, in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, describes what’s become a political fight in Washington over how to spend this money. It pits, on one side, circumvention tool developers like the Global Internet Freedom Consortium that have actively lobbied media and politicians, and on the other Internet advocates (MacKinnon included) who warn that circumvention tools only address a small piece of the problem of free speech censorship online.
Hillary Clinton seemed to place herself in the latter category during her February speech on internet freedom when she said the government would invest in a “portfolio of technologies, tools and training.”
The bigger question, though, may not be which technologies and which tools, but can the US best help the global cause of internet freedom by investing in technology tools, or human infrastructure?
As Ethan Zuckerman has argued: “We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.”
11 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
It’s easy to look at access to the internet — “the freedom to connect,” as Hillary Clinton called it — as a black-and-white proposition. Either you have it, or you don’t. Either your government allows the free flow of information online (as is the case in much of the West), or it doesn’t (as in China, Iran or Burma).
But equally important is the question of the quality of access, warned Nasser Weddady, the outreach director for the American Islamic Conference. He spoke Sunday at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston on a panel parsing the status of global internet freedom and solutions needed to expand the universal right to information.
“Quality of access is about censorship, or lack of it, but it’s also about secure access,” Nasser said. “This is a fundamental issue that is discussed insufficiently. Look at what’s just happened in the Middle East: hundreds of thousands of people converted from being citizens to being activists, and those people aren’t necessarily aware of the security consequences of being online.”
The same online tools that allowed activists to organize online may also in many cases allow repressive governments to identify and punish them.
“A radical solution is to make sure that people who are online are actually online safety,” Weddady said.
Free expression advocates looking for ways to do this would be wise to argue against censorship not just as a human rights issue, but as an economic one too, suggested Emily Parker, an official with the US State Department and a former journalist.
“If you’re [a business] operating in a country that has heavy censorship requirements, you’re going to have to spend a lot on hardware, spend a lot of senior management bandwidth just dealing with censorship,” she said. “That’ going to have costs as well.”
Brett Solomon, the executive director of Access, echoed this too.
“There’s no possibility in the modern world to be a prosperous functioning state,” he said, “without significant Internet penetration.”
30 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
Xavier Alvarez told some pretty big lies about his military service during a 2007 municipal water-board meeting in California — that he retired as a US Marine after 25 years, during which time he was awarded the prestigious Medal of Honor. When it turned out Alvarez had never even been a Marine at all (let alone many of the other things he has claimed to be over the years – a Detroit Red Wings hockey player, an Iranian hostage crisis hero), the water board member was convicted under a 2006 federal law making it a crime to lie about receiving military honours.
Last week, an appeals court reaffirmed a lower-court ruling throwing out the conviction on logic that has been praised by free-speech advocates: The First Amendment, the court concluded, protects fibs told about military service, rendering the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional. Other courts have disagreed about the constitutionality of the law, and the final word come could eventually from the Supreme Court.
Several judges dissented, arguing that “the right to lie is not a fundamental right under the Constitution.” But Chief Judge Alex Kozinski countered that criminalizing lies about military service could lead to making even more mundane falsehoods illegal.
“If false factual statements are unprotected,” he wrote, “then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as ‘I’m working late tonight, hunny,’ ‘I got stuck in traffic’ and ‘I didn’t inhale’ could all be made into crimes.”
(JDate, which must surely be making its debut here in sweeping legal scholarship, is a popular online dating site for Jewish American singles.)
