17 Mar 2022 | Magazine, Magazine Editions, Volume 51.01 Spring 2022
"Our need today is for organs of consciouness that could help us to know and to care about other members of the same intellectual community, much as Christians once were vigilant for other Christians in times of religious persecution."
THUS WROTE THE poet Stephen Spender in the founding manifesto of this magazine. As Spender outlined, Index came into being after Pavel Litvinov, a Soviet physicist and dissident, called on the international community to help those being censored in the USSR. The year of our first publication was 1972. The Cold War was not yet a chapter in a history textbook, nor was apartheid. Spain, Portugal and Greece were still under military dictatorships. Mao Zedong was the leader of China. The challenges were great and our mission was to concern ourselves with all because censorship was not a one-sided issue. “The problem of censorship,” Spender wrote, “is part of larger ones about the use and abuse of freedom.” Since 1972 we have done our best to live up to the ideals of the founding manifesto. We have covered the wars, the revolutions and the protests. We have smuggled writings out of prison and published material banned elsewhere. We have provided a forum for critical debate and waded into the thorniest issues of the day. And we have dealt with the complexity of technology, both a blessing and a curse. Our articles have rippled across the world in myriad ways, influencing statesmen and laymen alike, and providing a refuge for the persecuted. To mark our half-century we have created a birthday issue. It is not a celebration in the conventional sense. By all means, our refuge should no longer exist. But in 2022 the battles remain as large. We need to continue to shout. And we want to celebrate the brave and brilliant people who got us to this place – and do a little back-patting too over our role in documenting abuses and sometimes lessening them. And so to our anniversary special. We have asked editors from the five decades to reflect on their time at Index and we’ve selected pieces from our archive to accompany them. This was no easy task. As Spender wrote, the “material by writers which is censored in Eastern Europe, Greece, South Africa and other countries is among the most exciting that is being written today”. How right he was. We have therefore not tried to choose the best – a mission impossible. Instead we’ve picked articles that capture a moment in time and reflect our rich, varied history. At the same time, we’ve invited journalists around the globe to revisit articles published in our first year and consider them from the vantage point of 2022, such as Susan McKay’s look at the contentious role of the BBC in Northern Ireland then and now. In our culture section, Nick Harkaway reimagines the early days of Index, a fantastically fun accompaniment to Martin Bright’s deep-dive into the real Index origin story. Moving to today, Indian journalist Aishwarya Jagani brings you an alarming tale of women who found themselves on an auction site and we publish letters from prison by the Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai. As for the future, Sir Tom Stoppard considers mob justice and its ramifications. “In being concerned with the situation of those who are deprived of their freedoms one is taking the side of openness,” wrote Spender in the manifesto. Onwards we march.
Author
Andrey Kurkov is an Ukrainian author who has written about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts and also 19 novels, including the bestseller Death and the Penguin. Read More
Author
Human rights campaigner
Peter Tatchell is the director of human rights organisation the Peter Tatchell Foundation and highly acknowledged for his work with the LGBT movement.
Human rights campaigner
Artist and Activist
Rahima Mahmut is the director of the World Uyghur Congress (UK) and Adviser to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.
Artist and Activist
by Index on Censorship | 30 Mar 22 | Hong Kong, News and features, Volume 51.01 Spring 2022 | 3 Comments
Jimmy Lai Chi-Ying, Hong Kong’s 74-year-old self-made billionaire, is a dissident. His cause is freedom. For championing this cause, he has been jailed since December 2020. One of the crimes he was found guilty of was lighting a candle in public to commemorate the...
by Guilherme Osinski | 18 Mar 22 | 50 years of Index, China, History, Ireland, Magazine, News and features, Philippines, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 51.01 Spring 2022 Extras | 0 Comments
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] You may have heard that the 70s were different. In 1972, when the first issue of Index magazine was launched, no one knew that 20 years later there would be an influential economic bloc called the European Union. The Beatles' had...
by Index on Censorship | 17 Mar 22 | 50 years of Index, Afghanistan, Africa, Americas, Asia and Pacific, Bosnia, Brazil, China, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Magazine, Magazine Contents, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 51.01 Spring 2022 Extras | 0 Comments
The spring issue of Index magazine is special. We are celebrating 50 years of history and to such a milestone we've decided to look back at the thorny path that brought us here. Editors from our five decades of life have accepted our invitation to think over their...
28 Apr 2021 | Magazine, Magazine Editions, Volume 50.01 Spring 2021
Author
Ma Jian is an award-winning Chinese writer. His latest novel is China Dream. His work is banned in China
Singer
Gelareh Sheibani was born in Iran and took keyboard lessons as a youngter. She found a passion for singing in her teenage years but solo singing in the country was not permitted. After the release of the video for her song Nagoo Tanhaei and the follow-up she was arrested and prosecuted. She later left the country and now lives in Turkey
Journalist
Sarah Sands is Chair of the Gender Equality Advisory Council for G7 and a board member of Index on Censorship. Sands was the former editor of BBC’s Today programme
1 Apr 2021 | China, Hong Kong, Media Freedom, Opinion, Ruth's blog, Taiwan
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Photo: PublicDomainPictures
The awful actions of the Chinese government over the last month have dominated our news agenda. The collective actions of the government and their outliers have been designed to silence dissent, to intimidate and to bully.
They have repeatedly attacked core democratic principles both at home and abroad, undermining fair political participation. They’ve arrested democracy activists, changed the law to restrict electoral access to the Hong Kong Legislative Council to sanctioned ‘patriots’ otherwise known as the allies and friends of the Government of China.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has also sanctioned British parliamentarians and activists for daring to speak out about the acts of genocide, happening as I type, in Xinjiang province against the Uighur community. The CCP chose not to target members of the British Government nor key businesses with sanctions.
Instead, it sent a political message and targeted backbench Conservative MPs, two think-tanks and an academic, those who had been most vocal in exposing the actions of the CCP in both Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. This was a move intended to silence criticism not impose economic sanction, a clumsy and ineffectual effort to restrict free speech outside China’s borders.
This week, these aggressive actions by the CCP culminated with yet another attack on media freedom when the BBC’s lead China correspondent, John Sudworth, was forced to relocate with his family from Beijing to Taiwan after a campaign of state-sanctioned threats and intimidation. Sudworth and his wife, a fellow journalist for the Irish RTE, Yvonne Murray, were faced with no other option than to leave after months of personal attacks in Chinese state media and by Chinese government officials. They will both continue to report on events in China from Taiwan.
The harassment of international journalists in China (and now in Hong Kong) is becoming normalised, with dozens of journalists having to leave in recent months; threats of visas being withheld are now commonplace. This is simply unacceptable.
China seeks to be a loud voice on the global stage – they need to live up to their commitments under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They need to remember they are signatories to Article 19 and that media freedom and free expression are protected rights.
Index stands in solidarity with John and Yvonne.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title="You may also want to read" category_id="41669"][/vc_column][/vc_row]
19 Feb 2021 | China, Hong Kong, Media Freedom, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image="116283" img_size="full" add_caption="yes"][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship has condemned the removal today of the director of broadcasting of Radio Television Hong Kong from his post and his replacement with a civil servant approved by the Hong Kong Government.
Veteran journalist Leung Ka-wing has been in the post since 2015 and his contract was due to come to an end in August this year, although his tenure had already been extended by three years in 2018.
The Hong Kong government announced today that he would leave his post immediately, with civil servant Patrick Li Pak-chuen taking over on 1 March. Li has served as deputy secretary for home affairs since 2017 and has previously worked in the Security Bureau.
Commenting on the appointment, the Secretary for the Civil Service, Patrick Nip, said, "Li is a seasoned administrative officer with proven leadership and management skills. I believe that he will continue to serve the community with professionalism and dedication in his new capacity, and ably lead the Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) to meet the challenges ahead."
In its statement, the Government made a clear point of Li’s role at the broadcaster. “As Director of Broadcasting, Li will ensure that RTHK fully abides by the charter of RTHK,” it said.
Index’ s CEO Ruth Smeeth said, “Hong Kong has been a bastion of media freedom for decades. This chilling statement from the Chinese Government removing the Director of HKTV is another step towards a truly authoritarian regime in Hong Kong. We stand in solidarity with the people of Hong Kong and those journalists are trying to cling on to their media freedom which is so precious.”
The news comes in the wake of a tit-for-tat battle been China and the UK over broadcast rights.
On 4 February, the UK’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom rescinded the licence of China Global Television Network (CGTN), an international English-language satellite news channel, following an investigation into who held editorial control for CGTN’s output.
A spokesperson said, “Our investigation showed that the licence for CGTN is held by an entity which has no editorial control over its programmes. We are unable to approve the application to transfer the licence to China Global Television Network Corporation because it is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which is not permitted under UK broadcasting law.”
A week later, the Chinese government banned the broadcasting of BBC World News in the country. China's National Radio and Television Administration said the BBC’s broadcasts were not “truthful and fair" and it caused harm to China's national interests.
RTHK also announced it would stop relaying the BBC’s World Service radio.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title="You may also want to read" category_id="40980"][/vc_column][/vc_row]