17 Feb 2022 | Opinion, Ruth's blog
Tyrants love a distraction. There are only so many issues, so many countries, so many crises that our global institutions can focus on at any given time. So the worst but most effective of authoritarian regimes seek to implement their most repressive acts when the world is looking elsewhere. Of all those that seek to use misdirection and obfuscation I think it’s fair to suggest that Vladimir Putin is one of the masters.
In recent weeks we’ve seen a terrifying but all consuming escalation in Russian threats against Ukraine. 60% of their land army is now deployed on the borders of Ukraine and Belarus – but we are meant to believe that they have no plans to invade, or rather continue their war against Ukraine that began in 2014 when they invaded Crimea.
The world has rightly been focused on troop movements on the Ukrainian border. Every leader has spoken publicly of events in Eastern Europe. NATO leaders have talked daily, and nearly every democratic power has met with or spoken directly to President Putin. Their conversations have not touched on human rights violations within Russia, Putin’s support for a ruthless dictatorship in Belarus or even their weaponising of cyber activism to undermine democracies.
In the phoney propaganda war Putin is winning. On his own terms. And the world is letting him. He has determined the agenda at hand, world leaders are flocking to meet him in order to stop World War Three (rightly) and the rest of his indiscretions and human rights violations are, for now at least, off the table.
Which brings me to the subject of this blog. Alexei Navalny. On Tuesday, as our world leaders sought to prevent a new war, Putin’s biggest critic was put on trial, again.
The popular Russian opposition leader is accused of embezzling donations to his FBK anti-corruption organisation, which spearheaded investigations into Russian officials and sparked large protests against Putin. Navalny has denied the charges and says they’re politically motivated.
Putin is so fearful of dissent that he has held the trial not in Moscow, in a court, but rather in the prison that Navalny is already detained in. Navalny is being tried three to four hours from Moscow, a journey which is less than straightforward. If lawyers and observers do manage to get to the IK-2 penal colony then no phones or recording equipment may be taken inside, no evidence of impropriety obtained.
Hi wife Yulia wrote on Instagram on the eve of the trial: “[The authorities] want to hide him from all people, from his supporters, from journalists. It is so pathetic that they are afraid to hold the trial in Moscow.”
If Navalny is found guilty, again, then he will face a further 15 years in prison. Every day his family fear for his safety, not unreasonably after the attempted assassination attempt with Novichock in 2020.
Navalny’s case embodies Putin’s dismissal of the rule of law and his callous disregard for basic human rights. Index will continue to stand with Navalny and will keep telling his story to make sure that Putin knows the world is still watching.
24 Jan 2022 | China, Events
“Not speaking out causes guilt; but speaking out causes fear.” – anonymous Uyghur woman
Despite being far outside China’s borders, in a region synonymous with human rights, rule of law, and democracy, many Uyghurs in Europe refrain from publicly expressing concerns for their friends and family in Xinjiang or from sharing their own. To what extent is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) working to intimidate, silence, and discredit Uyghurs in Europe? And what can be done to protect their right to free expression?
Marking the launch of our latest report, this virtual event chaired by Index on Censorship’s Flo Marks examines the scope and scale of the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Uyghurs’ right to freedom of expression in Europe.
Meet the Speakers
Dolkun Isa
Dolkun Isa is the President of the World Uyghur Congress and Vice President of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). He was a former student-leader of pro-democracy demonstrations at Xinjiang University in 1988 and founded the Students’ Science and Culture Union at the university in 1987 working on programs to eliminate illiteracy, promote science and lead other students in East Turkestan. He was then dismissed from university.
After enduring persecution from the Chinese government, Isa fled China in 1994 and sought asylum in Europe, and became a citizen of Germany in 2006. He has since been presenting Uyghur human rights issues to the UN Human Rights Council, European Parliament, European governments and international human rights organizations. He has worked to mobilize the Uyghur diaspora community to collectively advocate for their rights and the rights of the Uyghurs in East Turkistan.
Isobel Cockerell
Isobel Cockerell is an award-winning British journalist. Since October 2018 she has been a reporter for Coda Story, covering disinformation, the war on science and authoritarian technology. She has also written and worked as a radio reporter and video journalist covering politics, migration, LGBTQ issues, environmental affairs and culture for platforms such as WIRED, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, USA Today, Rappler and Eurasianet.
In 2020 she won the European press prize distinguished reporting award for a multimedia project she reported and produced for Coda in collaboration with WIRED on Uyghur women fighting a digital resistance against China’s surveillance.
She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism school.
Nus Ghani MP
Nusrat Ghani is the MP for Wealden. A former Transport Minister, she is now Vice-Chair of the 1922 Committee and an active member of the influential Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. Here, she led an inquiry on supply chain transparency which exposed slave labour in UK value chains and the data harvesting of British consumers. For this, she was sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in March 2021, the only woman in Parliament who was, in an unprecedented move by the CCP to intimidate British MPs.
Nusrat was instrumental in leading on the Genocide Amendment to the UK’s flagship Trade Bill, aiming to stop the British Government pursuing preferential trade agreements with countries committing real time genocide. She led a campaign which resulted in Parliament unanimously declaring the markers of genocide are being met in Xinjiang. She is an active member of the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).
Nusrat has spoken at numerous academic and public events on the nature of campaigning within Parliament to plug the policy gaps around declaring genocide, guaranteeing supply chain transparency, and pushing for closer scrutiny of British citizens’ data being harvested.
As a former member of both the Home Affairs Select Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, she covered issues such as such as security, policing, counterterrorism strategies and antisemitism. Nusrat is also the UK representative to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. She was nominated for the 2021 NATO PA Women for Peace and Security Award and came runner up to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Flo Marks
Flo Marks is currently a Researcher at Index on Censorship and has been central to the research and writing of the February 2022 Uyghur Report. She has her work published in the LA Review of Books, Exposé as well as Index on Censorship. Her focus thus has been on raising attention to mass atrocity crimes, CCP influence in Europe, protecting the rights of Chinese dissidents, and empowering the voices of minorities.
She is also a politics BA student at the University of Exeter and a member of the campaign group Students for Uyghurs. Alongside other students, she exposed Exeter’s controversial links to Tsinghua (and the Uyghur Genocide ideological architect, Hu Angang), commenting to The Times on the subject. She has organised, chaired university events and developed social media posts for @studentsforuyghursexeter (Instagram). Until January 2022, she worked as a diversity and inclusion intern for MEA Consulting, giving her the professional space to drive positive change. And, in 2019 she was the UK and European winner of Zonta International’s Young Women in Public Affairs Award. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
When: Thursday 10 February, 16.00-17.00 GMT
20 Jan 2022 | Africa, News and features, Niger
Samira Sabou
Nigerien journalist Samira Sabou, winner of Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards 2021 in the journalism category, has been handed a one-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 50,000 FCFA (around £65) for circulating an article on drugs trafficking in the country. The sentence was handed down by the courts despite her house being searched without a warrant and Sabou being questioned without a lawyer being present.
The article – Strange Days for Hashish Trafficking in Niger – reported on the trafficking of cannabis through West Africa to North Africa, and the seizure by Nigerien authorities of a large shipment, some of which later went missing.
“On 26 May 2021, I posted an article on drug trafficking in the country,” says Sabou. “The following day I was summoned by an individual who called me on the phone. He told me that he was from the anti-drug unit and that I must come immediately. He didn’t tell me why. I told him that I would first call my lawyer and I would get back to him. But I was told that if I did not show up immediately he would send agents to look for me.”
Within 30 minutes at least 10 people showed up at Sabou’s house to search it.
“After reminding them that they could not come to my home and search it without a warrant, there was a fight,” she says. “They handcuffed my husband and took his phone to prevent him from calling my lawyer. They also confiscated my phone maybe because I had posted on social media about what was happening. In the face of legal harassment against me, it has become a habit of mine to make society my witness through Facebook posts.”
“Later that day police officers from the Central Office for the Repression of Illicit Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs (OCRTIS) came to take me in for questioning. They begged my husband to let me go with them, still without a warrant, and without my lawyer. And all this for a simple post on Facebook. I am neither a murderer nor a drug dealer, let alone a fugitive. I am a simple journalist!”
Sabou was taken against her will to the OCRTIS premises and interrogated. Following this, OCRTIS filed a complaint against Sabou for indirect defamation and she was summoned on 6 June to the Directorate of the Judicial Police (DPJ).
“At this stage I would like to point out that no responsible and ethical judge would agree to proceed given that the complainant (OCRTIS) had me forced from my home, without a warrant, and had questioned me without a lawyer. It is outrageous, completely senseless in a country of ‘rights’. And all this for sharing a post on Facebook!” she says.
On 9 September Sabou appeared before the Tribunal de Grande Instance Hors Classe in Niamey, where she was prosecuted for “defamation” and “diffusing information to disrupt public order” under the cyber crime law of 2019.
However on 27 December 2021, ORCTIS withdrew its complaint but her prosecution did not stop there.
“The public prosecutor’s office did not honour its part of the agreement and instead of dropping charges, asked for a conviction. On 3 January this year I was found guilty of defamation. I received a one-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 50,000 FCFA. My colleague Moussa Aksar was also found guilty, with a two-month suspended sentence and a fine of 100,000 FCFA.”
It is not the first time Sabou has had brushes with the authorities.
In June 2020, she was arrested and charged with defamation in connection with a Facebook post highlighting corruption, specifically possible overbilling by the country’s defence ministry. She spent over a month in detention before eventually being discharged and released.
Sabou says, “The most incredible thing about this affair is that we are not the only Nigerien journalists, citizens and media to have shared the article. But we are the only ones to have been punished by the justice system in such an extreme way. It is very clear that this is all part of a broader campaign of harassment against me and the work that I do, a campaign to silence me.”
15 Dec 2021 | Magazine, News and features, United States, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
Ashley Gjøvik knew things had become serious when she received an email on 9 September 2021 from Apple’s Threat Assessment and Workplace Violence team asking her to discuss a “sensitive intellectual property matter”.
Gjøvik, 35, had been raising concerns about toxic waste under her office for six months, and had become known as “The Apple Whistleblower”, but this was the first time she had been contacted by this scary-sounding unit.
She emailed back to say she was “happy to help” but with one condition: everything had to be done via email. “I wanted everything in writing so they are not misrepresenting me, they’re not trying to gaslight and intimidate me.”
But she never discovered what the sensitive IP matter was because she was fired for failing to co-operate with the investigation, despite repeated attempts to express her willingness to do so. The letter terminating her employment accused her of disclosing “confidential product-related information” but did not go into detail.
By the time she was sacked, Gjøvik had become a fearsome employee-activist conducting a full-scale campaign over hazardous waste in Silicon Valley. She had gone public on workplace harassment, Apple’s surveillance of employees and its culture of secrecy. But it all began when she started to raise perfectly regular concerns about her own safety and that of her fellow workers.
In February 2020, Gjøvik had moved into a new apartment in Santa Clara, California, only a short drive from her office in nearby Sunnyvale. On the face of it, Gjøvik had an enviable job as a senior engineering programme manager (“We work behind the scenes to make sure everything gets done. We make sure the products actually get out the door”).
She worked hard in a stressful environment – while training to be a lawyer in her spare time – but prided herself on her resilience. Despite the punishing hours of work and study, she was in good health. However, within days of moving into the apartment, she started experiencing dizzy spells.
Waking up choking
“I’m starting to have chest pain and palpitations and I’m like, what the hell is going on?” she told Index. She went to see about 20 different doctors and even attended a nervous system clinic at Stanford University. “My blood pressure’s doing crazy stuff. My heart’s doing crazy stuff, but no one knows why. I’m getting all these rashes. No one knows why. I have a growth on my thyroid… all this weird stuff happening all at once.”
By the end of February, she was already so ill that she could barely function: “I’m passing out sitting. I can’t focus. I have to lay down all the time. My body starts going nuts.”
Before the pandemic hit, Gjøvik was already working from home and by March she was signed off on a medical leave of absence.
As the months passed and she became sicker and sicker, Gjøvik realised she was waking regularly at 3am feeling as if she was choking. She began to wonder if her failing health had anything to do with the apartment itself. By chance, one day in September 2020, she was talking to a friend whose husband was an engineer and he suggested she check the carbon monoxide levels.
Ashley Gjøvik has raised concerns about toxic pollution
She discovered a spike in volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the early hours of the morning. These VOCs, essentially toxic gases, are present in everyday household products such as disinfectants, aerosols, pesticides and paints. But they are not usually found at levels dangerous to people’s health. Nor do they tend to spike at particular times without a cause such as cooking or cleaning.
Gjøvik immediately set about doing some serious detective work. When she looked up the environmental assessment report on her apartment she saw it contained a 40-page section entitled “hazardous waste”. Silicon Valley was favoured by defence contractors before it became the centre of America’s tech miracle and was once dominated by factories and heavy industry.
It turned out the apartment was built on a so-called Superfund site, a designation from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Such sites demand a special industrial clean-up before people can live and work in the area, involving deep excavation and “backfilling” with concrete. If this is not carried out properly the risk is that vapour from toxic underground plumes can escape into the atmosphere (and people’s homes).
Gjøvik discovered that so-called “vapour intrusion” can occur through sewer pipes, plumbing, sprinkler systems and air conditioning. She pestered her landlord and the fire department for diagrams of all the pipes in the building to isolate the source. To this day she does not know exactly why the levels of toxic gas spiked at 3am, but she believes it is possible that it had something to do with the automated air conditioning or the flushing of the fire sprinklers.
“The apartment block had 1,800 units with two or three bedrooms. So, thousands of people could be sick and not know it. I literally could not sleep at night. I had to get the word out,” said Gjøvik.
She raised her concerns with the California and Federal EPA as well the state and county departments of environmental health and the local water boards. She moved out of the apartment later that month and all the symptoms stopped immediately. She was even able to return to work.
Alarm bells
By the spring of 2021, Gjøvik had become an armchair expert on Superfunds, vapour intrusion and the science of toxic groundwater plumes. So when she saw an email from Apple’s environmental health and safety team on 17 March notifying staff of “a large-scale project” across the company’s building portfolio to carry out vapour intrusion testing, alarm bells started ringing.
The building, a slick glass office with an octagonal atrium, had been leased by Apple since 2015 and was known to be built on the site of a factory owned by TRW Microwave Inc, a notorious Superfund polluter. Gjøvik found a 2016 report of vapour intrusion in homes next to the office and a 2019 lawsuit by the EPA against the polluters. The real concern was the presence of trichloroethylene (TCE), a carcinogen associated with kidney cancer.
Gjøvik was keen to know if the new testing was the result of a new vapour intrusion incident and asked if any testing had been carried out since Apple employees had moved in six years earlier. She was initially told not to discuss her concerns with anyone except her manager, the HR department and environmental health and safety so as not to cause panic.
But already Gjøvik was building a reputation as a toxic waste whistleblower through the campaign around her Santa Clara apartment. She had written an article in the local paper, San Francisco Bay View, entitled “I thought I was dying: My apartment was built on toxic waste”. She had also brokered a meeting with California Senate member Bob Wieckowsi to discuss her concerns.
In mid-April she visited experts in public health and occupational medicine at University of California San Francisco and it became increasingly clear that it would be difficult to separate her concerns about her former apartment from those about her office.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021, Gjøvik put pressure on Apple to reveal why the new testing was being carried out and whether it was connected with cracks that had appeared in the floor of her office. She also urged her employers to test the air in the office before the cracks were repaired to establish whether workers had been put at risk since 2015.
Apple was planning for the post-pandemic return to work, but Gjøvik said she felt it was unsafe for her and her colleagues to return to work without assurances about the toxic waste under their office. Some co-workers had been given special permission to return to work as early as May 2020.
The relationship with Apple had almost completely broken down by this point. The company did begin an investigation into Gjøvik’s complaints of bullying and sexual harassment, but she believes this simply sparked further intimidation. In a last-ditch attempt to force Apple to engage publicly, she began live-tweeting her interactions with the company and eventually, in August, she was suspended on indefinite administrative leave.
In a statement on the case to the tech website The Verge, Apple spokesperson Josh Rosenstock said: “We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace. We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”
But Gjøvik is refusing to roll over: “I want to document it and show the world this is what Apple did: You poisoned me physically, mentally, spiritually. Fuck you guys.”
Ashley Gjøvik has become a nightmare for Apple, which prides itself on its employees’ loyalty. Following the classic whistleblower playbook, rather than address the issues she raised about toxic waste, the company has taken the decision to shoot the messenger.
