4 Mar 2022 | China, Events
Index is once again partnering with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. It takes place from 17-25 March and screenings will be both digital and in-person – at the Barbican in London.
In partnership with the festival, we are partnering on the screenings of the following films relating to freedom of expression:
Myanmar Diaries – a film made by a clandestine collective of citizen journalists which documents the human rights abuses and life under military rule in Myanmar. This film is the winner of HRW’s Tony Elliot award for courage in filmmaking.
Eternal Spring – a film which looks at the brave actions of a group of individuals to challenge censorship in China by hijacking the local TV station to combat China’s misinformation campaign against religious practitioners. The film shows the life and death circumstances people have to take to stand up against media censorship.
Boycott – a film which looks at laws in the US that attempt to stifle freedom of speech. In this documentary, one media publication is asked to sign an affadavit claiming they will not boycott products of Israel as a condition of their funding.
When: 17 to 25 March
10 Feb 2022 | China, News and features, Press Releases
The report, compiled over months of detailed research and gathering of personal testimony, shows how the “long arm” of the Chinese Communist Party is silencing ethnic Uyghurs.
Countless Uyghurs who have managed to escape China in search of freedom and security have instead found themselves threatened and silenced by threats to friends and family still living in China.
From being persecuted in China, they find themselves hounded in Europe. Meanwhile, Uyghurs in Xinjiang are increasingly being pressured to inform on friends and relatives living abroad.
As the Uyghur Tribunal recently concluded, genocide, human rights abuses and torture are taking place against the Uyghur population of China. This intelligence gathering drive by the CCP is part of a concerted effort to compile a “global register” of information to assist the authorities in China to clamp down further on them.
Jessica Ní Mhainín, policy and campaigns manager at Index on Censorship, said: “Today’s report shows the shocking reach of the Chinese government’s ‘long arm’, and also shines a light on the depths to which they will stoop in their concerted campaign against the Uyghur people.
“It has been widely accepted that there is a genocide taking place against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. What today’s report from Index on Censorship demonstrates is that the CCP is now taking this campaign into countries around the world.
“Most of the approximately 12,500 Uyghurs that reside in the UK and EU still have friends or family members in Xinjiang. Speaking out or reporting CCP-backed threats could put their loved ones at an increased risk of internment, torture or worse.”
Download the report here.
4 Feb 2022 | China, Hong Kong, Opinion, Ruth's blog, Tibet, Uncategorized
]Today the Beijing Winter Olympics begins, and I am angry.
While the world enjoys extraordinary sport and the emotional rollercoaster of a global competition – checking their countries medal table on a daily, if not hourly, basis we know, beyond doubt, that the CCP government of China is persecuting its citizens. It is using every page in the authoritarian leader’s playbook to silence opposition, whether that be in Hong Kong, the Chinese mainland or even beyond its borders, as it tries to prevent those who seek to live freely and true to themselves and their beliefs. And in Xinjiang province their documented acts of genocide against the Uyghur people are just devastating.
I cannot and will not in all good conscience turn the other way and pretend that Beijing is an acceptable place to host the Winter Olympics. To give credibility to a regime that is murdering its citizens because of their faith and detaining others because they engage in democratic protest or dare to document events as journalists.
This is not a regime that warrants global celebration – it deserves unified condemnation.
But…
The participants in the Winter Olympics didn’t get to choose where they were being held. They have trained for the past four years to participate in the Olympics – not the CCP Olympics. It is for this reason that I am a little torn.
Index doesn’t support boycotts – we fight for freedom of expression around the world. We may not agree with the views of the those who are expressing themselves and we may not agree with their creative output but we campaign every day for people to have the right to express themselves freely and without fear or favour. And athletes taking part have done nothing to deserve our censure.
But Index was also established to be a voice for those that were being persecuted by repressive and totalitarian regimes. To campaign against these regimes. To make the case, daily, for freedom of expression as a liberal democratic value.
So, it is in this tradition that Index will be using the days ahead as the Beijing Olympics continues to highlight the CCP’s tactics against both its population and outside its borders. Next week we launch our new Banned by Beijing report – on how the CCP Government is seeking to use every resource at its disposal to silence the Uyghur community that have managed to escape China to the seeming safety of Europe; details of our launch event can be found here.
Every day of the Games, we will also be sharing a story from our archive on social media highlighting how the CCP have been persecuting their people. So, watch the Olympics – enjoy your favourite sport, cheer on your side – but don’t forget what the CCP are doing to their own people – and share the stories of the persecuted every day.
3 Feb 2022 | China, Hong Kong, News and features
Athlete protest has been almost as common a feature of the Olympic Games as elite sporting achievement since its modern inception at the turn of the 20th century.
At the 1906 Games, Irish triple jumper Peter O’Connor protested his registration as a British athlete – Ireland did not have a national Olympic committee at the time – by scaling the flagpole during the award ceremony and waving an Irish flag.
The official recognition of the Games as a platform for protest happened in 1955 when then president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Avery Brundage wrote guidelines into the Olympic bylaws. These stated that Olympic host cities had to ensure “no political demonstrations will be held in the stadium or other sport grounds, or in the Olympic Village, during the Games, and that it is not the intention to use the Games for any other purpose than for the advancement of the Olympic Movement”.
This did not stop perhaps the best known of all Olympic protests – the Black Power demonstrations at the 1968 Mexico Olympics when American 200-metre athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their gloved hands in salute during the US national anthem.
Further changes to athletes’ rights to express themselves were codified in a 1975 update to the Olympic Charter in rule 55, which simply said, “Every kind of demonstration or propaganda, whether political, religious or racial, in the Olympic areas is forbidden”.
The IOC has since moved away from this total ban and now declares itself to be “fully supportive of freedom of expression”.
And yet the most recent version of the rule on athlete expression, now known as Rule 50, state that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”. It does though allow for expressing views outside Olympic sites and venues or before and after the Games. Athletes are also permitted to express their views in press conferences, during interviews and through their own social media channels.
In 2020 IOC member Dick Pound wrote: “Everyone has the right to political opinion and the freedom to express such opinions. The IOC fully agrees with that principle and has made it absolutely clear that athletes remain free to express their opinions in press conferences, in media interviews and on social media. But, in a free society, rights may come with certain limitations. Rule 50 restricts the occasions and places for the exercise of such rights. It does not impinge on the rights themselves.”
Athletes recognised just how much of a platform the games give them to express themselves, particularly with the global, 24-hour coverage afforded to it in modern times. As a result, they’ve always pushed back against bans. For example, at the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, many athletes and teams took the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement within Olympic venues.
So what can we expect from Beijing?
When China last hosted the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, it was a dramatically different country. One continuity was the human rights situation and there were protests organised by activists about human rights abuses in Tibet during those Games. Athletes however kept quiet.
A huge amount has changed in the 14 years since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Athletes may feel very tempted to speak out. The wider world has been made aware of the Uyghur genocide, involving sterilisation, forced education in detention centres, the disappearance of activists and threats around the world against those who do speak out on the atrocities.
China has also cracked down in Hong Kong, effectively ending the one country, two systems policy. It has introduced the national security law, closed down independent media outlets and jailed political opponents.
Meanwhile, its other abuses – such as those in Tibet – have not gone away. Nor has concern over Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who disappeared late last year after she accused a top official of sexual misconduct.
At the Australian Open in January, athletes did use their platform to speak out about Peng Shuai. It would stand to reason the same would happen in Beijing. And yet China is not Australia.
While the rules governing freedom of expression at the Games have been loosened in the wake of athlete protests, Chinese officials have done little to ease concerns over athletes expressing themselves in Beijing. In mid-January, the deputy director of the Beijing organising committee Yang Shu said that “Any expression that is in line with the Olympic spirit I’m sure will be protected.” She then added, “Any behaviour or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment.”
Basically, speak out and risk prison. It’s a high price to pay.
Then there’s the question of technology. Unlike 2008 when social media was in its infancy, China will be very worried about the potential for protest to reach a much wider audience than before. Anyone making comments on social media from inside the country will be required to communicate with the world through Chinese telecoms companies.
In December, VOA News reported that China has committed to switch off its Great Firewall for athletes and accredited media in the Olympic Village, competition and noncompetition venues, and contracted media hotels.
Just because the Firewall is being relaxed does not mean what athletes say over social media is not being monitored.
One particular concern for athletes at the Games is the requirement to download an app called MY2022 before arriving in China. The app is ostensibly there to maintain a closed loop system relating to Covid measures. However, researchers at Canada’s Citizen Lab says the app is not secure, leading a number of national Olympic committees, including the USA, Canada, the Netherlands and the UK, to advise their athletes to leave their personal devices at home.
In a statement shared with athletes, Canada’s national committee wrote, “We’ve reminded all Team Canada members that the Olympic Games present a unique opportunity for cybercrime and recommended that they be extra diligent at Games, including considering leaving personal devices at home, limiting personal information stored on devices brought to the Games, and to practice good cyber-hygiene at all times.”
The app also has a number of other features beyond health, such as AI-powered translation and weather, and real-time messaging and audio. Citizen Lab says it also includes features that allow users to report “politically sensitive” content while the Android version includes a censorship keyword list.
The organisation said, “We discovered a file named illegalwords.txt which contains a list of 2,442 keywords generally considered politically sensitive in China. However, despite its inclusion in the app, we were unable to find any functionality where these keywords were used to perform censorship. It is unclear whether this keyword list is entirely inactive, and, if so, whether the list is inactive intentionally.”
The list includes terms such as Xi Jinping, Tiananmen riot, Dalai Lama, Xinjiang and forced demolition. Citizen Lab says that many of the terms are in Uyghur or Tibetan scripts, something that is “not common” in other censored apps such as WeChat and YY.
It is highly likely that one or more principled athletes will use the Beijing Games to make a stand over Xinjiang, Tibet or Hong Kong. The question is whether, with the world watching, China will dare to take them to task.
CCP censorship extends well beyond the Olympic Games, including the targeting of Chinese minorities overseas. Index has investigated the extent to which the Chinese government is using its technological and economic leverage, combined with cultural and diplomatic networks, to intimidate, silence, and discredit Uyghurs in Europe. The report – China’s Long Arm: How Uyghurs are being Silenced in Europe – will be published on 10 February 2022.
Get a free ticket to the launch event here, titled Banned By Beijing: How can Europe stand up for Uyghurs? After the event, check out our website’s Banned By Beijing page to read the report.”
