25 Sep 2018 | Campaigns -- Featured, Counter Terrorism, Statements, United Kingdom
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship has filed an official notification with the Council of Europe raising concerns about the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill’s impacts on media freedom in the UK.
Index believes that the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill would undermine media freedom and damage journalism if it is enacted in its current form.
The bill would criminalise watching online content likely to be useful for terrorism, even if viewed with no terrorist intent. The offence would carry a prison sentence of up to 15 years. It would make the work of investigative journalists very difficult.
The bill would criminalise publishing (for example, by posting online) images of clothing or an article such as a flag in a way that aroused “reasonable suspicion” that the person doing it was a member or supporter of a proscribed (terrorist) organisation.
The bill would introduce new border security measures that would not allow journalists to protect sources and confidential materials.
The bill will be considered in the House of Lords on 9 October.
Index is an official partner in the Council of Europe’s Platform for the safety of journalism.
Joy Hyvarinen, head of advocacy said: “Index considers this bill to be a threat to media freedom in the UK, which is why we have alerted the Council of Europe. It is extremely important to tackle terrorism, but doing it by undermining media freedom is not the right way. Journalists must be free to do their work”.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1537888523395-496f859a-3b84-3″ taxonomies=”27743″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
5 Jul 2018 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Statements, Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In a joint statement in June, 42 civil society organisations, including Index on Censorship, called on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to appoint a rapporteur to examine the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan.
One of the cases highlighted in the statement was that of investigative journalist Afgan Mukhtarli, whose case Index had raised with the Council of Europe’s Platform for the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists after receiving a report through their Mapping Media Freedom platform. Mukhtarli disappeared from Georgia in highly questionable circumstances in 2017, reappearing in Azerbaijan where he was sentenced to six years in jail on what the OSCE media freedom representative has referred to as spurious charges and an attack on free media.
Joy Hyvarinen, head of advocacy at Index, said: “Index on Censorship welcomes the appointment of a rapporteur to prepare a report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. We urge the rapporteur Thorhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir to prepare a frank report on the situation, in particular the case of journalist Afgan Mukhtarli, who was jailed for six years on spurious charges”.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1530793587839-a74e8496-f02b-4″ taxonomies=”7145″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
15 Jun 2018 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Statements, Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
Representatives of 42 international and national non-governmental organizations issue the appeal to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to request the appointment of a Rapporteur to examine the situation of political prisoners in Azerbaijan.
Below is a short version of the document. Read the full statement here: 
csp_letter_to_pace_on_az_political_prisoners_12_june.pdf
Civil society groups report that today there are at least 100 prisoners held on politically motivated charges in Azerbaijan. Among them are dozens of religious activists, at least nine journalists, editors and bloggers as well as members of the political opposition, human rights defenders and several persons who have been imprisoned in retaliation for the actions of their relatives who have fled the country. The most notable cases include the continued imprisonment of former opposition Presidential candidate Ilgar Mammadov, investigative journalist Afghan Mukhtarli, the leader of Muslim Unity Movement Tale Baghirzade, and Mehman Huseynov, young blogger and journalist who documented corruption among high-ranking government officials through his YouTube posts.
It is time for PACE to take decisive action to tackle the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan in order to hold the authorities accountable for implementing the commitments undertaken upon the country’s accession to the Council of Europe in 2001.
Resuming the work started by Christopher Strässer will send a first strong signal to the Azerbaijani authorities to demonstrate that the Assembly will not tolerate a continuation of this systematic repressive practice which has no place in a Council of Europe Member State. As politically motivated imprisonment violates the underlying principles of the Council of Europe, appointing a Rapporteur with the mandate to investigate the issue and make recommendations is consistent with the mandate of the organisation.
Reiterating our concerns about the widespread use of politically motivated imprisonment in Azerbaijan we, the undersigned civil society organizations call upon the members of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights the PACE, which has been mandated to make a decision on this matter, to:
- Appoint a Rapporteur to examine the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan;
- Ensure that the Rapporteur is appointed through a fully transparent process and in close consultation with civil society.
Signatures:
- ARTICLE 19 (United Kingdom)
- Association UMDPL (Ukraine)
- Austrian Helsinki Association (Austria)
- Bir Duino (Kyrgyzstan)
- Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine)
- Center for Participation and Development (Georgia)
- Centre de la protection internationale (France)
- Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights (Russia)
- Citizens’ Watch (Russia)
- Crude Accountability (USA)
- Freedom Files (Russia/Poland)
- Freedom Now (United States)
- German Russian Exchange – DRA (Germany)
- Helsinki Association (Armenia)
- Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Poland)
- Human Rights Club (Azerbaijan)
- Human Rights House Foundation (Norway)
- Human Rights Information Center (Ukraine)
- Human Rights Monitoring Institute (Lithuania)
- humanrights.ch (Switzerland)
- Index on Censorship (United Kingdom)
- International Partnership for Human Rights (Belgium)
- Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties – CILD (Italy)
- Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law (Kazakhstan)
- Legal Policy Research Center (Kazakhstan)
- Macedonian Helsinki Committee (Macedonia)
- Moscow Helsinki Group (Russia)
- Netherlands Helsinki Committee (The Netherlands)
- Norwegian Helsinki Committee (Norway)
- OMCT (Switzerland)
- Promo LEX (Moldova)
- Protection of rights without borders (Armenia)
- Public Alternative (Ukraine)
- Public Association “Dignity” (Kazakhstan)
- Public Verdict Foundation (Russia)
- Regional Center for Strategic Studies (Azerbaijan/Georgia)
- SOLIDARUS (Germany)
- The Barys Zvozskau Belarusian Human Rights House (Belarus)
- The Kosova Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims (Kosovo)
- The Swedish OSSE Network (Sweden)
- Truth Hounds (Ukraine/Georgia)
- Women of the Don (Russia)
Individual signatories from Azerbaijan
- Zohrab Ismayil, Open Azerbaijan Initiative
- Khalid Baghirov, lawyer
- Khadija Ismayilova, investigative journalist
- Akif Gurbanli, Democratic Initiatives Institute
19 Jan 2018 | Campaigns -- Featured, Malta, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]On 19 January, Index on Censorship joined a letter calling on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to appoint a Special Rapporteur to monitor the investigation into the murder of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, killed by a car bomb on 16 October 2017.
Joint open letter to the members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe: Call for a PACE Special Rapporteur on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination and the crimes she exposed
Dear Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
Daphne Caruana Galizia was by all accounts Malta’s most widely read and influential journalist. She had an immeasurable impact on Malta’s politics over the course of her thirty-year career and single-handedly uncovered some of the country’s biggest corruption scandals, exposing Maltese institutions for their unwillingness to pursue powerful and well-connected members of the country’s business and political class.
Known by her hundreds of thousands of readers in Malta and elsewhere simply as ‘Daphne’, she was assassinated on 16 October 2017 in broad daylight by a remote-controlled car bomb as she left her home in Malta.
Only months before, Daphne Caruana Galizia had uncovered systemic government corruption implicating senior members of her country’s government, showing how offshore structures exposed in the Panama Papers were used to receive and launder kickbacks on the sale of Maltese passports and process unexplained payments from members of Azerbaijan’s ruling family.
In a January 2018 report of a European Parliament fact-finding mission to Malta, the country’s Commissioner of Police confirmed on record that no police investigations took place into any of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s Panama Papers revelations. The senior government figures implicated in her investigative reporting remain in public office.
In a context of complete impunity for the high-level corruption Daphne Caruana Galizia exposed and the legal, financial and other threats she faced from figures in or close to government before her assassination, her killing has underlined in shocking fashion the extent of corruption and rule of law failings in Malta. The threat to the country’s liberal democracy and press freedom is a real one: Malta has slipped sixteen places in a single year in Freedom House’s latest global ranking.
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s violent death and the impunity for the crimes she revealed have serious consequences in the most fundamental areas of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
At the winter session in Strasbourg, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s three sons will be calling for a special rapporteur to be appointed whose mandate will involve monitoring the ongoing murder investigation in Malta, investigating the broader circumstances surrounding Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death, and ensuring there is no impunity for the perpetrators of the crimes Daphne Caruana Galizia exposed.
We ask you to heed their call and to support their efforts in every possible way in the interests of all of us who work to see justice and bring an end to impunity.
Yours sincerely,
- Ricardo Gutiérrez, General Secretary, European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
- Antoine Bernard, Deputy Director General of Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
- Patricia Moreira, Managing Director, Transparency International
- Barbara Trionfi, Executive Director, International Press Institute (IPI)
- Carles Torner, Executive Director, PEN International
- Tom Gibson, EU Representative, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
- Anna Bevan, Assistant Director, International News Safety Institute (INSI)
- Ernest Sagaga, Head of Human Rights and Safety, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
- Joy Hyvarinen, Head of Advocacy, Index on Censorship
- Natalia Yerashevich, Director of the Secretariat, Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum
- Katie Morris, Head of Europe and Central Asia, ARTICLE 19
- Antonia Byatt, Interim Director, English PEN
- Dr Lutz Kinkel, European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
- William Horsley, VP and Media Freedom Representative, Association of European Journalists (AEJ)
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”6″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”2″ element_width=”12″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1516623064760-9c9f608a-54cc-1″ taxonomies=”18782″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
