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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Does anonymity need to be defended? Contributors include Hilary Mantel, Can Dündar, Valerie Plame Wilson, Julian Baggini, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Maria Stepanova “][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2”][vc_column_text]
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[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”SPECIAL REPORT: THE UNNAMED” css=”.vc_custom_1483445324823{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
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[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”END NOTE” css=”.vc_custom_1481880278935{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Index on Censorship has dedicated its milestone 250th issue to exploring the increasing threats to reporters worldwide. Its special report, Truth in Danger, Danger in Truth: Journalists Under Fire and Under Pressure, is out now.”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
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[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”END NOTE” css=”.vc_custom_1481880278935{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”SUBSCRIBE” css=”.vc_custom_1481736449684{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship magazine was started in 1972 and remains the only global magazine dedicated to free expression. Past contributors include Samuel Beckett, Gabriel García Marquéz, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and many more.[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”76572″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]In print or online. Order a print edition here or take out a digital subscription via Exact Editions.
Copies are also available at the BFI, the Serpentine Gallery, MagCulture, (London), News from Nowhere (Liverpool), Home (Manchester), Calton Books (Glasgow) and on Amazon. Each magazine sale helps Index on Censorship continue its fight for free expression worldwide.
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Mada Masr is an Egyptian online news site formed just before the military coup in July 2013 by 24 friends and journalists. Published in both English and Arabic, the site aims to offer an alternative to newspapers censored by state-owned printing and distribution facilities and media owned by industrial conglomerates. Wanting to represent in practice what Egypt was trying to achieve, Mada aims to be entirely democratic and is owned and run by its original founders and the journalists who write for it.
Editor-in-chief, Lina Attalah is well-known Egyptian media figure and former editor of Egypt Independent, which was shut down in April 2013 by the management of Al-Masry Media Corporation. When the editorial team tried to release a final edition explaining why, it was also pulled just before going to print. Attalah published it anyway, with the promise that “In keeping with our practice of critical journalism, we use our final issue to reflect on the political and economic challenges facing Egyptian media, including in our own institution.” Many of the founders of Mada Masr are former employees of Egypt Independent.
Since its formation, Mada Masr has seen Egypt go through the popular uprising against Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, the military’s overthrow of Morsi and the subsequent violent crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood protesters, and the spread of terrorist violence in the country. Mada’s reporters work in a country with 186 laws restricting freedom of the press and expression.
In November 2015, Mada journalist Hossam Bahgat was summoned by Egypt’s military intelligence detained for two days, after he wrote a story about the prosecution of about two dozen military officers for allegedly plotting a coup. The arrest was condemned globally, and Bahgat was eventually released, after which Mada published his statement describing the detention.
With many investors are politically aligned with the military regime, and those that weren’t facing huge pressure, funding has been a problem for Mada Masr. Valuing its independence above all else, Mada has come up with some innovative fundraising ideas, including, a pop-up marketplace launched in April which sells designer clothes and urban crafts.
One of Mada’s new editorial initiatives is to create networks of citizen journalists to bring in more local reporting — and readers — throughout Egypt’s governorates.
“We have established a cooperative media organisation independently, at a time when media are controlled and only made possible through either the state or wealthy businessmen,” said Lina Attalah. “We are experiencing some deal of fear while doing our jobs every day.”
But Mada Masr has not allowed this to guide them towards self-censorship, she says. “With our minds and hearts grappling with being progressive and practical, we build our institution with an ambition to respond to that which we critique in our coverage.”
“I want us, down the line, many, many years to come, to be a reference of what happened.”
The arrest by Turkey of journalists for Vice News, just two days after the sentencing of Al Jazeera reporters in Egypt, demonstrates how easily terror laws can be abused to stifle a free and independent media.
It should be a wake-up call for the UK, which in the next few months will introduce yet another piece of anti-terrorism and extremism legislation that could be used in much the same way.
On Monday, two British reporters and a translator working for international news organisation Vice News were charged by a Turkish court for “working on behalf of a terrorist organisation”, after filming clashes between government forces and Kurdish militants. The charges came just days after the sentencing in Egypt of three Al Jazeera journalists – accused of aiding the banned Muslim Brotherhood – for “spreading false news”.
The injustice in both cases is patent. In both cases laws meant to tackle terrorism and extremism are being used against journalists simply trying to do their job: to report the news.
Tobias Ellwood, the UK Minister for the Middle East and North Africa, said he was, “deeply concerned by the sentences handed down” against the journalists in Egypt. But what should also be concerning us is how easily that could happen in the UK as the government seeks ever broader powers, and definitions of terrorism that uses language little different to that being used to charge journalists like those of Vice News and Al Jazeera.
The UK government already defines extremism very broadly, as “the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs” – a net wide enough to catch Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, but also potentially anyone who preaches, for example, against gay marriage. But the government is not content. Now it says it needs new laws to tackle those who “spread hate but who do not break existing laws”. And that is a net wide enough to catch, well, pretty much anyone who says anything with which the current government – or mainstream popular opinion – disagrees.
Conservative MP Mark Spencer argued last month that proposed new banning orders intended to clamp down on hate preachers and terrorist propagandists should be used against Christian teachers who teach children that “gay marriage is wrong”. And if that could be the case, it takes little imagination to see that “spreading hate” could easily be applied to those journalists who report on those groups and individuals who have hateful messages.
The government will argue that this is not how the law is intended. But you only have to look at communications intercept laws to see how easily “intentions” can be subverted and abused in practice. Police officers used powers afforded by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) – an act intended to deal with terrorists – to pull the phone records of Sun political editor Tom Newton Dunn so it could track down the officers accused of leaking information to the Sun over “Plebgate” – an incident with no terrorist implications whatsoever in which a minister was accused at swearing at the police.
The new extremism bill will be no different. It will give the government powers to ban a host of groups from speaking or publishing, powers that can easily be used to silence those not just with whom the government disagrees, but those on whom we rely to convey information – even when that information, as is so often the case with those brave enough to report on the most violent extremism, is deeply unpalatable.
Britain has rightly described itself as shocked by the Al Jazeera verdict in Egypt. I hope it will be vocal in its condemnation of the arrest of VICE News’ journalists in Turkey. And I hope it will then reconsider its plans to introduce new terror laws that will stifle free expression and a free media.
This article was originally posted at Open Democracy on 1 September 2015