The past few months have seen the rise of a vocal and sophisticated anti-censorship campaign in Pakistan that has effectively shamed the government into shelving its plans for a national internet filtering system.
The Pakistan government’s ICT research and development fund issued a call in February for proposals from academia and companies for the development of a large-scale filter to block websites deemed “undesirable”.
According to the call, Pakistani internet service providers (ISPs) and backbone providers had “expressed their inability to block millions of undesirable web sites using current manual blocking systems.”
The document goes on to specify that the system should allow for the blocking of up to 50 million URLs with a processing delay of “not more than 1 milliseconds [sic]”. Were it to succeed, such a blanket system would put Pakistan’s internet on a par with the surveillance and filtering of China’s Great Firewall.
Human rights groups Bolo Bhi and Bytes for All have called on companies not to respond to the bid for proposals. Their methods seem to have worked, with five companies, including Websense, McAfee and Cisco saying they will not bid. Websense issued the following statement last month:
Broad government censorship of citizen access to the internet is morally wrong. We further believe that any company whose products are currently being used for government-imposed censorship should remove their technology so that it is not used in this way by oppressive governments.
The grassroots campaign has also garnered international attention, with a global coalition of NGOs, including Index, Article 19 and the Global Network Initiative, calling for the withdrawal of Pakistan’s censorship plans.
For Jillian C York, director for International Freedom of Expression at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, the support of, rather than initiation by, international groups has been key. “I think that it was a combination of strong Pakistani organisations working with international organisations in tandem that made this campaign so big,” York said in an email. “Bolo Bhi and Bytes for All made the campaign a local one, using the language they preferred, but were smart enough to get the right organisations to amplify their voices while still maintaining control of the tone. I think that’s the example that they set.”
“I don’t see a company going forward with it now because there’s been public outrage and naming and shaming,” Sana Saleem, CEO of Bolo Bhi (“speak up” in Urdu), told Index. “There has been consistent effort and collaboration (…) It is tempting to shout but we said ‘let’s sit down first’. If we were reactionary it would make it hard for businesses to join us.”
In addition to appealing to companies and receiving international support, activists continued to contact the Pakistani government. Eventually a member of the National Assembly notified Bolo Bhi that the country’s secretary of IT had confirmed to her that the proposals had been shelved. Yet no official statement has been released, with Bolo Bhi and other civil society members planning to file a consititutional petition tomorrow. Saleem says the verbal commitment could be seen as a delaying tactic, arguing that now is the time to “consistently build on the campaign.”
Saleem says the Pakistani government has been looking for more control of the internet — which is accessed by 20 million of the country’s 187 million population — and that the filtering proposals could give rise to blanket surveillance. The vagueness of the terms “objectionable content” and “national security” in the terms of reference might also make the plans prone to abuse.
The proposals also threaten secure, encrypted web browsing available via https. “Something that has always annoyed intelligence agencies is not being able to access https,” Saleem said, noting that the government currently needs a court order if they wish to monitor particular users. The proposals would essentially absolve ISPs of the responsibility of blocking content manually.
Her fear is where the filtering would stop. “If we allow the state to be our moral police, it could be pornography today and something else tomorrow,” she said, citing a case late last year in which the PTA issued directives to ISPs to block 1,000 pornographic websites.
Given its apparent backtracking, Saleem predicts that the government will now be more careful in how it approaches internet filtering and surveillance. “The government made a huge mistake in making the proposals public, so they might be more covert in the future.” She adds that more controversial issues of morality and blasphemy will continue to pose a challenge in the country. “These are very charged issues,” she said, adding: “when we talk about internet freedom and freedom of expression, the government will continue to use these [issues] as a shield to exert control.”
Saleem’s aim now is to get more stakeholders involved in a broader debate about Pakistan’s national security, starting by holding discussions with university students. “Ideally we’d want the internet to be completely free, but we do know Pakistan is a police state. This is a time when we can sit down and see what we want to do.”
Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco.
Bahraini human rights activist Abdulhadi AlKhawaja is now entering the 58th day of his hunger strike, having spent his 51st birthday yesterday in a prison clinic.
His lawyer has tweeted a picture of him in his weak and critical state, a far cry from the smiling and lively man that he once was, even though his principles remain unchanged. Mary Lawlor, executive director of Front Line Defenders, said that the activist is “at serious risk of imminent organ failure” after returning from a trip to Bahrain this week. She also reported that he has “shed 25 per cent of his body weight.” On 4 April he was transferred to a prison clinic for observation. Despite official documentation of his torture in prison and several calls for his release, Alkhawaja still remains imprisoned, serving a life sentence handed for peacefully protesting at Pearl Roundabout last year.
Alkhawaja’s daughters Zainab and Maryam credit their father for their commitment to human rights and peaceful tactics, and have inherited his passion and determination in speaking out against human rights violations in Bahrain. Both women have been careful to avoid focusing attention on a single individual, even as their father’s condition has worsened. They have recently decided to speak about their own family for a change, as his state is leading many to believe that Alkhawaja nearing the end of his life.
Maryam, who also serves as the Head of Foreign Relations for the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, wrote on Thursday that she finds it “difficult to remain impartial” and avoid focusing on more personal causes, but continues to persevere, fearing the moment when she will receive a phone call telling her her father is dead. Zainab recently wrote a poem about her father entitled, “The sultan digs my father’s grave,” in which she grimly describes watching her father dying. Despite feeling despair, she describes her father as being “tranquil” and pushing her to remain committed to fighting for human rights.
Several international human rights organisations have pushed on the Bahraini government to release the activist, who is also a Danish citizen. Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal called for his release or retrial by a civilian court back in March, yet such calls are still ignored.
AlKhawaja has become a symbol of a non-violent movement in the tiny country, and his death could solidify the already mounting disillusionment within Bahrain’s opposition. The country’s largest opposition group, Al-Wefaq, released a statement earlier this week condemning the activist’s continued detention, warning that his worsening condition would only inflame tensions and that “the regime is responsible for the consequences.” Lawlor, of Front Line Defenders, also warned of the grave consequences of Alkhawaja’s death in prison, stating that it would only “cause a great deal more unrest.”
What little faith there was in the government’s commitment to reform has been lost in many ways, and AlKhawaja’s release would only confirm that the royal family’s promises to carry out the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report served as nothing more than an elaborate exercise in public relations — rather than a commitment to human rights. AlKhawaja’s death would only ensure a deeper divide in an already polarised debate.
“Our theatre is the street,” said Nasreddine Ben Maâti, President of Eich el-Fan (“live the art” in English), a young association dedicated to street art. “Tunisian citizens are boycotting theaters and cinemas so we decided to go for the people instead of them coming to us,” he added.
Their goal is to tour Tunisia and perform in the streets of the interior and marginalised regions, where the wave of protests that toppled the 23 year rule of President Zeine el-Abidin Ben Ali began.
On 22 March, the association organized an artistic event named Occupy Bourguib Art Street on the capital’s main avenue (Habib Bourguiba Avenue). It was not long before police intervened to disperse the young artists playing music, dancing and drawing graffiti. “Two police officers came toward us and asked us to leave, they were saying what we are doing was prohibited, and told us to go home”, Nasreddine told Index. “They only know two expressions: it is prohibited, and go home”, he added.
The artists refused to leave, and police used to tear gas to disperse them. A photographer who was filming police physically abusing an artist drawing graffiti on the floor was arrested and held for one hour. In the police station, he was beaten by four police officers, according to the association.
On the same day, Wissem Khemiri, a graffiti artist and member of the association Live the Art was taken to a police station when a general in the army spotted him drawing graffiti on the wall of a Tunis art school. The content of the graffiti seems to have irritated this general and opened some old wounds: Khemiri’s drawing was dedicated to Abd el-Aziz Skik, an army general who is believed to have been murdered following an order from former President Ben Ali. Khemiri was suggesting that some figures in the army collaborated with the former regime to kill Skik — on the graffiti, he wrote “the betrayed general”. He was freed the same day of his arrest, but the army general who arrested him accused him of “assaulting the dignity of the national army”.
The struggle of artists who choose to perform in the streets did not end there. On 25 March the Tunisian Association for Art Graduates, in collaboration with Live the Art and many more associations organised a cultural manifestation named “the People Want Theatre”, to celebrate World Theatre Day.
Tunisian artists and actors who gathered outside the capital’s main theater to take part in the event were assaulted. This time, however, the assaulters were right wing extremists, and the events occurred under the eyes of police.
“Police officers were watching, they only intervened four hours later,” said Lobna Noomene, a singer who witnessed the incident .
A Salafi extremist hit her on her head while she was rushing to get inside the theatre. “It is not the physical assault that hurts, but what really hurts is how someone has the courage to unfairly assault someone else ,” she told Index.
Artists in Tunisia have fears about the rise of ultra-conservative forces that seek to ban art works that they deem insulting to the values of Islam. On 26 June 2011, ultra-conservative protesters attacked a movie theatre that was airing Neither God nor Master, a film by Tunisian director Nadia el-Fani. The film’s name was later on changed to Secularism by God’s Willing. Meanwhile, the CEO of Nessma TV is currently on trial over the airing of the French-Iranian film Persepolis.
For Noomene, the ministries of interior and culture are to blame too. She explains:
For Salafists, everything is haram [forbidden]. But, the Interior Ministry should take responsibility for what happened, it should not have allowed for two events that are ideologically antagonist to take place in the same location on the same time. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Culture is out of touch with the artist, it does not have a real project to ensure the safety of artists, and it did not take a real position for what happened. But we will not put an end to our shows, and our manifestations. We will not stop living.
Bahrain Centre for Human Rights accept the Advocacy Award, which recognises campaigners or activists who have fought repression, or have struggled to challenge political climates and perceptions
The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) has played a crucial role in documenting human rights violations, political repression and torture in the gulf kingdom. Despite efforts to silence and discredit it, the BCHR has kept international attention on the brutal government crackdown that began last February. It has prevented the Bahrain government from whitewashing its international image, and at times when news media were severely restricted and foreign journalists barred, it acted as a crucial source of alternative news.
Former BCHR president Abdulhady Al Khawaja is one of eight activists serving life sentences for peacefully protesting at the now-demolished Pearl Roundabout. Like many other activists he claims he has been tortured in prison. It is widely reported that BCHR employees regularly experience threats, violence and harassment. In January 2012, BCHR president Nabeel Rajab was severely beaten by security forces while peacefully protesting.
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