10 Jul 14 | Europe and Central Asia, Ireland, News and features
(Image: Quka/Shutterstock)
A recent court ruling in Ireland could have reintroduced the concept of criminal libel to the state, despite criminal defamation offences being abolished as recently as 2009.
The case itself was one of a particularly grim relationship break up. Names are not available as the people involved were also locked in a criminal case in which the male partner was accused of rape and false imprisonment, though he was acquitted of both.
But the details available are: couple breaks up in January 2011. They remain in touch. In April 2011, man goes to woman’s house to, according to the Irish Times’s report “confront her over a perceived infidelity”. Man later leaves woman’s house, but not before stealing her phone. Man goes through woman’s messages, which suggest she has started a new relationship. Man opens woman’s Facebook on phone and posts remarks from her account, making it appear that she is presenting herself as a “whore” who would take “any offers”. Drink was a factor, as the Irish court reporting phrase goes.
This action led to a charge under the Criminal Damage Act 1991, under which “A person who without lawful excuse damages any property belonging to another intending to damage any such property or being reckless as to whether any such property” can find themselves liable to a large fine and up to 10 years in prison.
In this case, the defendant was found guilty and fined €2,000.
The judge, Mr Justice Garrett Sheehan, is reported to have asked how to assess the “damage” when nothing had actually been broken. Prosecutors replied that the case was in fact more akin to harassment and that the “damage” had been “reputational rather than monetary”.
The first question here is obvious: if the facts of the case were more akin to harassment, then why were charges not brought under Section 10 of Ireland’s Non-Fatal Offences Against The Person Act, which would cover anyone who “by his or her acts intentionally or recklessly, seriously interferes with the other’s peace and privacy or causes alarm, distress or harm to the other”? Wouldn’t this be the obvious piece of legislation to use?
But after that, there are a few more: Who actually owns a Facebook profile? And does reputation count as property? And crucially, has Mr Justice Sheehan created a criminal libel law?
Ireland has a complicated relationship with social media. On the one hand, to be plain about it, the big online companies create a lot of employment in Ireland. Facebook, Twitter and Google all employ a lot of people in the country. On the other hand, it is susceptible to the same moral panics as anywhere else, and in a small, largely homogenous country, panics can be enormously amplified.
When government minister Shane McEntee committed suicide in Christmas 2012, the tragic story somehow became conflated with social media and online bullying. McEntee’s brother blamed the minister’s death on “people downright abusing him on the social networks and no names attached and they can say whatever they like because there’s no face and no name”. But his daughter later refuted that claim, saying: “Dad didn’t use Twitter and wasn’t a huge fan of Facebook. So I don’t think you can blame that and I’m not going to start a campaign on that.”
The subsequent debate on social media bullying was almost tragic in its simplicity, the undisputed highlight being Senator Fidelma Healy-Eames describing to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Transport and Communications how young people are “literally raped on Facebook”.
As ever in discussions that involve social media, a generation gap opens up, or is invoked, between younger “natives” who supposedly instinctively understand the web, and a political and judicial class who are apparently hopelessly out of touch. There is certainly an element of truth to this (I have sat in courts and watched judges express utter bafflement at the very concept of Twitter), but in general, what is actually happening is legislators, magistrates and the judiciary are desperately trying to apply existing, supposedly universal laws to phenomena to which they are simply not suited. This is where controversy usually arises, for example in the UK’s use of public order laws when the only threat to public order is a Twitter mob — as in the case of jailed student Liam Stacey; or use of laws against menacing communications in instances where it’s clear no menace was intended — such as Britain’s now infamous Twitter Joke Trial.
In the current Irish case, it seems obvious that harassment would have been the more relevant charge, but in this instance, that’s not what we have to worry about. The real concern is that by apparently putting reputation in the category of property which can suffer damage, the court has now created a precedent where damage to a person’s reputation, whether by “fraping”, tweeting, or even just the getting facts wrong in a news story, could lead to criminal sanction.
And the very worst thing is that no one seems to have noticed.
From the introduction of the new blasphemy law onward, Ireland has seen a slow, stealthy erosion of free speech. It’s not clear what will get people to start paying attention, but the country needs to be more vigilant.
This article was posted on July 10, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
12 Jun 14 | Americas, Brazil, News and features
(Image: Ksenia Ragozina/Shutterstock)
World Cup time! Hurray! An entire month of football! Rejoice as the pubs stay open late for weirdly timed matches! Gasp at your workmates’ expertise on Iran’s deployment of a false 9! Repeatedly smash yourself in the face with your iPad as you read yet another article by a broadsheet columnist complaining that people don’t pay as much attention to literary fiction as they do to sport!
While the competition officially kicks off tonight, the Brazilians, or, specifically, the archdiocese of Rio have dived in with an early tackle, reportedly threatening to sue Italian broadcaster RAI for an advert showing Rio’s famous Christ The Redeemer statue wearing the Jersey of Italy’s Azzurri.
Suing for what, exactly, is not clear. The church’s lawyer, Rodrigo Grazioli, has been quoted as saying “The Archdiocese is deeply offended. It’s as if Brazilian TV were to make a commercial in which mulatto girls engaged in lewd behaviour with the gladiators of the Colosseum.”
Leaving aside the bizarrely specific and racist mention of “mulatto girls”, and the fact that people involved with churches have to make absolutely everything, ever, about “lewd behaviour”, it’s still not clear what the exact complaint is. Is it the suggestion that the colossal statue might support Italy? That Jesus himself might support Italy? Is this about putting any jersey at all on Jesus, or specifically an Italian one? Is there something specifically blasphemous about suggesting that the Son of God is a catenaccio man?
Or is it something rather more prosaic, such as, say, the church claiming to hold copyright over the image of the statue?
If it is that, as the original O Globo newspaper report suggests, then Grazioli and his clients are being more than a little disingenuous in their outrage. If the issue is simply an objection to commercial usage of the image, than that’s what the complaint should be about.
So why the offended line? Why the suggestion of an insult to religion? Because, put simply, it works. Who wants to be offensive?
In Ireland this week, national broadcaster RTE refused to show a sketch as part of the Savage Eye sketch show. The sketch, now leaked on the web features a group of “wild nuns” ogling a muscular Jesus, in a spoof of Diet Coke ads of old. Comic David McSavage, the man responsible for the skit, has said the broadcaster is afraid of Ireland’s blasphemy laws; RTE says its own guidelines will not allow for “undue offence”.
I’m not even sure that, even if one was a supporter of laws against blasphemy, images of hunky Jesus, or Azzurri Jesus would necessarily count as blasphemous, at least not for Catholics.
On a panel on religious art a few years ago, I found myself simultaneously playing the role of token secularist and token Roman Catholic. The other panelists – art critics and Anglicans – were quite keen on abstraction in religious art. I found myself defending the more visceral, more Roman depictions of Jesus and God on the basis that the entire point of Jesus was his manifestation as human.
To ascribe certain human possibilities to him, such as lust, or even supporting a particular sports team, should not be considered transgressive; indeed I recall, in my youth, our parish priest would often offer up prayers for the local Gaelic football club, suggesting at least the possibility of partisanship. And the very fact that nuns are “brides of Christ” is suggestive of, well…
Catholicism doesn’t really have a problem with idolatry either. Catholics complaining about depictions of Christ do not have the same theological basis as Orthodox Sunni Muslims, who at least can point to some rules on portrayals (which is not to suggest that everyone should follow those rules). Catholics, with our brightly painted statues, sacred medals and all the rest, don’t really have a leg to stand on this one.
These squeals of “offence” are really demands for “respect”, in the Corleone sense. And since the Danish Muhammad cartoons, religions have been in a respect-based arms war. Every time you hear a conservative Christian moan that this or that comic or writer “wouldn’t say that about the Muslims”, remember, they are not praising their own faith’s humility, but condemning its timidity. The archdiocese of Rio is playing a version of this game with its claim to be offended by a Photoshopped football jersey. There’s no reason we should play along.
This article was published on June 12, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
24 Apr 14 | Ireland, News and features, Politics and Society, Turkey, United Kingdom
Armenian protesters in Lyons accused Turkey of supporting Islamic rebels in an attack on Kessab, an Armenian majority town located in Syria, on the Turkish border. (Image: Benjamin Larderet/Demotix)
It is, as Zhou Enlai might have said, probably too early to tell how significant Tayyip Erdogan’s comments alluding to the Armenian genocide will be.
The Turkish prime minister seems to have broken one of his country’s great taboos. In a statement translated into nine languages, the AK leader said: “It is with this hope and belief that we wish that the Armenians who lost their lives in the context of the early 20th century rest in peace, and we convey our condolences to their grandchildren.”
“Having experienced events which had inhumane consequences — such as relocation — during the First World War, should not prevent Turks and Armenians from establishing compassion and mutually humane attitudes among towards [sic] one another.”
According to Anadolu, Turkey’s state news agency, Erdogan also commented: “In Turkey, expressing different opinions and thoughts freely on the events of 1915 is the requirement of a pluralistic society as well as of a culture of democracy and modernity.”
This is not, you will have noticed, an apology. Offering condolence is not at all the same as expressing remorse. Though some would say it is not Erdogan’s duty to express remorse; he is the prime minister of the modern republic of Turkey, not the Ottoman Empire under which the alleged slaughter of over 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915 took place.
And some are utterly contemptuous of Erdogan’s statement: Reuters quotes the Armenian National Committee of America describing the statement as an “escalation” of Turkey’s “denial of truth and obstruction of justice”.
But let us assume that a) Erdogan is in a position to speak for Turkey past as well as present, and b) there is, at the kernel of this, an attempt at reconciliation with Armenia and the Armenian diaspora.
The very mention of the events are significant against the backdrop of the Turkish Penal Code’s controversial Article 301, which forbids insulting “the Turkish nation”. That law has in the past, effectively barred discussion of the genocide, and created a environment where simply identifying as Armenian within Turkey was seen as a provocative act.
The most famous victim of this culture was Hrant Dink, the editor of Agos who was assassinated in January 2007.
Dink saw himself as Turkish-Armenian, and his newspaper was bilingual. He was a firm believer in the potential for dialogue in bringing some reconciliation between Turks and Armenians. He also believed such dialogue could only take place in an atmosphere free of censorship, to the extent that he vowed that he would be the first person to break a proposed French law making denial of the Armenian genocide a crime (a cheap political trick aimed at both currying favour with the Armenian community in France and creating a barrier for Turkey’s proposed entry into the EU).
Ultimately, Dink believed that progress could only be made if we were able to talk freely and access historical debate without impediment or fear.
History, like science, is a process rather than a dogma. And like science, one’s interpretations of history can vary based on both the evidence available and the prevailing mood.
For a long time after the creation of the Irish state, for example, the teaching of history in schools was simple. I recall one primary school history text which seemed to consist entirely of tales of the terrible things foreigners had done to the Irish: first the Vikings, then the Normans, and finally the English. The book finished pretty much where the 1919 War of Independence began. The last page featured the words of the national anthem and a picture of the national flag.
Sympathetic portrayals of English people, and British soldiers in particular, were thin on the ground — Frank O’Connor’s tragic short story Guests of the Nation being one of the very few.
Since the late 1990s peace process, both fictional and historical perspectives on Ireland’s relationship with Britain have changed. Some of the novels of Sebastian Barry, for example, attempt to tell stories of people who were neglected and even vilified in nationalist, Catholic, post-independence Ireland. Part of the plot of Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies has a Catholic school history teacher attempting to get his pupils interested in Irish soldiers who fought for Britain in World War I. Meanwhile, a recent book by nationalist historian Tim Pat Coogan, attempting to paint the Irish potato famine as deliberate genocide rather than cruel neglect, was given short shrift, in spite of the fact that this would have been a mainstream view until relatively recently — one must only listen to the sickly sentimental lyrics of rugby anthem The Fields of Athenry, penned in the 1970s, to understand the appeal of that victim status to the Irish imagination. Wrongs were certainly done in Ireland, but the relationship between the two nations was a hell of a lot more complex than the oppressor/oppressed line that was spun for so many years.
There was no official sanction on differing views of Anglo-Irish relations, but politics permeated the debate. Likewise with the recent intervention of British education secretary Michael Gove on the issue of how World War I is taught in schools. Gove claimed that the idea of a pointless war in which a moribund (figuratively) ruling class led moribund (literally) working class boys to their graves was a modern lefty invention. He was wrong, in that that view had been common even in the 1920s, but his opponents were equally adamant in their insistence that there could only be one view of World War I. None of this discussion was accompanied by new evidence on either side.
At the extreme end of this hyper-politicisation of history are the Holocaust denial laws of many European countries, and laws on glorification of the Soviet era in former Eastern bloc.
In his cult memoir Fuhrer-Ex, East German former neo-nazi Ingo Hasslebach described how, growing up in the DDR, with its overwhelming anti-fascist narrative, nazi posturing was the ultimate rebellion. In the modern era, France’s prohibition on nazi revisionism has led some young north African immigrants, alienated from the French nation state, to see anti-semitism and the quasi-nazi quenelle gesture as the ultimate “fuck you” to the authorities.
Taboos about discussing events of the past breed bad history and bad politics. For the sake of Turkey, and the rest of us, Erdogan should be held to his words on the necessity of free speaking and free thinking.
This article was originally posted on 24 April 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
30 Jan 14 | Ireland, News and features, Religion and Culture
Rory O’Neill’s alter ego Panti
Irish state-run television broadcaster RTE has come under heavy criticism after offering a full apology and possible financial compensation to the Iona Institute, a conservative Catholic lobby groups declared “homophobic” by a talk show guest.
The decision appears to have been reached under pressure from Irish Broadcasting Authority board member John Waters, who was also declared homophobic during the same segment. The allegations follow RTE’s decision to remove the remarks, made by Rory O’Neill who performs as one of Ireland’s most acclaimed drag queens under the name Miss Panti, and extensive popular debate about the treatment of Ireland’s conservative lobby groups in mainstream media.
On RTE’s The Saturday Night Show, O’Neill declared a number of prominent Conservative advocates, specifically Breda O’Brien, John Waters, and “The Iona Institute crowd” homophobic. RTE removed the segment from its online player the following day, citing legal concerns as well as the recent murder of Iona Institute researcher Tom O’Gorman as a matter of “sensitivity”‘ although later admitting O’Gorman was not relevant to the program content. On January 25th, the show’s host Brendan O’Connor formally apologised for the distress caused to John Waters and other columnists. The Iona Institute has thanked RTE for the apology, which it called “an extremely valuable contribution to a calm and reasonable debate” and explained that RTE had also agreed to pay damages to the injured parties. When asked about the claim that damages would be paid over O’Neill’s comments, an RTE television spokesperson declined to comment. Neither side would confirm the identity of the claimants.
RTE’s sudden condemnation of the remarks has been linked to legal action pursued by John Waters, a conservative Catholic commentator and journalist, and board member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland . The Irish Independent cite anonymous sources confirming that legal representatives of Waters sent a legal letter to the broadcaster seeking the removal of the interview on the popular Saturday Night Show. It has since been restored to the website, though the offending portions of O’Neill’s interview have been edited out. Waters resigned from his position with the Irish Broadcasting Authority on January 23rd, after the letters had been drafted and sent. His decision to legally challenge RTE has been broadly criticized as an abuse of office. As solicitor Simon McGarr explains, this “was not merely a letter from an aggrieved citizen to a broadcaster. It was also a letter from one of that Broadcaster’s regulators seeking to have that broadcaster censor a citizen, who was both contributing to a matter of public debate and engaging in a defence of a minority of which he is a member, bona fide and without malice”. Waters has declined all requests for media comment.
Since his appearance on The Saturday Night Show, O’Neill has confirmed receiving personal legal correspondence from Breda O’Brien, David Quinn, Patricia Casey, and John Murray, all patrons of the Iona Institute. In a statement released on its blog, the Iona Institute defended the measure, explaining: “The problem is that merely believing that marriage is the sexual union of a man and a woman, and that children deserve the love of both a mother and a father whenever possible is automatically deemed to be ‘homophobic’ by those wishing to close down this debate.” This defamation, they claim, is harmful to political discussion.
Any private claims of defamation, explains barrister Brian Barrington, are unlikely to hold up in court, explaining: “Mr O’Neill’s comments arise in a context where the Iona Institute is well known in Ireland for its opposition to affording equal marriage rights to gays and lesbians and also for its opposition to same-sex parenting. It seeks to maintain the current discrimination whereby same-sex couples are prohibited from marrying whereas opposite sex couples are free to do so. In these circumstances, it is clear that Mr O’Neill was entirely entitled to express his honestly held opinion, which was based on facts that were reasonably known to the public.” Criticism of RTE for reacting to such a baseless legal case is well founded. “‘It is astonishing that RTE, a national broadcaster, should apologise for what Mr O’Neill has stated, censor his interview on the internet and award public money to those in the Iona Institute who have sought to prevent a free debate on equal marriage by preventing gay rights campaigners from uttering in future that opposition to same sex marriage is homophobic,” he explains.
Irish media have come under fire for a number of complaints of homophobia in recent weeks, including a discussion on RTE radio program The God Slot that discussed “curing” homosexuality and a Midwest Radio presenter’s decision to read a text on air that suggested children of gay couples could develop Aids. Ireland will legislate on a number of key gay rights issues in the coming years, including full legal recognition of gay adoptive parents, and a constitutional referendum on the legalisation of gay marriage is scheduled for 2015. The imminent debate has many calling for a “homophobia watchdog” to monitor public statements.
Una Mullally, a columnist for the Irish Times, explains: “‘Free speech’ is not a free pass to inflict psychological trauma just because you don’t want lesbians or gay people to get married. Opponents of marriage equality are not the victims in this debate.”
This article was posted on 30 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
