22 May 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, Singapore
Roy Ngerng has received a letter from lawyers representing Singapore’s prime minister.
Singaporean blogger Roy Ngerng has become the latest critic of the government to receive a lawyer’s letter.
Through his lawyer Davinder Singh, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is accusing Ngerng of having made defamatory statements in one of his blog posts. He is demanding that Ngerng take down the post, make an apology and pay him damages. The amount of damages he is asking for is not yet clear.
For critics, commentators and political opponents of the PAP government – the People’s Action Party having been the ruling party in Singapore since 1959 – the threat today is not assassination or getting beaten up by hired thugs, a danger faced by critics and journalists in many other countries. The threat comes instead in the form of lawyer’s letters and lawsuits.
Ngerng’s blog post, entitled “Where your CPF Money is Going: Learning from the City Harvest Trial”, had drawn parallels between Lee, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and the management of the Central Provident Fund (CPF, the state pension fund) and the ongoing trial over Singaporean mega-church City Harvest Church’s alleged misappropriation of funds.
He went on to ask questions about the handling of both the state pension and sovereign wealth funds.
“Why have they created such complicated ways that the funds are being channelled, and why do they hide some information that they don’t want Singaporeans to know?” he said to Index on Censorship about his motivation in writing his posts.
The prime minister saw things very differently. “The article means and is understood to mean that Mr Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister of Singapore and Chairman of GIC, is guilty of criminal misappropriation of the monies paid by Singaporeans to the CPF,” wrote Singh in the letter sent to Ngerng. “This is a false and baseless allegation and constitutes a very serious libel against our client, disparages him and impugns his character, credit and integrity.”
If Ngerng does not concede to the prime minister’s demands by Monday at 5pm Singapore time, legal action will be taken against him. He is still talking to his lawyer about steps to take next.
“By eliminating the discourse through a lawsuit I am not able to get more information about [how our CPF is managed],” said Ngerng, adding that he hoped his case would at least further awareness and discussion of the way CPF rules affect Singaporeans.
This is nothing new. British journalist Alan Shadrake was famously taken to court in 2011 for scandalising the judiciary in his book “Once a Jolly Hangman” which examined the use of the death penalty in Singapore. He was found guilty and was jailed for about five weeks before he was deported to the UK.
The socio-political blog Temasek Review Emeritus was threatened with a defamation lawsuit in 2012 for publishing an article that alleged nepotism in the appointment of the prime minister’s wife, Ho Ching, to the chairmanship of Singapore’s other sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings. The blog deleted the article and published an apology.
The Attorney-General’s Chambers is also seeking to take legal action against blogger Alex Au for allegedly scandalising the judiciary in two of his blog posts. The court has so far allowed them to take action on only one of the posts, and the AGC is appealing the decision.
Many Singaporeans have objected to the threat of a defamation lawsuit against Ngerng. They argue that even if Ngerng’s assertions had been problematic, the prime minister should have countered them through openness and dialogue rather than a potentially financially ruinous lawsuit.
“The right to freedom of expression is enshrined in our Constitution, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and even in the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration signed by our Government. Yet, our Government’s actions, once again, are highly regressive, and serve to limit the space for expression instead of expanding it,” said human rights organisation MARUAH in a statement.
“Defamation actions do not address the concerns that Singaporeans have. Ngerng’s article, touching on issues like CPF and retirement funding, has sparked important questions that Singaporeans wish to be answered,” said another statement issued and signed by 54 civil society activists and supporters. “The prime minister’s threat of legal action, and the accompanying demand to remove the entire article, will eliminate dialogue and engagement on these questions when they should be debated and rebutted in public.”
This article was published on May 22, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
This story was updated on Friday, May 23, 2014 to reflect an extended deadline for Ngerng to respond. The previous deadline set for response was Friday May 23. The new deadline for a response is Monday, May 26 at 5pm.
19 May 2014 | Brazil, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
The Brazilian press is “partially free”, according a study made by Freedom House published on 1 May. The study considered the deaths of three journalists in 2013, the attacks on the work of the press in June’s protests, the lawsuits against bloggers and internet companies and a large number of government requests to remove online content. Brazil scored a 45 — on a scale of zero to one hundred, zero being the best scenario.
The attacks and violence are only one side of the threats to press freedom in Brazil. Communication monopolies standardise the views and concentrate the budget and the audience. The leader is Globo Network, which owns more than half of the television advertising market. The concentration of the media and the intimacy of their owners with powerful politicians is identified by Freedom House as “one of the biggest obstacles to media diversity in Brazil”.
Televisions and radios are government grants, and although the law prohibits monopoly, this is a game of power advantageous for both businesses and the government. There are also congressmen who own or control media. Both sides reinforce each other, forming lobbies to protect their fiefdoms’s of versions and truths. Any proposal on communication democratization or regulation is shouted down by these lobbies as an attack on freedom of expression or an attempt at censorship. The Brazilian Telecommunications Code is 50 years old and a target of campaigns of freedom of expression entities.
However, there is not a declared censorship. All the guarantees of freedom of press and information are established in the Constitution and in various laws. What happens is that press freedom in Brazil is fundamentally compromised by political and state interests and private sponsorships, which finance the media. Thus, it is not a lack freedom, but a lack of autonomy.
Since June 2013, hundreds of protests have been shaking Brazil. During many of them, protesters burned cars belonging to the press. What does this mean? The level of dissatisfaction and resentment is palpable. There’s a heartache that turned against “everything-that-is-there”, including how the media covers the facts. The roles of the press and government is being questioned in the streets. Nevertheless, the sound of these voices is muffled in the media.
With the FIFA World Cup, the exacerbated patriotism and the green and yellow colors have taken control over television commercials, selling an artificial enthusiasm. Advertisers such as private banks, state companies, operators of credit cards, the soft drink industry, beers and cars have invested over £350 million for ads on only one station–Rede Globo, the country’s largest. Each advertiser is spending £1.4 million on advertising per day, the equivalent to a daily Super Bowl.
The largest communication network in Brazil has exclusive rights to broadcast the matches and has the official sponsorship of FIFA. Throughout the day, and especially between 8:30PM and 10PM –“the Brazilian primetime TV” –viewers see an exciting commercial film seeking to promote the acceptance of the FIFA World Cup. With the slogan “Somos um só” (“We are all one”), the advertisement shows how television “has the magic to put the entire country on the same vibe”.
The numbers are even more exciting. Only 30 seconds of a primetime ad cost £168,000. There is still the merchandising: the company is the only one licensed to sell FIFA products. About 1,700 items should yield £534 million to the broadcaster. Such numbers do not harmonise with autonomy of content.
Dozens of federal government announcements are also aired on television. One, for example, announces a rich country, with full employment and a promising future. A country with no inflation, social problems or misery-−”A rich country is a country without poverty”, says the slogan, ignoring the economic crisis, electric blackouts, water shortages and strikes. Petrobras ads claim a solid company, with smiling workers, while in practice the company applies a plan of voluntary dismissals and responds to an investigation into allegations of kickbacks.
With an expenditure of £614 million for ads, the federal government was the fourth largest advertiser in media last year; 65% of the total was invested in TV, according to the Department of Communication of the Presidency. The agenda is to suppress the resentment of the people with a shower of advertising. “We love football and are proud to organize the Cup of the Cups. Therefore, all who come to Brazil will be welcomed and will know a multicultural country, with happy and hardworking people”, said President Dilma Rousseff.
Despite the inundation of propaganda, a survey conducted by the Senate in late April found that 76% of the respondents consider that the expenditure on stadiums are larger than necessary; 86% believe that public funds earmarked for the event would have better use in other areas such as health, education and public safety. 42% of the respondents approve of the event, while 40% disapprove – a technical draw. The margin of sampling error is 3.5 percentage points, plus or minus. The research was not even mentioned in the press.
It can be said that freedom of the press in Brazil at this time is restricted. To talk about protests against the World Cup, a journalist must assume a mild tone to avoid displeasing sponsors. Journalists must also prevent the increasing antipathy to the World Cup, which would bring monumental financial losses. The possibility of withdrawn sponsorships generates a cold feeling for the broadcasters and FIFA.
The ball of Brazil is already rolling and it remains unclear what the outcome of this game will be. In the run up to the opening of the World Cup, workers strikes and protests are on the increase in the country. Journalists do not know what people want, but they listen to experts, the police, and the rulers.
Is the Brazilian press partial in the officialism that privileges the voices of the government and the market in exchange for financial benefits, affable policy and high profits?
The Brazilian press is its own executioner.
This article was posted on May 19, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
15 May 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, Turkey
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Photo: Philip Janek / Demotix)
Last Thursday, after nearly eight years of detention three journalists were among a group released from a prison near Istanbul. The journalists Füsün Erdoğan, Bayram Namaz and Arif Çelebi were arrested in 2006 and accused of belonging to the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP), which is considered a terrorist organization in Turkey. For journalists and activists who had been closely following the case, the sudden release came as a surprise after months of resistance from local courts.
In November 2013, seven years after her arrest, Erdoğan was sentenced to life in prison for her alleged involvement with the MLKP. She has denied involvement with the group. In a letter Erdoğan wrote that was published by the CPJ last year, she explicitly rejected the charges: “In reality, there was only one real reason for our arrest: police were trying to intimidate members of the progressive, independent, democratic, and alternative media.” Erdoğan is a founder of the leftist radio station Özgür Radyo and began writing for the independent news website Bianet while in prison, mailing editors her regular dispatches, says Elif Akgül, Bianet’s freedom of speech editor.
Earlier this year, judicial reforms in Turkey brought down the maximum legal detention time for prisoners awaiting sentencing in terrorism cases from ten years to five. While Erdoğan had been sentenced in local court, she is still awaiting a verdict from an appeals judge. Following the new reform, Erdoğan’s lawyers applied for her release from prison, but the request was denied in March. Around the same time, eight journalists were released who had been detained in 2011 and were accused of belonging to the Kurdish KCK union, which is also considered a terrorist organisation in Turkey.
The turnarounds over the past months, from Erdoğan’s life prison sentence last year to her release from prison a few days ago, have exposed the Turkish judicial system’s capacity for dragging on a case in uncertainty. Erdoğan was not informed of the charges against her until two years into her detention, and served nearly eight years without receiving a final verdict. Now, after Erdoğan’s sudden and unexpected release from prison, the court’s decision also shows the opacity of court regulations in Turkey. The implications of a broken judicial system for press freedom are troubling—especially in a country with consistently high numbers of jailed journalists.
Füsün Erdoğan’s case has attracted the attention of advocacy organizations like the Turkish Journalists’ Union, the European Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters without Borders. Because she’s a Turkish-Dutch dual citizen, last year the Dutch Association of Journalists (NVJ) also began campaigning for her release.
Thomas Bruning is general secretary of the NVJ and has started campaigns in the Netherlands to bring attention to Erdoğan’s case. What drew the most reactions, he says, was when the NVJ had 10,000 posters made featuring a picture of Erdoğan with the text “Füsün Erdoğan must be free” and “journalists are not terrorists” in Dutch. The association sent the posters out to subscribers of their magazine and asked them to share pictures of the posters on social media. Over the last few months, Bruning and the NVJ have also been in contact with Erdoğan’s son, and Bruning gave a speech outside the Dutch parliament when Erdoğan’s son went on a hunger strike there to draw attention to his mother’s case. Now that Erdoğan is out of prison, the NVJ is focused on having the charges against her dropped. “We always said that there are two problems left – one is that, although in the last few months journalists have been released, there are still a lot of journalists in prison in Turkey. The second is that Füsün is released but the charges haven’t been dropped yet. She’s not free to travel and she’s awaiting the appeal. She’s not a free citizen,” Bruning said.
Füsün Erdoğan’s surprise release from prison is not an indicator of lasting change in Turkey’s press freedom situation. During its 2013 prison census, the CPJ reported that 40 journalists were in Turkish prisons. Yesterday, five more journalists were released from prison who had been held in connection to the KCK case. Despite the release of multiple journalists this year, the CPJ estimates that at least 11 journalists are still imprisoned in Turkey.
At protests in Istanbul on May 1, journalists were detained and Bianet reported that at least 12 were injured. A few weeks ago, the journalist Önder Aytaç was sentenced to ten years in prison for a 2012 tweet that insulted Prime Minister Erdoğan. Akgül says freedom of speech is evolving but not improving in Turkey. “In the 1990s, you were killed for being a journalist, in the 2000s you were arrested for being a journalist. Right now, you become unemployed if you’re a journalist,” she said.
Erdoğan’s legal situation remains precarious as she awaits appeal trial, but while Akgül says her release is a positive development, the case is a warning sign for the media climate in Turkey. “It’s a threat not just for the journalists who are on trial, it’s a threat for the others too,” said Akgül. “Because a journalist now working in Turkey, writing critical stuff, knows they can be jailed for being a terrorist member, administrator, member, they can be jailed for lifetimes.”
This article was posted on 15 May 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
14 May 2014 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Yemen
American journalist Adam Baron in jail. He was deported from Yemen last week. (Image: @almuslimi/Twitter)
Working in Yemen as a journalist can often feel like being an involuntary character in a clichéd Hollywood drama — a hybrid of a John le Carré novel and a Johnny English-style parody.
In over three and half years living in Yemen I’ve gone on the run from government agencies on four occasions. Looking back months later you either laugh or shake your head in despair at the surreal madness of it all.
One occasion involved a more than six-hour drive across part of rural Yemen popular for US drone strikes, with a local journalist alongside me. Exhausted and relieved, our successful getaway ended just before dawn.
Another was, in hindsight, rather more comical. As Yemen’s uprising intensified in April 2011, district security chief came knocking on the door in the middle of the night. He was looking for journalists and demanded copies of foreigners’ passports. It was a few weeks after soldiers had stormed the house of three foreign journalists who were then deported. The young, clandestine-revolutionary who guarded the apartment block where American journalist Jeb Boone and I were temporarily staying, managed to put the official off until the next day.
Under the cover of darkness we each packed a small rucksack of essentials: cameras, notebooks, and a change of clothes, while planning our escape to a friend’s house which had been left empty following the evacuation of the majority of the ex-pat community due to deteriorating security in Sana’a. As we made our furtive escape, creeping out of the gate in the early hours of the morning we walked straight into a truck full of soldiers parked outside the next-door neighbour’s gate. George Smiley wept.
The third almost ended in disaster. After writing a piece in January last year for The Times on Saudi Arabia’s involvement in America’s covert war in Yemen, on advice, I once again temporarily relocated in Sana’a amid fear of reprisals for my reporting. A couple of weeks after returning to my Old City home the taxi I was travelling in was ambushed outside the Ministry of Defence. A bullet smashed through the window next to my head, hissed through the hair of my driver but miraculously left both of us unharmed. Since then I have probably become the only woman in the world to convert their United Nude shoe bag into a gunshot trauma kit which I’ve since carried with me at all times.
But, as foreign journalists we have little if anything to fear. The worst that’s likely to happen to us, as American journalist Adam Baron found out during his deportation last week, is a 10-hour spell in jail wondering if we’re going to be given a few minutes to pack before being kicked out of the country we call home, without the possibility to return.
While we — the handful of foreign journalists based in Yemen — might have anxious moments once or twice a year, our Yemeni colleagues are constantly under threat. Yemen remains amongst the bottom 15 countries out of 180 in the world for press freedom. A Human Rights Watch report last September concluded that freedom of expression since President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi took power in February 2012 has increased, but along with it, intimidation and violence against journalists has also risen. Yemen’s Freedom Foundation recorded 282 attacks and threats against journalists and media workers in 2013.
While Adam waited anxiously in jail last Tuesday, passport and phone confiscated, unease spread. Officials indicated that “other foreign journalists were next” my name was also mentioned. Not knowing if they’re coming to get you today, tomorrow, or at all, means that despite the relatively benign consequences, you are gripped with an almost unbearable sense of apprehension. Preparing for the worst I informed my editor at The Times in London and started to pack.
Three days later, still waiting, the madness felt like it was closing in. As the sunset over Sana’a on Friday evening one friend called to tell of gunfire and explosions next to his house. Meanwhile I sat in the protective darkness of my stairwell whispering into my phone as I heard the distant voices of two men banging on my front gate. Was this it? Was this the moment I would be forced to leave? My phone — on silent in case it was heard by those outside — lit up. Another friend had just narrowly avoided driving straight into a running gun battle in the south of the city. I tiptoed down the stairs in the dark and silently slid the two deadbolts across the large wooden door of the ancient Yemeni tower-house that is my home.
The irony is that while the ex-pat community goes into week two of lockdown in Sana’a and Western embassies close to the public due the increasing threat from al-Qaeda attacks, the most persistent threat to journalists on a daily basis is from the government and its intelligence agencies, not so-called militants.
After Adam was deported last week, for the first time, I decided not to run as I have too many times in the past. Without stopping and challenging what the government has done means the persecution of journalists will continue unabated.
There are just a small handful of foreign reporters based full-time in Yemen. Adam and I were the only ones accredited in a country where the government makes it almost impossible to live permanently as a foreign journalist with the correct paper work. Deporting unregistered journalists means no complaints can be made when individuals are thrown out.
As a legally operating reporter I had firm ground to stand on to support Adam and raise questions about why the government has chosen this moment to target him, and possibly me. Was this a personal vendetta against him? Or, was this a concerted effort by the state to remove witnesses? Those who may witness the consequences of a US-backed war currently being waged in the most significant military crackdown against al-Qaeda every carried out in Yemen.
The answers to those questions were partly answered by the manager of immigration who pulled me aside at Sana’a airport on Monday morning when I chose to leave Yemen of my own accord. I realised I’d had enough of the constant cycle of farcical drama, instigated by the state, that comes with living as a journalist in Yemen over three and a half years. I wanted it to stop. To take back control.
Despite the fact that my journalist visa is valid until February 2015, the immigration official began with “you can’t come back…” and ended with “it’s OK, you are allowed to leave now”. For the latter at least I was grateful.
The foreign media may not be welcome in Yemen, but if they are quietly trying to remove us then the greatest threat to be faced will be to domestic reporters. Over a snack of traditional sweet kataif pancakes and chilled apricot juice on my last day in Sana’a on Sunday, I sat with a Yemeni friend and fellow journalist. He acknowledge the need to step back from the madness. “The national security, they get to you,” he said tapping a finger against the side of his head. “You need to go home for some quiet time,” he added. “I got my quiet time…in prison.”
This article was posted on May 14, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
