11 May 2022 | Media Freedom, News and features, Rwanda, United Kingdom
Index has filed a Council of Europe alert raising concerns about the decision to exclude certain journalists from accompanying UK Home Secretary Priti Patel on an official visit to Rwanda where she announced a proposed new arrangement for sending British migrants to the central African country to have their asylum claims decided.
Journalists from The Guardian, Financial Times and The Mirror were among those excluded by the Home Office on the mid-April press trip, restricting their ability to scrutinise a significant development in British foreign policy.
Among those excluded was Rajeev Syal, the Guardian’s home affairs editor, who had previously reported extensively on bullying allegations against Patel. Other home affairs specialists did accompany Patel on the trip. The Guardian said: “We are concerned that Home Office officials are deliberately excluding specific journalists from key briefings and engagements.”
The Financial Times told Press Gazette: “On this occasion our journalists were excluded from the press trip and received minimal briefing. It is clearly not good practice to exclude some media from government meetings simply because they are willing to ask difficult questions.”
Index understands it is not the first time journalists have been blacklisted by the Home Office in this way. Only a select group of reporters was invited on a trip Priti Patel made in November 2021 to Washington DC to discuss terrorism and the global migration crisis with Alejandro Mayorkas, US secretary of homeland security.
The government’s controversial scheme will see migrants who arrive in small boats after crossing the English Channel flown 4,000 miles to Rwanda to have their claims processed; in her speech in Rwanda, Patel said 28,000 migrants crossed the Channel this way in 2021.
Migrants will be encouraged to relocate to the African country. Patel said, “Those who are resettled will be given support, including up to five years of training to help with integration, accommodation, and healthcare, so that they can resettle and thrive.”
Opponents of the scheme have questioned Rwanda’s record on human rights and free expression. Journalists working in Rwanda operate under a strict accreditation system and criticism of President Paul Kagame is off limits.
In March, Human Rights Watch said Rwanda did not match up to international standards of free speech and warned of a wave of arrests of Rwandan journalists and commentators: “Judicial authorities in Rwanda, lacking the independence to stand up and protect free speech in accordance with international law, have unjustly convicted and jailed people based on their protected speech and opinions,” said Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
The first legal challenge to the Rwanda scheme was launched last week on behalf of an Iranian asylum seeker. Lawyers argue the proposals breach international law, the UN refugee convention and British data protection legislation.
In her speech in Rwanda, Patel said, “This agreement fully complies with all international and national law, and as part of this ground-breaking agreement, the UK is making a substantial investment in the economic development of Rwanda.”
The Home Office has denied targeting certain journalists and says it adheres the UK’s Government Communication Service Propriety Guidance in dealing with the media.
The Council of Europe was founded after World War II to protect human rights, democracy and the rule of rule across the continent. It is committed to upholding the European Convention on Human Rights.
The British government will be asked to provide a formal response to the alert, although it has a poor record in this regard, responding to just 10 per cent of the alerts filed in 2021.
14 Jan 2022 | Armenia, Greece, News and features, Turkey
Sevan Nişanyan at home in Samos
A prominent Turkish-Armenian academic faces deportation from Greece after being labelled an “undesirable foreigner” in what he sees as punishment for creating a database of Greek placenames and how they have changed through history.
Sevan Nişanyan, born in Istanbul in 1956, is a linguist and compiler of the hugely comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Turkish Language.
In 2012, he wrote a blog post about free speech arguing for the right to criticise the Prophet Mohammed which incensed then prime minister and now president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Speaking to Index in an interview at the time, Nisanyan said: “I received a call from [Erdogan’s] office inquiring whether I stood by my, erm, ‘bold views’ and letting me know that there was much commotion ‘up here’ about the essay. The director of religious affairs, the top Islamic official of the land, emerged from a meeting with Erdogan to denounce me as a ‘madman’ and ‘mentally deranged’ for insulting ‘our dearly beloved prophet’”.
The following year he was sentenced to 13 months in jail for his “insults”.
While in prison, he was further charged with violations of building regulations in relation to the village of Şirince in Turkey’s Izmir Province and particularly the mathematical research institute established there in 2007 by Ali Nesin and in which Nasanyan was heavily involved.
Nişanyan was charged with 11 violations of the code leading to a total prison term of more than 16 years.
At the time, he and others were convinced that this was a political case, because jail time for building code infringements is almost unheard of in Turkey and he was merely being punished for his earlier views and blog post.
In 2017, Nişanyan escaped from the Turkish low security prison where he was being held and travelled by boat to Greece, where he claimed asylum and was granted a temporary residence permit.
He has since been living on the island of Samos and married a Greek citizen in 2019. While there he successfully applied for an Armenian passport and dropped his asylum application.
Everything changed on 30 December 2021 when he was denounced by the Greek police as a national security threat. His supporters say his name was added to what is known as the EKANA list of undesirable foreigners, administered by Greece’s Ministry of Public Order. At a recent press conference, Nişanyan claimed the reasons for the inclusion of his name on the list is considered a state secret.
The fast-growing use of the EKANA list has been called a “particularly worrying development” by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs.
“The Ekana list has become a favoured tool of the Greek police, primarily used against refugees who are denied asylum,” says Nişanyan.
Nişanyan says he has no concrete idea why his own name is on the list but he can speculate.
“There have been all sorts of accusations of me working against Greek national ideas,” he says.
He suspects it may be related to his creation of the Index Anatolicus, “a website looking at the toponomy of placenames, the authoritative source on the name changes to 53,000 Turkish places”.
“I recently decided to expand into Greece, North Macedonia, and Armenia,” he says.
He recognises it is a sensitive issue. In 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to a population exchange after the fall of the Ottoman Empire which saw 1.3 million people made refugees.
“A hundred years ago, none of the towns and hamlets in northern Greece had Greek names. I have been accused by lots of insignificant people that this was a grave betrayal of the Greek motherland. That is absurd.”
On 7 January, the court ordered Nişanyan’s release saying he presented no risk of fleeing but gave him 15 days to leave the country voluntarily. He appealed against the ruling but this was thrown out on Thursday 13 January, meaning he must now leave by 22 January or face forced deportation. His request to be removed from the EKANA list has also been turned down. Nişanyan has appealed both decisions with the Administrative Court of the First Instance in Syros.
Nişanyan claims he is not a threat and that deportation would be particularly harsh on his wife, who is seriously ill.
He believes he has also become persona non grata as a result of a less welcoming attitude towards foreigners in the eastern Aegean in recent years.
“There has been enormous panic and paranoia over the refugees. Three years ago, people in Samos were divided on the refugee issue. Now you can be literally lynched if you say anything positive about refugees. It is a huge emotional mobilisation against all refugees and not surprisingly, part of that hostility has been directed towards Westerners and the NGOs who have ‘invaded’ the islands over the past few years.”
Where can Nişanyan go?
“I am tired and getting old. My wife’s health is a huge disaster. My normal instinct would be to stay and fight as I have been a fighter all my life. Now I am a weary,” he says.
“My three grown children are in Turkey and I have property there. However, I cannot go back unless there is some sort of presidential pardon.”
“The reasonable thing would be to go to Armenia, sit out the storm and come back some time,” but says that his chances of getting back to Greece appear slim.
It is also unclear whether his wife will be well enough to accompany him.
Nişanyan hopes the government comes to it sense and reconsiders an “utterly stupid decision which was obviously taken at the instigation of a paranoid and ignorant police force”.
He says, “I don’t think ever in the history of this country has a person who has not committed any crime whatsoever been deported to Armenia, historically one of Greece’s closest friends. It doesn’t make any political sense.”
Nişanyan has also gained support from the Anglo-Turkish writer and Balkans expert Alev Scott.
Scott told Index, “It is ironic that Sevan is hated in Turkey as an Armenian and in Greece as a Turk – and in both countries, as an outspoken intellectual who challenges conservative beliefs and nationalist sensibilities.
“He fled from a Turkish prison to a Greek island and embraced it as his new home; sadly, in recent years the Greek islands have become more and more hostile to foreigners as the refugee crisis worsens, and Sevan is a victim of this development.
“He is a big local presence on Samos, and receives a steady stream of visitors from Turkey and elsewhere – clearly, this has not gone down with locals, or with police,” she said.
“Sevan’s scholarly work on the etymological roots of place names raised hackles in Turkey and his proposal of a similar project on Greek place names has had a similar effect. Anything that challenges the existing nationalist narrative in both countries is, of course, highly controversial. It is beyond absurd that this academic – outspoken though he may be – presents a national security threat to Greece.”
Nişanyan also claims support for his case at the highest levels in the country – “former prime ministers, people high up in the judiciary system and journalists”.
“They seem shocked,” he says. “They cannot imagine something like this happening in a presumably democratic country.
3 Dec 2021 | Greece, News and features, Turkey
Ingeborg Beugel had been living and working in Greece on and off for years when, last month, a stone thrown at her head and a wave of online bullying and threats against her life forced her to return to the Netherlands. The attacks happened after she asked Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis why he “keeps lying about pushing back refugees” from Greek to Turkish waters. Her case adds to a growing list of violations against media freedoms in Greece, a worrying sign that all is not well in the European country.
“I hadn’t expected a digital witch hunt”, Beugel told Index on Censorship after she had returned to the Netherlands. Beugel is known in the Netherlands for her many reports from the Greek islands, where refugees are held in camps in dire conditions and where she tracks refugees personally, collecting first-hand evidence of those who are sent back to Turkey. Press conferences with authorities are not her cup of tea, but this time was different, she said:
“This was my chance to let two prime ministers, Mitsotakis of Greece and Rutte from the Netherlands, not get away with denial of push-backs anymore. Until the last minute I wasn’t sure how to phrase my question, but I knew I had to be sharp.”
What she came up with was: “When at last will you stop lying about the push-backs? Please don’t insult either mine or the intelligence of all the journalists in the world. There has been overwhelming evidence and you keep denying and lying. Why are you not honest?”
Mitsotakis reacted furiously, taking it as an insult to both himself and the Greek people. Asked if she had been impolite, Beugel answered: “You know what’s impolite? Pushing refugees back, which is against international law, and lying about it.”
In the evening following the press conference, a rock was thrown at her as she left a grocery shop, grazing her forehead. She ran home and only then discovered the digital witch hunt. [Some of those online were criticising Beugel for helping an asylum seeker, for which she was briefly arrested over the summer. – Editor]
A couple of days later, she was on a plane back to the Netherlands. The Dutch embassy in Athens, the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Dutch Journalists Union NVJ strongly advised her to leave because her safety couldn’t be guaranteed anymore.
“’Let it blow over’, they said. So I’m waiting for it to blow over,” Beugel said.
Yannis Kotsifos, director of the Journalists’ Union of Macedonia and Thrace in Greece and chairperson at the European Center for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) in Germany, told Index: “Mitsotakis didn’t react in the right way to Beugel’s question and even though I didn’t like her style, I understand why she did it this way. But we need to be careful not to make the debate about press freedom political. Greece’s position on the press freedom list is in decline but it’s not just about this government. The problems are deeper rooted.”
Beugel agreed, and indeed placed the way she phrased her question in a wider context of the Greek media landscape, in which media don’t dedicate a lot of space to the illegal turning away of refugees to Turkey. “Mitsotakis’ denial keeps defining the journalistic narrative and I wanted to break that,” Beugel said. “I knew I would have a big audience at this press conference and that Greek pro-government media couldn’t ignore what I said and what then happened.”
Beugel recalls when she first started as an aspiring journalist in Greece 40 years ago. There was a lot of hope for the future, following the end of the Greek junta, a military dictatorship that lasted from 1967 to 1974.
“But now, the press is mostly in the hands of tycoons who are not in media for the sake of good journalism. Public TV works for the government in power, and has been underfunded,” she said.
Ownership is a problem, but ECPMF’s Kotsifos also highlighted a lack of self-regulation in the press, a lack of finances for independent journalism and for proper working conditions, and a growing distrust in the media because of rising polarisation.
“This leads to hate rhetoric against journalists and sometimes to physical violence,” said Kotsifos.
To break this cycle and encourage a freer press, the Media Freedom Rapid Response, a project that has monitored violations of media freedom across the EU since March 2020, and the ECPMF are conducting a fact finding mission in Greece this month.
The mission was considered necessary because of several worrying “signals”, the worst being earlier this year when crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz was fatally shot outside his house in Athens. Other incidents include surveillance by the Intelligence Service of Stavros Malichoudis, who reports about migration and refugees.
New legislation is of concern too, most notably the proposed introduction of fines and jail sentences for journalists found guilty of publishing “fake news”, which would, MFRR said,”undermine the freedom of the press and have a chilling effect at a time when independent journalism is already under pressure in Greece”. SLAPP lawsuits, in which journalists are bombarded with legal cases to drain them financially and stifle their work, are also a huge point of concern (as reported here by Index).
Today Beugel is in Amsterdam waiting until the commotion “blows over”. She said: “I want to return as soon as possible. I miss my dogs, who are luckily taken care of by a friend. I miss my friends, my house, my work. This situation is hard, but I know there is not only rejection, but support for my work in Greece as well.”
28 Sep 2015 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Serbia
At least eight journalists were beaten and three detained as they covered a clash between refugees and the Hungarian police at the border with Serbia on 16 September.
Among those attacked were Swedish photographer Meli Petersson Ellafi, Jordan Davis, a journalist at Swiss RTS, and an entire film crew working for Radio Television of Serbia. They were covering events at the Horgoš-Röszke highway border crossing, which the Hungarian authorities had blocked the day before, leaving around 2,000 refugees stranded on the Serbian side.
On 16 September, at around 2:30 PM local time, refugees attempted to break through a gate into Hungary. While most were protesting peacefully, a small number threw stones and bottles across the fence at the Hungarian riot police. The police responded with tear gas, pepper spray and water cannons.
“At some point, the riot police retreated from the fence and the refugees managed to open the gate,” Timea Becková, who works for Slovakian newspaper Denník N, recalls. Confusion followed, with many refugees thinking the Hungarian authorities would let them in, so they walked towards the riot police on the Hungarian side. Several dozen journalists on the Serbian side followed the crowd.
At around 5:30 PM, TEK, the Hungarian anti-terror SWAT unit, equipped with sidearms, helmets and face masks, started pushing the refugees back towards Serbia.
“As I was moving backwards, I stopped for a moment to help an old man who fell and risked being trodden by riot police, which is when an officer hit me with a baton,” Becková said. She repeatedly told police in Hungarian that she is a journalist, but it made no difference.
“Suddenly the TEK guys, not the riot police, started running towards us — it was mayhem,” says Warren Richardson, an Australian photographer. Despite having two cameras, he was grabbed from behind by an officer.
“Clearly he was there to beat, not to ask questions,” Richardson told Index on Censorship, adding that he was standing on ‘no mans’ land’ between Serbia and Hungary. “From there they beat me into Hungary, then took me from the border to the police station illegally. They kidnapped me.”
“Law enforcement lost control of the situation,” Becková said. While she doesn’t hold a grudge against TEK, she says the events that followed were outrageous. She was forcefully brought back to the Hungarian side — with her hands tied tightly with a plastic wrap — where she was thrown to the ground.
She was later handed over to the regular police along with Richardson, who was kicked in the head and chest, and the Polish journalist, Jacek Tacik, who suffered a head wound. They were taken to a police station in Szeged along with a number of detained refugees.
There they were questioned on suspicion of having crossed the border illegally. In addition, Becková was accused of inciting rebellion and Tacik was told he had assaulted a policeman. However, this accusation did not emerge again during his interrogation, he told Index.
During questioning, Richardson refused to cooperate. “I stood up for myself. They were making up laws. They never took my name, personal address or fingerprints,” he said.
After interrogations that lasted up to 13 hours, the journalists were released and the charges were dropped.
In a statement, the Hungarian police denied beating the journalists. “The police — in accordance with the law — used necessary and proportional force against the members of an aggressive group that was using instruments that could cause serious harm to the police protecting the border of Hungary and the European Union. The media workers stayed at their own risk in an area where the police — after a proper warning — used coercive instruments.”
Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said it was a surprise to find journalists among the chaos. He said that in situations like this, the safety of journalists cannot be guaranteed, therefore they should stay away. A policeman is not in the position to judge who is a troublemaker and who represents the media, he added.
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has denounced the attack. “It is incomprehensible to see an EU country like Hungary constantly violating press freedom and human rights. The European Commission and international institutions must take action against these serious violations,” EFJ President Mogens Blicher Bjerregaard said.
“It is a prerequisite for EU member states to respect the EU Charter on fundamental rights which sets out standards on media freedom and freedom of expression.”
The incident was also condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists. “We are appalled by the police violence against journalists covering this world story,” CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. “The Hungarian government must make a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not tolerate such behavior.”
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This article was published on 16 September 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
