15 Aug 24 | Europe and Central Asia, Turkey
On 1 August, a significant prisoner swap between the USA and Russia took place in Turkey’s capital Ankara and 26 prisoners were freed, including the peerless American reporter Evan Gershkovich. In playing a central role in the most extensive prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) won accolades. The operation reminded the world that its NATO membership has been the cornerstone of Turkey’s defence and security policy since it joined the bloc in 1952.
Yet over the next 24 hours, Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority barred access to Instagram without providing a specific reason. Reports suggested the ban was a response to Instagram’s removing posts related to the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, a close ally of Turkey’s strongman president
During his 21-year reign, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has established himself as the most relentless implementer of censorship in Turkish history. Twitter, Wikipedia, OnlyFans, YouTube, Google Sites, Blogger, Blogspot, Google Docs, SoundCloud, WordPress, Facebook, Reddit, Google Drive, Dropbox, WhatsApp, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Roblox have been among the victims of Erdoğan’s censorship.
Erdoğan has always oppressed free voices by tagging them as fascists. He has attacked and imprisoned all sectors of Turkish society under that accusation – except for Turkey’s actual fascistic groups which are parts of his far-right governing coalition.
On 5 August, Erdoğan accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of “digital fascism.” But five days later, Turkey restored access to Instagram. The nine-day block reminded people of the arbitrary nature of Erdoğan’s regime, which is built on macho posturing to audiences at home and bullying “foreign powers” in the name of the Turkish nation.
Turkish users could then re-access Instagram after the country’s minister of transport and infrastructure claimed Instagram had accepted that “our demands… will be met”. Yet Instagram continues to remove posts mourning the death of Haniyeh: nothing has changed.
Three days after Instagram was reinstated, a woman who criticised Erdoğan’s ban in a YouTube interview was arrested for “insulting Turkey’s President”. She was sent to a prison where she remains at the time of writing this.
For some, Erdoğan’s Instagram ban was but a pointless act. I see it as part of a more ominous tactic. Banning Instagram solidifies the idea that censorship in Turkey is all about Erdoğan’s whims. The strongman can cut access to Google, Amazon, Netflix, iCloud, and other vital internet services if and when he feels like it. He’s all-powerful: no legal entity can stop him from doing whatever he wants.
02 Aug 24 | Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News and features, Newsletters, Russia
There is a tendency to see Russia as a huge monolithic entity with a matching ideology. This is the expansionist, imperial Russia that poisons its enemies and kidnaps their children. It is the Russia of the gulags, of Putin, Stalin and the Tsars. But there is another Russia. It is the Russia of the eight brave students who stood in Red Square in 1968 to demonstrate against the invasion of Czechoslovakia and inspired the founders of this magazine. It the Russia of the dissidents of the 1970s and the reformers of the 1990s. It is the Russia of Pussy Riot, of Alexander Livintenko, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny.
This is the Russia of Vladmir Kara-Murza, the Russian activist, politician, journalist and historian released this week in a prisoner swap with Russian spies held in the West.
Much has been made of the detention and release of American journalist Evan Gershkovich – and rightly so. The Wall Street Journal reporter has become an important symbol of the fundamental values of a free media. It is to his eternal credit that his final request before release was an interview with Vladimir Putin. We also welcome the release of Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist from the Tatar/Bashkir service.
But it is Vladimir Kara-Murza who most fully represents the dissident spirit of Russia that runs counter to the authoritarian tendency that has dominated the country for so much of its recent history.
He is often described simply as one of the fiercest opponents of Putin, But Kara-Murza is so much more than that. He is above all the keeper of the flame of the Russian dissident tradition. He, more than anyone, understands the power of this alternative version of Russian identity.
Supporters of Index interested in the subject should watch the four-part documentary series, They Chose Freedom, directed and presented by Kara-Murza in 2005. The film is edited by his wife Evgenia, who has led the campaign for his release. Two decades later it is still acts as a powerful reminder of the courage of those who spoke out against the Soviet system. It examines the roots of the dissident movement in the weekly poetry readings held in Mayakovsky Square in the 1950s. It includes interviews with the key players in the movement, including Vladminir Bukovsky, Anatoly Sharnsky and three of the participants of the Red Square demonstration of 1968, Pavel Litvinov, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and and Viktor Fainberg.
In April 2023, shortly before he was sentenced to 25 years for charges linked to his opposition to the war in Ukraine, Kara-Murza said: “I know the that the day will come when the darkness engulfing our country will clear. Our society will open its eyes and shudder when it realises what crimes were committed in its name.”.
The release comes after reports earlier this year that Kara-Murza had been transferred to a harsher prison regime and that his health was deteriorating. An image shared on Telegram (see above) by fellow dissident Ilya Yashin, also released in the prisoner swap, show Kara-Murza this morning in Germany where they will hold a press conference later today. We await news that he and family will finally be able to welcome him back to Britain, which they have made their home.
01 Aug 24 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, Statements
Index on Censorship welcomes the news that Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist, author, filmmaker and fierce Putin critic, and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich have today been released as part of a multi-country prisoner exchange including Russia and the USA.
The prisoner swap, one of the largest ever, has taken place in Ankara under the auspices of the Turkish National Intelligence Agency and involves 26 people held in Russia, Belarus, the USA, Germany, Slovenia, Norway and Poland. The exchange follows private discussions between the intelligence services of Russia and the United States and is the largest such exchange in decades.
Index has long championed the causes of Kara-Murza and Gershkovich.
Kara-Murza, a British citizen and father of three, had been a tireless pro-democracy campaigner and a champion of legislation that has provided for human rights violators and corrupt officials around the world to be subject to asset freezes and visa bans (so-called Magnitsky Acts). Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2022; he was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize the same year.
In mid-July, WSJ reporter Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony on espionage charges. He was arrested in March 2023 while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg 1,600 km east of Moscow with prosecutors arguing that he worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency, claims which the journalist, his employer and the US government denied.
Jessica Ní Mhainín, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Index on Censorship, said, “In most of Europe, Kara-Murza is rightly lauded for his work in defence of human rights and was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize in 2022. During his time in detention, he was held in solitary confinement and has had access to medical treatment restricted despite suffering from polyneuropathy, a condition affecting his central nervous system, brought on by two failed poisonings by FSB agents in 2015 and 2017.”
Index on Censorship CEO Jemimah Steinfeld said: “Evan Gershkovich’s trial was held in secret and his conviction is widely regarded as politically motivated. Index will continue to stand up for press freedom both in Russia and in other countries worldwide. His release has come not a moment too soon but we will continue to fight for the release of reporters unjustly held in countries around the globe for doing their jobs.”
Sasha Skochilenko, who was sentenced to a seven-year jail term for distributing anti-war leaflets in a Russian grocery store, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was seized by Russian authorities on a trip to visit her mother and has been in prison since October, are among those have who also been released. Former US Marine Paul Whelan, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020 on espionage charges, has also been freed.
Vadim Krasikov, a colonel in Russia’s FSB intelligence service, who has been serving a life sentence in a German jail since 2019 for the murder in broad daylight in a Berlin park of dissident Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, is also part of the exchange.
For more information, please contact policy and campaigns manager Jessica Ní Mhainín on [email protected] or acting editor Sally Gimson on 07890 403338 or [email protected]
12 Jul 24 | News and features, Newsletters, Russia, United Kingdom
It’s been a hectic week in British politics after a Labour government was elected in a landslide last week. There are reported to be 30 new bills which will be announced in the King’s speech as part of the state opening of parliament next Tuesday.
As our CEO Jemimah Steinfeld indicated in last week’s newsletter, we at Index are keeping a beady eye on how much new Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government will prioritise freedom of expression at home and abroad. To help guide his thinking, we have put together this manifesto, a wishlist for freedom of expression under the new government.
So far the signs are encouraging. As one of his first acts in office, the new foreign secretary David Lammy called for the immediate release of Russian-British journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza whose plight Index highlighted in April this year. Kara-Murza is languishing in a Russian penal colony in Omsk and there were fears this week for his health after it was reported that he had been moved to the prison’s hospital.
Lammy said in his statement : “His [Kara-Murza’s] absurd 25-year sentence shows the Kremlin’s deep fear that more Russians will know the reality of Putin’s illegal war – and is further evidence of the targeted repression of the opposition.” He also called for his lawyer to have permission to visit him, which subsequently happened.
In other encouraging news for free speech in the UK, human rights lawyer Richard Hermer KC was appointed attorney general. A former colleague of Starmer’s, he will serve in government from the House of Lords. He has a distinguished career fearlessly standing up for human rights highlighted today in a Guardian profile. He recently gave legal advice that the so-called BDS bill proposed by the Conservative government, would stifle free speech. The bill (which never became law) was introduced by the then communities secretary Michael Gove to stop local councils and other public bodies economically boycotting countries like Israel. The new solicitor general, freshly elected MP Sarah Sackman, also worked with Hermer at Matrix Chambers.
Meanwhile Index – as co-chairs of the Anti-SLAPP coalition – has written a letter to the Prime Minister to ask for a bill to be introduced next Tuesday, putting protections in place which prevent Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). Legislation had been introduced as a private members bill in the last parliament. It garnered cross-party support, but never became law. The letter, signed by Index’s Jessica Ní Mhainín and Nik Williams, calls for that bill to be revived and strengthened. As we highlight, these kind of lawsuits not only hinder clampdowns on fraud and corruption, but silence many ordinary people including “sexual violence survivors speaking out after the police or the CPS have refused to bring criminal charges, patients of healthcare services posting reviews to highlight concerns regarding their care, as well as members of the public scrutinising a wide variety of services they have received.” If the Labour government were to introduce a comprehensive Anti-SLAPP law early in their administration, it would be a brave and tangible indication of their commitment to free expression. In the meantime we are holding an event in Dublin on SLAPPs in October and you can sign up for tickets here.
