Geert Wilders’s visit today to Westminster is a small blow against censorship, says Oliver Kamm
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International media and press freedom organisations including Index on Censorship have issued a report calling for far reaching reforms of the media in Belarus.
Entitled For Free and Fair Media in Belarus, it was published and presented to the Swedish EU Presidency in Stockholm on 16 October. The report provides an overview of the current media situation and conclusions drawn from meetings with state and non-state media and the Belarus authorities to discuss press freedom and the media situation.
“A thin veneer of limited and symbolic reforms in recent months cannot conceal the fact that Belarus continues to operate a highly repressive media environment,” said IFJ European Co-Director Marc Gruber, who led an investigation mission team to Belarus between 20 and 24 September, which included Index on Censorship.
This report calls for a set of reforms dealing in particular with economic conditions for non-state media, access to information, accreditation of media and journalists as well as broadcasting licensing. The joint initiative is intended to ensure that media freedoms remain top of the agenda at the ongoing EU-Belarus Human Rights Dialogue.
The organisations that contributed to the report include: Article 19, Civil Rights Defenders, Danish Union of Journalists, Index on Censorship, International/European Federation of Journalists, International Publishers’ Association, International Pen, International Press Institute, Open Society Institute, PressNow, Reporters Sans Frontieres, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, and International Media Support (IMS).
A copy of the report can be downloaded here.
Index on Censorship’s September 2009 commentary on free expression in Belarus.
A inspiring evening at the British Museum on 14 October, hosted by writers’ charity English PEN, where the poet, playwright and classicist Tony Harrison was presented with the inaugural PEN/Pinter Prize.
Established by English PEN in memory of the Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter, it is to be awarded annually to a British writer or writer resident in Britain who, in the words of Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’.
The PEN/Pinter Prize is also intended to be shared with an imprisoned writer of courage, selected by the winner in consultation with English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.
Harrison chose the Burmese poet, performer and comedian Zargana, recently condemned to thirty-five years in prison for the ‘crime’ of independently organising aid for victims of Cyclone Nargis.
“When he was in solitary confinement he had to scratch his poems with a pot fragment on the floor of his cell, then commit them to memory,” Harrison told the audience at the award, closing his lecture to commemorate their joint award.
“May all those poets I have summoned up today make him at this moment the centre of their gaze and honour the prisoner-poet for his still defiant poetic gift.”
Burmese Theatre Workshop presents: Let Me Out of Hell at the Free Word Centre at 12.00 on 28th October 2009: A scratch performance of a new play about about Burma after cyclone Nargis, devised by Burmese Theatre Workshop and directed by Andrew Mclay. Details from the Free Word Centre, e-mail [email protected] or phone 020 7324 2570.
English PEN website.
An answer to a parliamentary question by Paul Farrelly MP has revealed that the high court does not keep a record of the number of injunctions granted against the press. In the current edition of The Economist, media lawyer Mark Stephens says he estimates that between 200 and 300 injunction are in action at any one time.
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