13 Jan 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China
The sad death of jailed writer Zhang Jianhong went by with hardly a blip from the foreign media.
Zhang, 52, died 31 December in hospital while on medical parole from a rare neurological disease. He leaves behind a wife and daughter.
A few months into his prison term in Zhejiang province, Zhang, whose pen name was Li Hong, was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, a disorder in which the muscles irreversibly waste away. The prison repeatedly denied him medical parole until June last year, by which time he was completely paralysed and was kept alive by a respirator.
Zhang had been sentenced to six years for “inciting subversion of state power” in March 2007 for his work as a contributor to anti-Chinese government, pro-human rights media overseas including the Epoch Times and Boxun.
Radio Free Asia also reported that Chinese police warned his dissident friends not to publicly mourn Zhang.
Zhang had a long history of angering the authorities. In December 1989 he was sentenced to three years of Re-education Through Labour for publicly criticizing the Tiananmen Square Massacre. He briefly took part in the protests but left the Square on 2 June.
His contacts with the China Democracy Party also got him periodically in trouble.
In 2005, he founded Aegean Sea, a literary website which was closed down by the police the following year for its anti-government content.
Zhang was also a commercially successful freelance writer and poet, penning several novels and a popular TV show The Firm of Red Clothes.
He was a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) which released a statement mourning his death.
“ICPC considers Mr Zhang Jianhong as the most recent victim of contemporary literary inquisition in China and one of its worst cases in over 30 years,” the centre said.
“May his spirit live on,” said US-based Human Rights in China.
12 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
This week’s libel debate organised by Inforrm and the Media Standards Trust was a reminder of how complex the issue is: five speakers aired their views and there was hardly any overlap between the topics they addressed. From libel tourism to conditional fee agreements and from tabloid excess to defining public interest, the ramifications go on and on.
Two politicians, Evan Harris and Paul Farrelly MP, had an interesting exchange, which I think was really about the difficulties of delivering the reform legislation that the coalition government is promising. In crude summary, Farrelly pointed to the challenge of ensuring access to justice and Harris replied that if the law got the principles right then access should be easier to sort out.
It certainly feels as though any attempt by parliament to get all the ducks in a row when they legislate would mean long and possibly indefinite delay. Access to justice is a maze in which the cost of lawyers’ fees and After The Event (ATE) insurance are mixed up with corporate abuse and questions about levels of damages. In principle at least all of this seems distant from the issues of freedom of speech, chilling and redress which I suspect most of us think of first in connection with libel reform, yet as Farrelly suggested there isn’t much point in getting the principles right if no ordinary citizen can afford to invoke the law.
The other big complicating factor, vividly described by Kevin Marsh of the BBC, is the question of what to do about irresponsible journalism. Far too many journalists tell far too many lies at the moment, even with our apparently harsh libel laws; if we have more sensible libel legislation, won’t those journalists exploit the opportunity and tell even more lies?
For the public as a whole, which has so little love for journalists, any legislation that appears to do them a favour without requiring better behaviour in return will probably be unattractive. Among MPs, most of whom appear to loathe and fear the tabloids in equal measure, it will surely be doubly so. Put bluntly, passing a sensible libel law would probably make it easier for the Daily Mail and the News of the World to maul and abuse MPs; why would they vote for that?
They might, if some effective form of press regulation existed, but it doesn’t. On the one hand the Press Complaints Commission refuses to be more than a low-key complaints service (and the Desmond papers have just opted out of it) while on the other the phone hacking scandal raises considerable doubt about whether even the Metropolitan Police are prepared to stand up to the tabloids.
These are very big, interlocking problems. Harris may be right, and the best approach may be to get a good, basic law in place and then see what else needs to be done afterwards, but the politics will surely make that a hard sell.
12 Jan 2011 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Saudi Arabia’s already restricted cyberspace is now subject to new regulation that allows the state to directly supervise and control internet material. The law passed on 1 January 2011 requires anyone wishing to post material on-line to obtain a press license and to abide by content limitation regulations which ban “offending others”, “compromising the economy or security” and disobedience to Islamic Law. The Saudi authorities regularly harass journalists who challenge the states policies. Law professor Mohammed Abdallah Al-Abdulkarim was detained in early December 2010 after writing an article on-line in criticism of the government.
12 Jan 2011 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
According to opposition website rahesabz a think tank close to the Iranian security apparatus has published a leaflet containing a list of publishers, writers and translators deemed as “usurpers” intent on overthrowing the regime. The publishers listed include Cheshmeh, Ghoghnous, Akhtaran and Kavir and are well known for publishing works by reformist scholars and writers. Among the writers listed in the document are dissident figures such as Emadeddin Baghi, Ramin Jahan Begloo and poet Simin Behbahani.
