PAST EVENT: 27 June: Mass lobby for libel reform

20 Jun 2012 | Events

Mass lobby for libel reform

Join high profile supporters of the Libel Reform Campaign in Parliament on Wednesday 27 June to ensure Parliamentarians and policy makers know there is public support for a public interest defence in the Defamation Bill

The Defamation Bill addresses some important issues, such as reducing libel tourism and providing protection for academic publication, but the Bill falls short in crucial areas. There is no worthwhile public interest defence and the Bill offers no restrictions on the ability of corporations to silence critics. Also, instead of bringing the law into the 21st century by protecting website operators, the current draft of the Bill reduces their protection from being made liable for the words of others.

Unless these issues are addressed, libel threats and libel actions will still be used to bully newspaper journalists, scientists, bloggers, consumer groups, human rights activists and others.

The meeting will hear from supporters who have been part of the campaign since it started: Dara Ó Briain, Professor Brian Cox and Dave Gorman; organisations backing libel reform; the three charities at the heart of the Libel Reform Campaign (Index on Censorship, English PEN and Sense About Science); and victims of the libel laws including Simon Singh, Ben Goldacre and Peter Wilmshurst.

In this final push for a truly fair and effective Defamation Bill, we need your help:

Please write to your MP. You can find a template email and full instructions about contacting your MP on the Libel Reform Campaign pages.

Attend the meeting. Please come along to Committee Room 10 at 10.30am on 27 June. More details and directions can be found on the Mass Lobby event page.

And ask your MP to meet you there. After the meeting, you can arrange to raise your concerns about libel reform directly to your own MP. Details of how to arrange this are also on the Mass Lobby event page.

Playing cat and mouse with Bahrain’s political prisoners

20 Jun 2012 | Middle East and North Africa

By BahrainFeb14Bilad |Demotix

There are no prisoners of conscience in Bahrain — at least that’s what the government would like you to think.

A year ago today, eight opposition activists were given life sentences for their involvement in the country’s anti-government uprising. When NGOs and foreign governments call for the release of political prisoners, particularly those jailed for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and association, the regime responds with “We have!”. The dictatorship continues to falsely claims that these individuals have been jailed for criminal or violent offences rather than acknowledging the truth, they are there for voicing their desire for change.

When voices from the international community call for all prisoners of conscience or all those charged solely for the expression of their views to be freed, it makes little dent in Bahrain’s obduracy.

Take the well-known case of the Bahraini medics. For merely doing their jobs, they were arrested, detained, tortured into making false confessions, subjected to an unfair trial in a military court and sentenced to long prison terms. But because that is not what it said on their charge sheet — which included allegations such as smuggling weapons and occupying the main hospital — the Bahraini government refused to admit that they were convicted for expressing their opinions.

Last week nine of the 20 were declared innocent on appeal, leading to awkward questions about why nine leading medical professionals with impressive careers and reputations would all have confessed to crimes they did not commit.

While various detainees are considered to be “prisoners of conscience” by the international community, the Bahraini government continues to insist on painting them as “traitors” and “terrorists”. Mahdi Abu Deeb, for instance, leader of the Bahrain Teachers Union, called for a strike during the start of the country’s uprising last year to call for reform in Bahrain’s education system, and to protest the brutal crackdown against demonstrators gathered at Manama’s Pearl Roundabout. For this, he was then handed a 10-year sentence for “halting the education process”, “inciting hatred of the political regime”, and “attempting to overthrow the regime by force”.

Similarly, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja is one of the most famous human rights defenders in the region, and now the world. The founder of Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), who peacefully called for change at Pearl Roundabout last year, has been branded a “terrorist” or “traitor” by state-owned media, much like other detainees. Alkhawaja was convicted of violent crimes — after documented torture and an unfair military trial — but the Bahraini government still refuses to class him as a political prisoner.

During the Universal Periodic Review process in Geneva last month, Bahraini Human Rights Minister Salah Bin Ali Mohamed Abdulrahman told the Human Rights Council that his country held no prisoners on political charges. “Any such charges have been withdrawn. The only [remaining] cases are criminal cases,” he said.

Instead of this ping-pong conversation between the regime and human rights organisations of “release prisoners of conscience” — “oh we already have”, it might be better to focus attention on the unfair military trials of last year, where 502 people were convicted of a variety of offences, both peaceful and violent. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has called for these convictions to be overturned. Last December she called on the Bahraini regime to “urgently take confidence-building measures including unconditionally releasing those who were convicted in military tribunals or are still awaiting trial for merely exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and assembly.”

This would mean the immediate release and dropping of charges against Abdulhadi Alkhawja and other prominent dissidents including Mahdi Abu Deeb and his deputy Jalila al Salman, and hundreds of others prosecuted in politically-motivated trials but officially convicted of criminal or violent offences. If the regime has real evidence that any of these people have commited violent crimes then it should retry them in a new, fair process.

Of course, this would not solve the problem of those who are being harassed through the civilian courts. Other prominent human rights defenders Zainab Alkhawaja and Nabeel Rajab, president of the BCHR, have been regularly detained over the last few months because of their success in drawing attention to the regime’s abuses. Rajab is currently being targeted for expressing his views on Twitter, where he has over 150,000 followers, and will be detained at least until 27 June. A new crackdown on those using social media is expected as Bahraini officials warn those promoting “sedition” on social networks.

The Bahraini regime should be denied the wriggle room of insisting it has released all prisoners of conscience when many of them were convicted on trumped-up charges of violence. Demanding the release of all those convicted by the kangaroo military court (on any charge) would be a start.

Brian Dooley is Director of the Human Rights Defenders programme at Human Rights First. He tweets at @dooley_dooley

Crowds return to Tahrir Square to protest military power grab

20 Jun 2012 | Egypt

Hundreds of thousands of activists returned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Monday night to protest supplementary constitutional amendments issued by the ruling military council in recent days. The amendments grant the military sweeping legislative and budgetary powers while limiting the powers of the country’s next president. Critics argue that the surprise amendments — announced as votes in the presidential run off were being counted — are a last-ditch effort by the military to retain power beyond the handover to civilian rule on 1 July. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has denied the charge, insisting it will hand over to the newly elected president on the scheduled date as promised.

The newly introduced amendments include re-imposition of martial law allowing military police to arrest civilians “to enforce order”. Shielding the military from accountability, they also grant the SCAF the right to form a panel to draft the constitution should the constituent assembly recently elected by parliament fail to complete its work. The military council would also have control over the drafting of the new constitution with the right to object to any article.

The new decisions by the SCAF unleashed a new wave of anti-military criticism. Rights lawyer Hossam Bahgat called the amendments “a declaration of war” while sceptics described them on Twitter as being tantamount “to a complete military coup” and “an inevitable end to a messy transitional period.”

The announcement of the new amendments came as Egyptians were still reeling from shock after the High Constitutional Court issued a ruling to dissolve the Islamist-dominated parliament on Thursday . The court also decided to allow Ahmed Shafik, a former air force commander and the last prime minister under Mubarak, to stand in the run-off election. The latter ruling dashed hopes of the youth-revolutionaries that the former regime remnant would be forced out of the presidential race under a so-called “political exclusion law” passed by parliament. The law, which bars former regime members from standing for office, was rejected by the High Constitutional Court as unconstitutional.

As pro-reform activists chanted anti-military slogans in Tahrir Square on Monday night, supporters of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi celebrated his victory after his campaign organisers announced he had won the election by 51.2 per cent of the vote. Shafik ‘s camp has disputed the vote count , declaring its candidate the winner. The two camps have also traded accusations of election violations. The Supreme Electoral Commission has stated it may have to delay the announcement of the official election result beyond Thursday as it continues to look into complaints of voting irregularities filed by the two camps.

The presidential vote has brought to the surface the Islamist-secular divide that has existed in Egypt for decades. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition group — who have long been marginalised and oppressed by successive military presidents in Egypt — fears a renewed crackdown if Shafik wins the election.

Members of the movement have in recent days tried to rally the secularist youth-activists behind them, urging them to unify ranks to counter “the military challenge”. But the truth is there no love lost between the mostly middle class, educated pro-reform activists who led the January 2011 mass uprising and the Islamists. Despite giving the MB candidate Mohamed Morsi their vote, many of the young revolutionaries argue that they voted for him simply because they considered him “the lesser of two evils”. Many of them believe the Muslim Brotherhood betrayed the revolution to further its own interests.

Film director Khaled Youssef, a liberal who invalidated his vote, accuses the Islamist movement of aligning with the military dictatorship and “selling out the revolutionaries.”

“Not only did the Muslim Brotherhood attempt to excercise monopoly over the drafting of the constitution but they also reneged on a previous promise not to field a presidential candidate,” he charges.

He adds that the Islamist parliament had allowed the blood of the pro-reform activists to be spilled during last year’s Mohamed Mahmoud violent protests when MPs had charged that “the protesters were not the real revolutionaries but were thugs and criminals instead.”

With tensions escalating and political forces calling for another “million people march” in Tahrir Square on Friday, analysts predict that the unrest in Egypt is likely to worsen in the coming weeks before showing signs of improvement. The activists meanwhile are bracing themselves for another showdown with the military.