The panel from left to right: Gavin Millar QC, Tom Phillips, Padraig Reidy, Jonathan Heawood and Gill Phillips (Image: Georgia Hussey)
A new press regulator, with or without statutory underpinnings, would not stop another scandal like phone hacking from happening, an Index on Censorship panel said yesterday. The panel, consisting of Gill Phillips (Legal Director, Guardian Media Group), Gavin Millar QC (Doughty Street Chambers), Jonathan Heawood (Director of the Impress Project), and Tom Phillips (Senior Writer, Buzzfeed UK), chaired by Padraig Reidy, spoke at a Doughty Street Chambers and Index on Censorship debate on press freedom in the UK after the Leveson inquiry.
“In terms of the institutions that failed over phone hacking, the Press Complaints Commission doesn’t even make it onto the podium,” said Tom Phillips. “So the idea that any kind of regulation was ever intended to be the solution to this is missing a whole bigger picture.”
If you set up a system to stop something “human ingenuity and imagination” will find a way to get around it, said Gavin Millar QC. He added that the best regulation “has to come from the heart”, and was worried about the complicated rules surrounding regulation taking the responsibility away from those “who are putting the stuff out.”
Jonathan Heawood argued that we can make press abuses “less likely” though a “good, intelligent, intelligently applied regulator” and “sufficiently enforced, sufficiently clear sanctions”. He added that regulation is “part of the solution” to improve conditions allowing public interest journalism to flourish.
Press regulation took centre stage at the event, but wider issues of press freedom were also discussed. Gavin Millar pointed out how the UK’s debate on press freedom and press regulation may be perceived in authoritarian countries, while Tom Phillips warned that ignoring the evolving social norms of the internet age bad is for press freedom. Gill Phillips argued that while the UK isn’t as bad on press freedom as some other countries, “where we’re going” and “the threat of criminalisation that effects every day journalism” is worrying.
The event took place ahead of the release of Index on Censorship’s policy paper Life after Leveson: British media freedom in 2014. The paper acknowledges that the recent change in libel law was good for this country’s press freedom, “the record of successive governments have been far from perfect” and “there are still several areas where this government can act to safeguard the free press and free speech more broadly in the coming year.”
It was a timely discussion, as yesterday the High Court dismissed David Miranda’s challenge to his detention at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act in August. It was also the day former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks took the stand in the ongoing hacking trial.
“The [Miranda] judgement has some wide ranging views downgrading journalism in the 20th century that I find personally bizarre,” said Philips. Millar said the judgement shows how the “remaining tendency of government using the possibility of court proceedings against newspapers to stifle the publication of state secrets” has a “chilling effect” on press freedom.
The sold-out event encouraged audience interaction, which made for a lively and at times heated, debate. One comment from the floor argued the panel had missed the point — that the debate was about press abuses, and a regulator was the minimum step that had to be taken. Another audience member questioned the press calling for regulation of other industries, but not wanting to be regulated themselves. The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade argued that we need to separate those issues of press abuse that can be tackled through the law and those that must be tackled by self-restraint on the part of the media. Observer columnist Peter Preston said the Royal Charter regulator would be part of a “conspiracy of chaps”.
The discussion also took place on Twitter, under the hashtag #LifeAfterLeveson
Protests against increase in public transportation costs in Rio de Janeiro on 13 February (Image: Mauricio Fidalgo/Demotix)
On Friday 14 February, Brazil’s Minister of Justice, José Eduardo Cardozo, announced a bill to regulate safety measures during protests. The bill allows for use of force by the military police and punishment for violent actions during demonstrations, and will be sent to congress for consideration in the coming days. The move comes after the death of Bandeirantes Network cameraman Santiago Andrade on 10 February, from injuries sustained covering a protest. This is the latest move by Brazil’s government to control popular discontent ahead of this summer’s FIFA World Cup.
The government is rushing vaguely worded, extraordinary bills defining “terrorism” to the floor of congress. Currently, there are no specific laws for the crime of terrorism in Brazilian legislation. Crimes are classified in the National Security Act, created during the military dictatorship. A number of bills tackling this issue, which could potentially penalise protest actions, are now being debated in congress, without input from the population.
A street protest against rising bus fares in Rio de Janeiro on 6 February erupted in violence, when gas bombs and fireworks thrown by some demonstrators injured seven people, including Santiago Andrade. The cameraman was hit by a rocket firework launched by two protesters, which burst over his head. He later died from the injuries, and the two protesters were arrested in controversial circumstances.
The incident generated national uproar. Congressmen called the protest an act of terrorism and promised action. A number of figures within the Brazilian government, including President Dilma Rousseff, condemned the “escalating violence in protests”. Citing public security, congress moved quickly to table bills aimed at defining actions in public places — both violent and non-violent — as terrorism. Bill 499/2013, which has been fast tracked for consideration, defines terrorism as “causing terror or widespread panic” and threatens penalties of up to 30 years. The bill further stipulates that acts of terror committed with explosives increases the penalty by one third. It also criminalises “Black Bloc” protest groups, and wearing masks. Legal experts have criticised the bill for its vague language which leaves room for wide interpretations. Further, critics contend that it shows the government’s intent to use the bill as a tool to suppress popular protests during the World Cup.
The controversial Bill 728/2011 was created to punish “infractions” committed during the World Cup. In its text, acts of terrorism are associated with religious or ideological positions, and it also limits Brazilians’ ability to strike. The bill was nicknamed the AI-5 Cup, after the 1968 AI-5 act, which in gave extraordinary powers to the then-president and suspended key civil and constitutional guarantees for over 20 years. Under pressure from Brazil’s civil society, 728 was shelved.
Still under consideration in congress, however, is Bill 236/2012 — an anti-terror project that promises to modernise Brazil’s penal code, which dates from 1940. While it categorises terrorism, 236 does not define it. Among its most dangerous threats to freedom of expression is the criminalisation of disturbing the peace, and damage to public property by “vandals” and “vagrants”. The bill does not further define or clarify these terms.
Former justice minister Miguel Reale Jr, a renowned jurist and professor of law at the University of Sao Paulo, criticised the law’s “legal nonsense” and labelled it a setback for journalism. The bill would criminalise defamation and impose four year sentences without adequately defining this offence. He has launched a campaign against it, which has gained support from the legal community.
Bill 236 also contains “crimes against sporting and cultural events”. Any person who promotes “tumult” within 5 km of a sporting event would be imprisoned for up to two years, and the bill would also block protest access to the sport or cultural venue for up to three years. If applied, any popular protest on game days could be banned.
But whether or not some or all of the bills are passed, President Rousseff looks set to be able to curtail protests. On 20 December, a manual on the enforcement of law and public order, put together by the Ministry of Defence, entered into force. The manual defines “opponent forces” as persons, groups or organisations that provoke radical and violent actions, and cites the blocking of public streets as a major threat. Under certain conditions, the manual allows the president to give police powers to the armed forces.
Brazilians who wish to take to the streets, could have an interesting spring.
Inna Lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah Willing. Meanwhile if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions. Rouhollah al-Mousavi al-Khomeini.”
On 14 February 1989, 25 years ago today, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran handed down a death sentence not just on British author Salman Rushdie, but on anyone associated with the publication of his novel the Satanic Verses.
It’s always worth writing down exactly what happened. A medievalist tyrant decided a novelist and his editors and publishers should die, because he was offended by a book he could not claim to have read.
Rushdie went into hiding. Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was murdered. Because he had translated a novel.
The controversy did not begin with Khomeini – he merely attempted to capitalise on it. No, the first countries where the book stoked the ire of Islamists were South Africa and India, both countries whose divide-and-rule laws (the Indians’ law inherited from British colonial law, the South Africans’ in a diabolical league of its own) meant it paid to promote communal grievance.
Khomeini’s fatwa seems, in hindsight, a desperate bid to distract the people of Iran, and the rest of the Muslim world, from the fact that his reign, about to end, had been a disaster. Iranians had hoped their 1979 revolution would deliver them from the oppression of the Peacock Throne. Instead they just found their oppressors had simply grown beards.
The disaster was not entirely of Khomeini’s own making, perhaps. He could not be blamed for having the equally psychopathic Saddam Hussein as a neighbour, but nonetheless, he had sent hundreds of thousands of Iranians to their death, promised martyrdom as they marched into Saddam’s poisoned gas during the Iran-Iraq war that raged for almost the whole of the 1980s.
The Iran Iraq War ended in 1988. Neither side could legitimately claim victory. The Islamic Republic had not swept all before it. And Khomeini needed something new to establish his Shia theocracy as the leader of the Islamic world. He found it in harnessing the mounting anger over Rushdie’s book.
In Britain, this was the moment for political Islam. Young second generation South Asian Islamists exploited their parents’ folk memories of anti-Muslim violence during the torturous period before and after partition in 1947 (the subject of Rushdie’s great work, Midnight’s Children) to mobilise Muslims against Rushdie.
Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain wrote in 2007:
So on February 14 1989, when the Iranian Islamic leader, Imam Khomeini delivered his fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death, I was truly elated. It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; they were part of a truly global and powerful movement. If we were not treated with respect then we were capable of forcing others to respect us.
Yusuf Islam, formerly known as cuddly hippy musician Cat Stevens, told a television audience at the time that he felt Rushdie deserved to die. Some on the British right were pleased, seeing the death sentence as comeuppance for a man who was a vicious critic of the racist establishment.
Khomeini is dead and Rushdie is a knight of the realm (though some, such as Shirley Williams, considered that elevation in 2007 unwise). But it is perhaps on those grounds only that victory can be claimed for free speech. As Kenan Malik has suggested, writing for Index on Censorship, we live still in the “shadow of the fatwa”.
Religious sensitivity has become an excuse for threats. “Offence” is something to be taken greedily, and then pumped back out with a mixture of aggression and self pity.
And the shadow of that fatwa does not only fall on Islam. Every zealot of every creed will now offer up special pleading for their right to be protected from mockery, debate and challenge with the line “You wouldn’t say that about Islam.” What they mean, always, is “We want you to be scared. We want you to be as scared as Salman Rushdie was when he received that threat. We want you to be so scared that you will never question our literalism, our version of events. Truth is ours and ours alone.”
Rushdie’s friend, the late Christopher Hitchens, wrote that the fatwa represented “an all out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar and inquisitor and bureaucrat and those who know that, whatever the role of social and political forces, ideas and books have to be formulated by individuals”.
