17 May 07 | Comment
It is unlikely that the contents of the memo leaked by David Keogh and Leo O’Connor, for which the two men were jailed last week, will ever be disclosed. The British government has a long tradition of covering up its Middle East embarrassments. O’Connor’s barrister remarked during the trial that the war in Iraq was the most controversial foreign affairs involvement of this country since Suez, but more than 50 years since Anthony Eden invaded Egypt, there are still documents which Whitehall refuses to release.
While working last year on a BBC series about the Suez crisis, I applied to the Cabinet Office under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of all withheld documents. It was a bit of a fishing expedition (just the sort of journalistic abuse of FoI that Lord Falconer despises) but well worth doing. I hoped that the Cabinet Office might consider the 50th anniversary of Suez an important enough occasion for putting all documents in the public domain. Some documents were released, after a six-month wait, but nothing revelatory. I was also told that a number of documents would not be disclosed as they related to “security matters” or would “prejudice” international relations.
“We acknowledge that release of information relating to the Suez crisis may add to the understanding and knowledge of this subject,” wrote the Cabinet Office’s Histories, Openness and Records Unit. “However, in favour of withholding this information we consider that, in this case, the effective conduct of the UK’s international relations, and its ability to protect and promote its interests abroad, would be compromised if we released the information … it is strongly against the public interest to damage our international relations in this way.” It appears the same mixture of imperious and Alice-in-Wonderland logic which led the judge to censor reporting of the trial last week is also at work in the Cabinet Office.
It took years before the full truth of Suez emerged, and decades before the document revealing the secret agreement between France, Israel and Britain to invade Egypt was disclosed – and that was only because the Israelis still had a copy. But it seems remarkable that there could be documents whose content is so inflammatory that it could still damage international relations. Suez, clearly, cannot yet be consigned to history. It’s still live – at least as long as Britain meddles in the Middle East.
The irony is that Anthony Eden did not just discuss the possibility of bombing an Arab broadcaster – as President Bush was once reported to have contemplated – he actually did it. Eden was obsessed with the influence of the Voice of the Arabs, the most popular radio station at the time in the Arab world. It transmitted from Cairo and Eden believed that it was damaging British interests in the Middle East. The one and only time he met President Nasser, he asked him to tone down the propaganda.
As Britain prepared to invade Egypt in 1956, the Voice of the Arabs was one of Eden’s first targets. Planners hesitated when they believed it would mean bombing the heart of Cairo and killing civilians. But when they realised that the transmitters were outside the city, they went ahead. They didn’t, however, do a very efficient job: the Voice of the Arabs was up and running again within days. Eden’s plan was to broadcast his own propaganda in Arabic from Cyprus. He requisitioned another Arab radio station and a number of inexperienced Foreign Office Arabists were flown in to man the station – renamed the Voice of Britain – but it was not a success.
History repeats itself, tragic and farcical both times around. Little is learned except that embarrassing and illegal activity must be kept out of the public domain, apparently for all time.
03 May 07 | Comment, News and features
BBC reporter Alan Johnston was kidnapped in March, and suddenly press freedom, in the most literal sense, has become a talking point.
Websites and blogs all over the world carry badges calling for his release. Last week, BBC colleagues held a vigil, while an image of Johnston was projected on to the wall of Television Centre.
Johnston’s may be the big story this year, but it’s by no means the only one: indeed, surveys of freedom of the press have discovered a depressing trend as more and more people are now living under regimes where journalistic freedom is either unprotected, or actively attacked, by government.
In Russia, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered, apparently for digging too deep in to the government’s dirty war in Chechnya.
In the Philippines, six journalists were killed last year, and police have done little to stop the wave of threats and harassment media workers face. Environmental journalist Joey Estriber was kidnapped in March, like Alan Johnston. To date, the police have failed even to mount a search for him.
In Zimbabwe, cameraman Edward Chikomba was abducted and murdered, apparently because he had filmed the violent conduct of the security forces during anti-government protests.
In Turkey, the resurgence of the nationalist, statist right has created an atmosphere where journalists and authors fear to voice their opinions. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has left the country: Agos editor Hrant Dink decided to stay, and was assassinated on 19 January.
The list goes on. And it’s getting longer.
Meanwhile, the hope for freedom offered by the World Wide Web seems to be lost.
Only a few years ago, we convinced ourselves that the web was the wild frontier, an ungoverned new world where everyone with access to a computer could write their own news, challenge official lines, and generally push ever harder at the barriers of censorship.
So what happened?
It seems increasingly obvious that that breach in the fence was only temporary. Throughout the world, the enforcers have caught up with the bloggers. We imagined the Internet to be beyond the reach of the censors. We were wrong. As George Orwell wrote in 1943, “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less.”
We now realise that this is just as true of the Internet user in 2007 as it was of the dissident diarist in 1943. In Egypt, blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman was jailed for criticizing his country and Islam on his blog. Other Egyptian bloggers have quit, after harassment from security forces. Meanwhile, Iran and China both exercise extensive and ever-widening Internet censorship, with the help of companies such as Google. The Iranian government’s paranoia about the World Wide Web has now stretched to the point where mms messages may be screened, lest they be used for blogging. The Internet once offered the promise of a new ‘citizen journalism’ unburdened by commercial or institutional pressure. But now it increasingly finds itself under the insidious hand of the state censor.
Sadly, as the 21st century progresses, journalists all over the world find themselves struggling to carry out the very basics of their jobs without fear.
The prognosis is grim. Commenting on Freedom House’s Global Press Freedom Report, Executive Director Jennifer Windsor said: “The fact that press freedom is in retreat is a deeply troubling sign that democracy itself will come under further assault.” This is why, on World Press Freedom Day, we must shout ever louder for those who have been silenced.
30 Apr 07 | Azerbaijan News, Comment
What was initially billed as a celebration of the importance of religious and cultural tolerance and understanding turned into something a bit harder edged when the 56 nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held a major conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijani foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov voices pride in his country as a ‘land of tolerance’ where – and by and large it is true – people live in a spirit of ‘harmony in difference’ regardless of ethnic origin and religious affiliation.
The April 26-27 conference on the Role of Media in the Development of Tolerance & Mutual Understanding drew more than 180 delegates to Baku at a timely moment in the wider debate.
The UN has appointed the former Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio as High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, to promote reconciliation between religions, cultures and nations. And the world body’s human rights committee has just passed a controversial resolution aimed at stopping ‘defamation’ of religions in general and Islam in particular.
In Baku the lead conference participants very quickly got to their point: that a key problem was the media’s failure to take proper professional responsibility for its various deeds.
‘Both democracy and liberty are senseless if the citizens, the institutions, the state and the media do not have the highest sense of responsibility in all that they do,’ said keynote speaker Ion Iliescu, former president of Romania.
Iliescu cited the case of Don Imus, the US radio station ‘shock jock’ fired after voicing one racist epithet too many for his employers. Forced to choose between audiences, profit, and social responsibility, they chose the last and dismissed him, he said. ‘(Was that) an infringement of freedom of expression?’ Illiescu asked. ‘Obviously not!’
The Imus case was to Iliescu’s eyes, black and white. There were no greys to confuse his judgment when asked whether it was right to qualify the basic human right of freedom of expression solely in the name of racial tolerance and community cohesion.
Taking up the theme, a series of speakers lined up to call on the western media to stop ‘belittling or denigrating’ Islam, in the words of one Egyptian delegate. Yet often the long term beneficiary of such thinking is not mutual understanding, let alone tolerance, but the ambitions of governments to manage communities and constrain political debate.
Examples were close to hand. Only days before, Azeri opposition journalist Eynulla Fatullayev had been jailed in Baku for criminally libeling – ‘belittling or denigrating’ perhaps – an Azeri community in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan efficiently manages the activities of its own Muslim Sunni and Shia communities, plus its various Christian communities and 15,000 Azeri Jews through its State Committee for Work with Religious Associations.
The conference debate tracked the issue on through detailed calls from the Muslim delegates for tolerance, mutual understanding and mutual respect. Director-General Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri of the OIC’s cultural agency cited the UNESCO declaration on tolerance, a quality that is ‘above all an active attitude prompted by recognition of the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of others’, and cannot be used to justify infringements of these fundamental values.
Yet the debate still echoed the discussion surrounding the controversial passing of a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council on Combating Defamation of Religions on 30 March. The resolution, though not new – versions of it have been passed every year since 9/11 by the Council’s predecessor body at the UN – has been widely criticised.
Opponents argue that the resolution does little to protect the rights of the believer or their right to freedom of religious belief, and justifies specific controls on the believers’ rights to freedom of expression. The motion puts the focus on confronting defamation, suggesting that artists, writers and dissidents in states where religion has a political context could find their work censored to protect the ‘reputation’ of a particular faith.
In Baku these suspicions were fed by a recurring conference theme; that the western media is a homogenous force with a hostile agenda.
It was not a traditionally censorious position: Mammadyarov was one of many leading speakers to defend the principle of self-regulation of the media. However he argued that it had a ‘key role in preventing irresponsibility of media outlets and (to) encourage media to use its potential for the sake of peace and dialogue between cultures, rather than for the instigation of inter-religious and inter cultural tensions.’
Ironically though, many delegates who accused the western media of simplistically reading Islam as extremist and terroristic, were sometimes just as simplistic in their analysis of the western media itself.
Citing a 2001 Newsweek article by Indian Muslim born US journalist Fareed Zakaria headlined ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ Egyptian senior editor Mohammed Imbrahim el-Desouky of the daily al-Ahram argued that this kind of coverage presented a picture that fostered hostility.
Miklos Haraszti, chief representative on free expression issues at the Organisation for Security & Cooperation in Europe, was not so sure, contending that Zakaria’s article was a self-reflective look at US policy in the post 9/11 context. Western published opinion on US policy was more diverse and self-critical than many speakers from Muslim nations were suggesting.
What about the other side of the coin, asked Reinhard Meier, deputy editor of the Swiss daily Neue Zuricher Zeitung. ‘Is the reporting and information about pluralistic realities more objective and fairer in the media of Islamic countries?’ Furthermore the problem, thanks to the Internet, had gone beyond the realm of the conventional mainstream media.
Haraszti suggested that Islamist groups that issued fatwas that incited violence against writers and journalists should be prosecuted in their home countries. Meier recognized the problem of unbalanced reporting and a tendency to generalize and stereotype among journalists. But the “level of imperfection” was not the same everywhere.
Five journalists are now in jail in Azerbaijan. Fatullayev, jailed for 18 months for a libel in a website post he denies writing, is the editor of Realny Azerbaijan, successor to the opposition weekly Monitor, shut down after the March 2005 assassination of its editor Elmar Huseynov.
Fatullayev’s imprisonment ‘is part of a pattern of increasing repression of independent media in Azerbaijan, often through politically motivated defamation cases,’ says the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Council of Europe secretary general Terry Davis told the Baku conference that freedom of expression is a right that must be exercised in a ‘respectful and civil manner to ensure peaceful coexistence’, but the rights of individuals to express different views and beliefs also needed protection. It is a principle that is still only selectively applied.
15 Mar 07 | Awards, Awards year slider
[vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content_no_spaces” css_animation=”fadeIn” css=”.vc_custom_1485789156640{padding-top: 250px !important;padding-bottom: 250px !important;background-image: url(https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/awards-2007-logo-v2.jpg?id=82871) !important;background-position: 0 0 !important;background-repeat: repeat !important;}”][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1472525914065{margin-top: -150px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_row_inner equal_height=”yes” content_placement=”middle”][vc_column_inner el_class=”awards-inside-desc” width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AWARDS 2007″ use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards exist to celebrate individuals or groups who have had a significant impact fighting censorship anywhere in the world.
- Awards were offered in five categories: Film, Journalism, Books, Law and Whistleblowing
- Winners were honoured at a gala celebration in London at LSO St Luke’s
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”82901″ img_size=”460×260″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1472608310682{margin-top: 0px !important;margin-bottom: 20px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”WINNERS” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes” css=”.vc_custom_1477036676595{margin-top: 0px !important;}”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Chen Guangcheng” title=”Whistleblower” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82903″]Chen Guangcheng is a self-taught lawyer in the Shandong province of China who has been regaled as representative of an emerging group of liberal Chinese intellectuals. In 2005, he publicised reports that women with two children were forced to be sterilised, and women pregnant with their third child were forced to have abortions. He also reported that officials took to holding villagers or their relatives hostage if the women refused sterilisation or abortion. He was charged with damaging public property and inciting people to disrupt traffic and was tried, convicted and sentenced to four years in prison in August 2006.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Siphiwe Hlophe” title=”Bindmans Law and Campaigning Award” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82882″]Siphiwe Hlophe discovered she was HIV positive in 1999 and she lost her husband and agricultural economics scholarship as a result. But by 2001, she co-founded an organisation called Swazis for Positive Living (Swapol), which aims to fight gender discrimination related to HIV/Aids and help other HIV/Aids victims. Almost half of Swaziland’s population is infected with HIV and women are killed for disclosing their infection or for simply finding out about their husbands’ infection. Similarly, women who are HIV-positive are isolated from their families and communities.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Kareem Amer ” title=”The Index / Hugo Young Journalism Award” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82904″]Kareem Amer is the pseudonym for 22-year-old blogger Abdul Kareem Suleiman Amer, who now faces a trial in Egypt that could land him a decade in jail. His blog writings led to his arrest and brief detention in October 2005, his expulsion from Al-Azhar University in early 2006, and a second arrest in November 2006 that has left him in solitary confinement ever since. His trial was delayed multiple times, with the verdict finally scheduled for 22 February 2007, and he faces up to eleven years in prison for charges such as incitement to hate Islam and defaming the president. His blog writings promoted secularism and women’s rights.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”5 Days and Yoav Shamir” title=”Index Film Award” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82879″]Chronicling five days in Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in August 2005, this documentary benefits from extraordinary access to its subjects: both the Army and some of the approximately 8,000 settlers being relocated. Utilising seven film crews, director Yoav Shamir builds a composite impression of the withdrawal that does justice to the complexity of the issues at stake and the conflicting aims and worldviews of those taking part.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Being Arab by Samir Kassir” title=”TR Fyvel Book Award” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82880″]Being Arab is a searing analysis of the predicament facing the Arab world. Samir Kassir considers what he calls the Arab ‘malaise’ – a condition which he believes springs from a crippling sense of impotence. He considers the crisis facing the Arab state and the threat of militant Islam. He looks to history and the forgotten Arab renaissance of the nineteenth century for answers and urges his fellow Arabs to move beyond their sense of victimhood, reclaim their past and break free from the current deadlock. Samir Kassir was a journalist and historian, one of the bravest voices in the Lebanese media and a critic of the Syrian occupation in Lebanon. He was assassinated in Beirut in June 2005.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”JUDGING” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_row_inner el_class=”mw700″][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]
Criteria – Anyone involved in tackling free expression threats – either through journalism, campaigning, the arts or using digital techniques – is eligible for nomination.
Any individual, group or NGO can nominate or self-nominate. There is no cost to apply.
Judges look for courage, creativity and resilience. We shortlist on the basis of those who are deemed to be making the greatest impact in tackling censorship in their chosen area, with a particular focus on topics that are little covered or tackled by others.
Nominees must have had a recognisable impact in the past 12 months.
Where a judge comes from a nominee’s country, or where there is any other potential conflict of interest, the judge will abstain from voting in that category.
Panel – Each year Index recruits an independent panel of judges – leading world voices with diverse expertise across campaigning, journalism, the arts and human rights.
The judges for 2007 were:
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Richard Sambrook” title=”Journalist” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82863″]Richard Sambrook joined the BBC in the 1980s as a radio news sub-editor. He is now Director of the BBC’s Global News division, responsible for leading the BBC’s international news services across radio, television and new media. He is also a member of the BBC’s Executive Direction Board and the BBC’s Journalism Board. As Director of BBC News from 2001 to 2004, Richard led the world’s biggest broadcast news operation. Recently, he has advocated Citizen Journalism and Social Media, contributing to the debate on their role and definition in an era of expanding access to the means of communication.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Dreda Say Mitchell” title=”Novelist” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82876″]In 2005, Dreda Say Mitchell was awarded the Crime Writer’s Association’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger for best first time crime novel for her critically acclaimed novel, Running Hot. She is the first Black British writer to have been honoured with this award. She is also a judge of the CWA’s New Blood Dagger award and is the recipient of an Arts Council writing bursary. She has been a guest on a variety of radio shows, including the Robert Elms Show and Radio 4’s Front Row. She has a degree in African history from SOAS and an MA in education studies. She also works as an education consultant specialising in the achievement of Black pupils. She was born in London’s East End, where she continues to live. Killer Tune, her next novel, published by Hodder and Stoughton, will be published in August 2007.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Mark Kermode” title=”Film Critic” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”81669″]Mark Mermode is a film critic, broadcaster and musician. Resident film critic for many BBC programmes such as Radio Five Love and the News Channel, he also frequently contributes to The Culture Show and Newsnight Review. He is contributing editor to Sight & Sound, a regular writer for the Observer. He has a PhD in modern English and American horror fiction, and is a fello of the English and Film Department of Southampton University. He plays the double bass in The Dodge Brothers.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Kenan Malik” title=”Writer” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82874″]Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He is visiting senior fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey. His main academic interests are in the history of ideas, the history and philosophy of science, race, ethnicity and religion, and theories of human nature. His books include The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (1996) and Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell us about Human Nature (2000). He has written and presented a number of TV documentaries for Channel 4 including Disunited Kingdom (29 October 2003); Are Muslims Hated? (8 January 2005); Let ‘Em All In (7 March 2005); and Britain’s Tribal Tensions (10 February 2006). He is a writer and presenter on BBC Radio 4’s current affairs programme Analysis.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Conor Gearty” title=”Professor and barrister” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82875″]Conor Gearty is Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, a practicing barrister and professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics. His latest book is a study of the place of the Human Rights Act in Britain’s constitutional order.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][staff name=”Ursula Owen” title=”Editor” color=”#28a7cc” profile_image=”82905″]Until recently, Ursula Owen was Editor in Chief and Chief Executive for Index on Censorship, a position she held from 1993. While at Index, she oversaw a dramatic editorial
redesign of the magazine, raised the organisation’s profile internationally, and broadened its focus to include contemporary debates on issues such as immigration, religious fundamentalism, the death penalty, and the condition of the world’s children. She was a founder/director and managing director of Virago Press, the well-known feminist publishing company, from 1974 until 1990, when she became Cultural Policy Adviser to the Labour Party.[/staff][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1473325552363{margin-top: 0px !important;margin-bottom: 20px !important;padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 15px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1473325567468{margin-top: 0px !important;margin-bottom: 0px !important;padding-top: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;}”][awards_gallery_slider name=”GALLERY” images_url=”82884,82885,82886,82887,82888,82889,82890,82891,82892,82893,82894,82895,82896,82897,82898,82899,82900,82901″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
