Iran’s controlling interest
Ahmad Rajabzadeh’s ‘Book Censorship’ is a guide to some of the stranger examples of literary repression in Iran. Azar Mahloujian takes a look
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"Most imprisoned journalists have been convicted for defamation"
OSCE media freedom watchdog Miklos Haraszti welcomes United Kingdom’s decriminalisation of defamation, urges other states to follow
“The United Kingdom is the first among the Western European participating States in the OSCE to officially decriminalize defamation. This is a crucial achievement not only for the country’s own freedom of speech, but a great encouragement to many other nations which are still to pursue such a reform,” Haraszti said.
An amendment to the Coroners and Justice Act decriminalized defamation, sedition and seditious libel, defamatory libel and obscene libel in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
“My Office has recommended the decriminalization of defamation for several years. Although these obsolete provisions have not been used in Western Europe for decades, their ‘chilling effect’ remained. Their existence has served as justification for states unwilling to stop criminalization of journalistic errors, and leave those offences solely to the civil-law domain,” Haraszti said.
“I urge other participating States to speed up reforms and end criminal libel,” he said.”Defamation is a criminal offence in all except nine OSCE participating States — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In most countries it is punishable by imprisonment, substantially ‘chilling’ critical speech in the media. Most imprisoned journalists have been convicted for defamation.”
Herta Müller: “Censorship is voracious”
Herta Müller has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this interview published in Index on Censorship, she discusses the death of free expression in Ceauşescu’s Romania
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Time for a revolution?
Is it time for another revolution? Timothy Garton Ash poses a leading question as he revisits the momentous events of 1989 in the latest issue of Index on Censorship. Writers and journalists across eastern Europe join him in assessing the legacy, and put the media under scrutiny. Cristian Tudor Popescu charts the highs and lows for journalists in Romania; Jan Bubenik remembers the night he became a velvet revolutionary; novelist Ivan Klíma reconsiders his expectations and Maria Eismont addresses the decline of press freedom in Russia.
Also in this issue: award-winning journalist Lydia Cacho tells the remarkable story of how she survived an abduction and death threats; Brian Klug explores the Jewish tradition of dissent and Geoffrey Robertson dissects the threats to free speech in the UK.