05 Feb 14 | About Index, Campaigns, Press Releases
After two years at the helm of Index on Censorship, Chief Executive Kirsty Hughes will be leaving the leading international freedom of expression organisation in mid-April to pursue new projects and writing in the international and European politics arena.
Hughes joined Index in April 2012 taking its international editorial and advocacy strategy to new audiences and leading Index in its work on international digital freedom, including Index’s opposition to mass surveillance as revealed by the Snowden revelations, reinforcing its work in authoritarian and transition regimes around the world, and introducing a new focus on the question of access to freedom of expression. Hughes has been a key commentator and evangelist for Index, raising the organisation’s profile in the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, the EU and the United States.
Index on Censorship is currently seeking a leading free speech defender as our new CEO. Full details on the role can be found here.
10 Jan 14 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, European Union, News and features
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
This article is part of a series based on our report, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression
The EU has made a number of positive contributions to digital freedom: it plays a positive part in the global debate on internet governance; the EU’s No-Disconnect Strategy, its freedom of expression guidelines and its export controls on surveillance equipment have all be useful contributions to the digital freedom debate, offering practical measures to better protect freedom of expression. Comparatively, some of the EU’s member states are amongst the world’s best for protecting online freedom. The World Wide Web Foundation places Sweden at the top of its 2012 Index of internet growth, utility and impact, with the UK, Finland, Norway and Ireland also in the top 10. Freedom House ranks all EU member states as “free”, and an EU member state, Estonia, ranks number one globally in the organisation’s annual survey, “Freedom in the World”. But these indices merely represent a snapshot of the situation and even those states ranked as free fail to fully uphold their freedom of expression obligations, online as well as offline.
As the recent revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden have exposed, although EU member states may in public be committed to a free and open internet, in secret, national governments have been involved in a significant amount of surveillance that breaches international human rights norms, as well as these governments’ own legal commitments. It is also the case that across the EU, other issues continue to chill freedom of expression, including the removal or takedown of legitimate content.
The EU’s position on digital freedom is analysed in more detail in Index on Censorship’s policy paper “Is the EU heading in the right direction on digital freedom?” The paper points out that the EU still lacks a coherent overarching strategy and set of principles for promoting and defending freedom of expression in the digital sphere.
Surveillance
Recent revelations by former US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden into the NSA’s PRISM programme have also exposed that mass state surveillance by EU governments is practised within the EU, including in the UK and France.
Mass or blanket surveillance contravenes Article 8 (the right to respect for private and family life) and Article 10 (the right to freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights. In its jurisprudence, the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly stated that surveillance, if conducted without adequate judicial oversight and with no effective safeguards against abuse, will never be compatible with the European Convention.[1]
This state surveillance also breaches pledges EU member states have made as part of the EU’s new cybersecurity strategy, which was agreed in February 2013 and addresses mass state surveillance. The Commission stated that cybersecurity is predominantly the responsibility of member states, an approach some have argued gives member states the green light for increased government surveillance. Because the strategy explicitly states that “increased global connectivity should not be accompanied by censorship or mass surveillance”, member states were called upon to address their adherence to this principle at the European Council meeting on 24th October 2013. The Council was asked to address revelations that external government surveillance efforts, such as the US National Security Agency’s Prism programme, undermining EU citizens’ rights to privacy and free expression. While the Council did discuss surveillance, as yet there has been no common EU position on these issues.
At the same time, the EU has also played a role in laying the foundations for increased surveillance of EU citizens. In 2002, the EU e-Privacy Directive introduced the possibility for member states to pass laws mandating the retention of communications data for security purposes. In 2006, the EU amended the e-Privacy Directive by enacting the Data Retention Directive (Directive 2006/24/EC), which obliges member states to require communications providers to retain communications data for a period of between six months and two years, which could result in member states collecting a pool of data without specifying the reasons for such practice. A number of individual member states, including Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic, have consulted the European Convention on Human Rights and their constitutions and have found that the mass retention of individual data through the Data Retention Directive to be illegal.
While some EU member states are accused of colluding in mass population surveillance, others have some of the strongest protections anywhere globally to protect their citizens against surveillance. Two EU member states, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, require that individuals who are placed under secret surveillance to be notified. Other EU member states have expanded their use of state surveillance, in particular Austria, the UK and Bulgaria. Citizens of Poland are subject to more phone tapping and surveillance than any other citizens in the European Union; the European Commission has claimed the police and secret services accessed as many as 1,300,000 phone bills in 2010 without any oversight either by the courts or the public prosecutor.
Internet governance
At a global level the EU has argued for no top-down state control of internet governance. There are efforts by a number of states including Russia, China and Iran to increase state control of the internet through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The debate on global internet governance came to a head at the Dubai World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) summit at the end of 2012 which brought together 193 member states. At the WCIT, a number of influential emerging democratic powers aligned with a top-down approach with increased state intervention in the governance of the internet. On the other side, EU member states, India and the US argued the internet should remain governed by an open and collaborative multistakeholder approach. The EU’s influence could be seen through the common position adopted by the member states. The European Commission as a non-voting WCIT observer produced a common position for member states that opposed any new treaty on internet governance under the UN’s auspices. The position ruled out any attempts to make the ITU recommendations binding and would only back technology neutral proposals – but made no mention of free expression. The absence of this right is of concern as other rights including privacy (which was mentioned) do not always align with free speech. After negotiations behind closed doors, all 27 EU member states and another 28 countries including the US abstained from signing the final treaty. That states with significant populations and rising influence in their regions did not back the EU and leant towards more top-down control of the internet should be of significant concern for the EU.
Intermediate liability, takedown and filtering
European laws on intermediate liability, takedown and filtering are overly vague in defining what constitutes valid and legitimate takedown requests, which can lead to legal uncertainty for both web operators and users. Removal of content without a court order can be problematic as it places the content host in the position of judge and jury over content and inevitably leads to censorship of free expression by private actors. EU directorate DG MARKT[2] is currently looking into the results of a public consultation into how takedown requests affect freedom of expression, among other issues. It is expected that the directorate will outline a directive or communication on the criteria takedown requests must meet and the evidence threshold required, while also clarifying how “expeditiously” intermediaries must act to avoid liability. A policy that clarifies companies’ legal responsibilities when presented with takedown requests should help better protect online content from takedown where there is no legal basis for the complaint.
The EU must take steps to protect web operators from vexatious claims from individuals over content that is not illegal. Across the EU, the governments of member states are increasingly using takedown requests. Google has seen a doubling of requests from the governments of Germany, Hungary, Poland and Portugal from 2010-2012; a 45% increase from Belgium and double-digit growth in the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. Governments are taking content down for dubious reasons that may infringe Article 10 rights of the ECHR. In 2010, a number of takedown requests were made in response to ‘”government criticism” and four in response to “religious offence”. A significant 8% of takedown requests were in response to defamation offences. With regard to defamation charges, it must be noted that the public interest is not protected equally across all EU countries (see Defamation above).
Although corporate takedown is more prevalent than state takedown, particularly in the number of individual URLs affected, the outcome of the DG MARKT consultation must be to address both vexatious state and corporate takedown requests. The new communication or directive must be clearer than the EU e-Commerce directive has been with respect to the responsibility of member states. While creating a legal framework that was intended to protect internet intermediaries, the EU e-Commerce directive has failed to be entirely effective in a number of high-profile cases. EU member states use filters to prevent the distribution of child pornography with questionable effectiveness. However, filters have not been used by states to block other content after a Court of Justice of the European Union ruling stated EU law did not allow states to require internet service providers to install filtering systems to prevent the illegal distribution of content. The Court made it clear at the time that such filtering would require ISPs to monitor internet traffic, an infringement under EU law. This has granted European citizens strong protections against systematic web filtering on behalf of states. There continue to be legal attempts to force internet intermediaries to block content that is already in the public domain. In a recent case, brought by the Spanish Data Protection authority on behalf of a complainant, the authority demanded that the search engine Google remove results that pointed to an auction note for a reposessed home due to social security debts. The claimant insisted that referring to his past debts infringed on his right to privacy and asked for the search results to be removed. In June 2013, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice decided Google did not need to comply to the request to block “legal and legitimate information that has entered the public domain” and that it is not required to remove information posted by third parties. Google has estimated that there are 180 cases similar to this one in Spain alone. A final decision in the case is expected before the end of this year, which could have profound implications for intermediate liability.
[1] In Liberty v. UK (58243/00) the ECHR stated: “95. In its case-law on secret measures of surveillance, the Court has developed the following minimum safeguards that should be set out in statute law in order to avoid abuses of power: the nature of the offences which may give rise to an interception order; a definition of the categories of people liable to have their telephones tapped; a limit on the duration of telephone tapping; the procedure to be followed for examining, using and storing the data obtained; the precautions to be taken when communicating the data to other parties; and the circumstances in which recordings may or must be erased or the tapes destroyed”; A. v. France (application no. 14838/89), 23.11.1993: found a violation of Article 8 after a recording was carried out without following a judicial procedure and which had not been ordered by an investigating judge; Drakšas v. Lithuania, 31.07.2012, found a violation of Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) on account of the absence of a judicial review of the applicant’s surveillance after 17 September 2003.
[2] The Internal Market and Services Directorate General
07 Jan 14 | Egypt, News and features
Head of the April 6 Youth Movement Ahmed Maher and two other activists were in December sentenced to three years in prison, among other things for “staging a protest rally without prior permission from the authorities” (Image: Roger Anis/Demotix)
After officially classifying the Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist organisation”, Egypt’s military-backed regime has in recent days, widened its crackdown on supporters of the Islamist group.
But the Egyptian authorities’ heavy clampdown on dissent has also increasingly targeted non-Islamists — including secular revolutionary activists who took part in the June 30 military-backed protests that toppled Islamist President Mohamed Morsi.
On Friday, seventeen Islamist “anti-coup” protesters were killed and scores of others were injured in clashes with security forces nationwide, Egypt’s Health Ministry said. Meanwhile, three journalists working for the Al Jazeera English channel remain in custody pending investigations on charges of “being linked to a terrorist organisation and spreading false news that harms national security.” Egyptian officials have accused the Qatari-based Al Jazeera network of backing the Muslim Brotherhood.
Three prominent revolutionary activists also languish behind bars after being handed down three-year jail sentences in December. Ahmed Maher, Founder/Head of the April 6 Youth Movement (one of the two main groups that planned and organised the 2011 mass uprising), Mohamed Adel, a member of the April 6 group and activist Ahmed Douma have been accused of “thuggery, assaulting police officers and staging a protest rally without prior permission from the authorities.” In November, the Egyptian government passed a controversial law criminalising protests without permission from the Interior Ministry.
The activists are on hunger strike to protest their imprisonment on what they — and various rights organisations — have described as “politically-motivated” charges. They are also protesting the harsh prison conditions and their “maltreatment” at the hands of prison guards and inmates.
On Saturday, the Free Alaa Facebook group slammed the “rights abuses” the detainees face at Torah high security prison where they are being held. According to a statement posted on the group’s Facebook page, the detainees are being held in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day and are being denied access to all forms of communication including with family members. “It has become clear to the detainees and their families that the Interior Ministry is not solely responsible for the rights violations. The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Prison Administration are also implicated,” the statement said.
Other activists too are paying a high price for their criticism of the regime. Political activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, a symbol of the January 2011 Revolution, his sister Mona Seif (Founder of the No To Military Trials movement) and ten other defendants on Sunday received a one year suspended jail sentence for allegedly “attacking the campaign headquarters of former presidential candidate Ahmed Shafik in May 2012”. Both Alaa and Mona have denied the allegation. Before appearing in court on Sunday, Seif told the independent Al Shorouk newspaper that there was no evidence to incriminate her — or her brother — in the case. Alaa will remain in jail on other charges including for allegedly “organising and taking part in an unauthorised November anti-military protest rally”. Alaa has denied organising the protest. His imprisonment, meanwhile, has provoked an outcry from rights campaigners who believe the activist has been jailed “for his oft-scathing criticism of the abuses committed by the security forces.”
Meanwhile, other revolutionary activists have decried what they describe as “efforts by the current regime to defame them”. Asmaa Mahfouz, an internet activist who played a key role in the mass mobilisation of Egyptians that led to the January 2011 Revolution and former MP and activist Mustafa El Naggar have filed lawsuits against TV talk show host Abdel Rahim Ali (widely believed to have close links with the country’s various security agencies) after he aired what he claimed were taped telephone conversations by the activists. The leaked conversations, broadcast last week on TV show “The Black Box” on the privately-owned satellite channel Al Qahira al Nas, provoked an outcry from Egyptian rights organisations. A joint statement released by several rights groups denounced the leakages as “a breach of privacy and a serious violation of basic individual and civil liberties.” The statement also called on the authorities to bring those responsible for eavesdropping, taping and broadcasting the telephone conversations to justice. Ali has remained defiant however, subsequently vowing to air many more taped telephone calls which he claimed would “expose those implicated in a foreign plot to destroy the country.”
The leaked telephone conversations focused on secret documents seized by the activists in question on March 4, 2011. That was the day hundreds of protesters stormed the offices of the much-detested State Security Service, the SSS, to acquire documents they hoped “would expose the crimes of the security agency against Egyptians during the Mubarak era”. The SSS was dismantled shortly after the raids and was renamed “National Security.” The military rulers who replaced Hosni Mubarak immediately after the January 2011 mass uprising, had vowed at the time that the new security authority would be solely concerned with dealing with “national security issues” and would not repeat the practices of the old SSS (including mass surveillance and spying on citizens). As a result of the recently televised leaks, several “private citizens” have filed lawsuits against Mahfouz and Israa Abdel Fattah (another prominent internet activist and former member of the April Six group) accusing them of “inciting the raids on the SSS Headquarters”.
In comments posted on his Facebook page, former lawmaker El Naggar said the leaked conversations were a form of revenge by the state against revolutionary activists. He also described them as a means of “character assassination to defame him and other political opponents of the military-backed regime.”
Meanwhile, an online statement released on January 3 by Amnesty International urged the authorities in Egypt to “halt their crackdown on vocal critics of the regime — including the use of politically-motivated trials to punish dissidents.”
One activist who chose to remain anonymous has best described the heavy-handed, repressive measures used by the state to intimidate and silence critics as “counter-revolutionary practices” which he said were designed “to crush dissent and wipe out all traces of the January 2011 Revolution.”
“But the critics will neither be intimidated nor silenced,” he said. He added that “the current regime tends to forget that the fear is gone… There is no going back to pre-January 2011.”
This article was published on 7 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
19 Dec 13 | About Index, Campaigns, Digital Freedom, Press Releases
Index on Censorship is deeply concerned that neither the report nor the recommendations on the NSA prepared by the White House review panel tackles the worldwide mass surveillance carried out by the United States. Index calls on President Obama to take urgent action to respect the right to freedom of expression and privacy of all the world’s citizens, not just those of the United States.
The report from President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology is a 300-page tome which includes 46 recommendations – from forcing telecommunications firms to store call data for on demand NSA access, to higher level signoff on surveillance of foreign leaders.
Kirsty Hughes, CEO of Index, said:
“These weak recommendations offer no privacy for non-Americans and only scant protection for foreign leaders. The NSA’s surveillance programmes continue to violate human rights on a massive scale. When Barack Obama decides what reforms to implement in January, he should remember that Americans are not the only people who deserve the right to privacy and free speech. ”
