21 Aug 20 | News and features, Opinion
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”114590″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]August is meant to be a quiet month for news. But this month has been anything but quiet.
Every day the world has been exposed to a new and sustained attack on our basic human rights. In every corner of the world, our collective rights to free expression and our freedom of association seem to be under siege. And for too many, the most basic of our human rights – our right to life, to live in peace – is, too often, not considered a right at all by those who will use any tool at their disposal to retain their power and the status quo.
It seems that at any given time, there is always at least one government, one repressive regime or a non-state actor using their power to remove the rights of citizens.
The results are heart-breaking to watch and devastating for the families that are torn apart and left scared and isolated.
This week alone, we have seen images of a teenager from Sudan who drowned as he tried to get to the UK to plead asylum – a 16-year-old who was fleeing war and a military regime.
In Russia, the leader of the opposition, Alexei Navalny, is in a coma after reportedly being poisoned as he travelled back to Moscow. His wife is being refused access to his hospital bed.
The first-hand account from a Uighur teacher who had been exposed to the Xinjiang concentration camps was published this week. It is a harrowing personal testimony of a genocide.
In Hong Kong, the impact of the national security law continues to be felt far and wide with arrests and intimidation now being deployed to silence dissenters. And its reach is now being felt outside of China. On university campuses around the world, professors and academics are starting to consider the impact their teaching will have on Chinese students. Knowledge has become a vulnerability for too many Chinese students as they return to Hong Kong. Seats of academic enlightenment and learning are having to change what they teach and how they teach it in order to protect their students – this is not acceptable.
And of course, we have followed in horror what is happening in Belarus, on European soil, as Lukashenko refuses to leave office and hold free and fair elections. Journalists arrested, protestors tortured and artists and musicians sacked for standing up to the regime.
These are the stories which have held the news cycle and grabbed our attention. However, for each example I cite there are a further dozen cases of tyranny that need to be exposed and challenged, in every corner of the earth. And yet, woven through each of these affronts to our basic rights is a single thread of brave men and women who refuse to be silenced. A cadre of freedom fighters determined to protect their rights and ours. They do not know each other and they likely never will meet but they are fighting the same fight. They are holding back the tide of tyranny and they are risking everything to do so.
The question for all of us is what can we do to help? How can we support people on the other side of the world as they stand up to tyrants? How can we make sure they know that we stand with them?
At Index, it is our role but also our responsibility to stand with them. To tell their stories, to publish their work, to make sure that the world knows what is happening to them. But to do that we need your help. We need your support, emotional and of course financial. Behind each of these headlines is a person, a family, a life. Their lives are as valuable as ours but their journeys are at the moment just too hard. To support them we need your help – please donate to Index, just a five pounds a month will enable us to tell someone else’s story.[/vc_column_text][vc_btn title=”Donate to Index” color=”danger” size=”lg” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fregular-donation-form%2F%3Famt%3D%25C2%25A35|||”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You might also like to read” category_id=”13527″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
17 Jul 20 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”114308″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]I think it’s fair to say that issues associated with free speech have been a recurring feature of our news in the last month, from the removal of Colston’s statue in Bristol, to the Hong Kong National Security law, to the very public debate on “cancel culture”. It seems a day doesn’t go by without a reference to free speech or someone pontificating on where the limits should be.
There are lots of things missing in the current conversation about free speech though – at least for me. The most crucial of which is why free speech is a core human right. Why does it matter if our voices are limited? If we can’t write or create art who does that hurt? If we don’t know what’s going on around the world – does it make a difference to our families?
I’m hoping that if you’re reading this then you share my view that being able to use our voices and to listen to each other gives us our humanity.
As a core tenet, our right to free speech has built the society that we live in – at least here in the UK. It has given us the literature which changes our perceptions of the world. Art that provokes emotion, academia which challenges the world as we know it and ensures that our society continues to develop and thrive. And of course, journalism which, on a daily basis, exposes the powerful and seeks to provide the ultimate scrutiny.
July 2020 has been an awful month to be a journalist in Britain. The BBC, The Guardian and Reach (the owner of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express as well as numerous local and regional papers) have all announced redundancies. Meanwhile, the Archant group (which also own dozens of local papers) is desperately seeking a new buyer. Covid-19 is having a devastating effect on the media on which we rely to make sure that corruption is reported, that repressive regimes are exposed and that provides a platform to speak truth to power. So, if you don’t already, it’s time to subscribe to a newspaper to make sure that journalism as a profession survives the 2020s.
Freedom of journalistic expression is vital for our society and in an era of disinformation and counter-propaganda, reliable and constant sources of information have never been more important. If it wasn’t for investigative journalists then we would not know of the horrendous plight of the Uighurs who, as I write, are are being transported to concentration camps in the Xinjiang province. We wouldn’t know of the women who are being sterilised by order of the state and of the children who are being re-educated.
Journalists at their best shine a light in the darkness and their bravery and determination makes the world listen and forces governments to act. I pray that, even in the middle of this awful pandemic, we listen to those brave voices reported in our daily newspapers and stand with the Uighurs against what can only be described as acts of genocide.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”YOU MIGHT LIKE TO READ” category_id=”581″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
19 Jun 20 | Volume 49.02 Summer 2020, Volume 49.02 Summer 2020 Extras
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Why don’t we learn that censorship and lack of trust in society puts us all at risk, particularly in times of crisis, asks Rachael Jolley in the summer 2020 issue of Index on Censorship magazine”][vc_column_text]
The coronavirus outbreak began with censorship. Censorship of doctors in Wuhan to stop them telling citizens what was going on and what the risks were.
Censorship by the Chinese state that stopped the rest of the world finding out what was happening as early as it could have.
Surely this is one of the most compelling arguments against censorship that we have seen in our lifetimes. Showing that if we know about a risk, we are able to discuss, to explore, to research, to prepare, and to take measures to avoid it.
As Covid-19 spread through the world, the parallels with World War I and the Spanish Flu were obvious. Here was a dangerous disease that many countries refused to acknowledge, that doctors were prevented from speaking about and that, for a time, the public had no knowledge of.
In 2014, I asked leading public health professor Alan Maryon-Davis to write about World War I and the flu epidemic for this magazine, a lesson from history for today. He wrote: “We also know that it was the deadliest affliction ever visited upon humanity, killing at least 50 million people world- wide, probably nearer 100 million, several times more than [the] 15-20 million killed by the war itself – and more in a single year than the Black Death killed in a century.”
Maryon-Davis identified three weak links that could have incredibly dangerous consequences in the reaction to a pandemic.
One was that health workers on early cases might worry about reporting it (self- censorship); the second was that governments would worry about political/cultural consequences (political censorship); and the third was that a cloak of secrecy might be thrown over it (pure censorship). Check, check, check. It’s happened again.
Lessons learned from history? Practically nil.
As we move through the tracking phase of this pandemic, we need to recognise that public trust is an essential part of any response, and that public will comes from a belief in society – and a belief that it will act for the public good. Trust also comes from a belief that your government will not collect private information about you and use it without permission, or to your detriment.
Historically, those who fought for freedom of expression and speech also fought for the right to privacy: your right to keep information private – such as your religion or sexual orientation – and the right for you not to have an illegal search of your private papers or your home. Those rights came together in the US constitution because those who wrote it knew what it was like to be in a minority or a protester in a country which oppressed those who did not conform.
They fled those countries to find more freedom, and they sought to create legislation that would mean others could choose to be different, or to express offensive or difficult ideas. That might sound ridiculously ideal- istic, and of course it was – there are plenty of holes people can pick in the reality of US society – but those ideas are strong, and valid for today.
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The right to privacy (and with it the right to express a minority opinion) is often endangered by legislation that is introduced without due process during times of war or crisis.
And it is against this backdrop that activists, journalists, academics and others began to worry that during this pandemic we are, with- out really considering the consequences, giving away our privacy.
Governments around the world have often responded to the Covid-19 situation with diktats that remove an element of democratic governance, or threaten hard-fought-for freedoms, with very little opportunity for public debate.
India’s Justice H.R. Khanna, among others, famously warned that governments use a crisis to ignore the rule of law. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
This feels like wisdom that’s fitting for the current fractured moment.
In Turkey, there are independent thinkers who believed that home was the last refuge where they could criticise the government or talk about a difference of opinion from the mainstream. The introduction of the Life Fits Home app could mean a severe erosion of that private space, as once they have input their ID numbers, the government will know exactly who is where, and with whom.
As Kaya Genç outlines in his article on p50, the question is: can they trust an autocratic state which could save their lives via contact-tracing not to come after them later for political reasons?
This is similar to the question being asked in Hong Kong by those who protest against the ongoing erosion of the freedom which ensured it was a very different place to live from China in the last two decades.
During the pandemic, there have been discussions about the dangers of sharing personal information with the government, and one Hong Kong citizen we interviewed for this issue outlined why.
“Of course, we’re willing to do what we can as a collective to stop the spread of Covid-19,” she said. “But the point is, we have no trust in the government now. That’s why I don’t want to trade my information with the government in return for a few face masks.”
Another said people were worried about an app that they were required to download if they left the city and wanted to return, asking: “Who knows what they’ll do with our data?”
Some governments have put in place legal checks and balances to give people more confidence, and to offer assurances that data will not be used for other means.
In South Korea, a law was amended after the 2015 Mers outbreak to give authorities extensive powers to demand phone location data, police CCTV footage and the records of corporations and individuals to trace contacts and track infections.
As Timandra Harkness outlines on p11, that same law specifies that “no information shall be used for any purpose other than conducting tasks related to infectious diseases under this act, and all the information shall be destroyed without delay when the relevant tasks are completed”.
In Australia, legislation restricts who may access data gathered by a Covid-19 app, how it may be used and how long it may be kept.
Other countries have done much less to offer legitimacy and transparency to the data- gathering processes in which they are asking the public to participate.
In the UK, for instance, there has been no sign of legislation outlining any restrictions on how data captured by its track and trace system, or expected Covid-19 app, will be restricted from other use, or even stopped from being sold on to third parties.
Requests to ask the public to add apps such as these come at the same time as we see rising numbers of drones being used to invade our private spaces, and potentially to track our movements or actions.
We also see a dramatic, mostly unregulated, increase in the use of facial recognition around the world, again taking a hammer to our rights to privacy, and ramping up surveillance.
US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the 1920s of those who wrote the early laws of his land: “They knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”
Those who fear their privacy is under threat, and who worry about other consequences of being tracked and traced, are unlikely to feel confident in a society that takes away basic freedoms during times of crisis and does not put dramatic changes into place via a parliamentary process. Governments should take note that this threatens pathways to safety.
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Rachael Jolley is editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship magazine. She tweets @londoninsider. This article is part of the latest edition of Index on Censorship magazine, with its special report on macho male leaders
Index on Censorship’s summer 2020 issue is entitled Private Lives: What happens when our every thought goes public
Look out for the new edition in bookshops, and don’t miss our Index on Censorship podcast, with special guests, on Soundcloud.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Listen”][vc_column_text]The summer 2020 magazine podcast featuring the world premiere of a lockdown playlet written and acted out exclusively for Index on Censorship by Katherine Parkinson
LISTEN HERE[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
Subscription options from £18 or just £1.49 in the App Store for a digital issue.
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17 Jun 20 | Magazine, Magazine Contents, Volume 49.02 Summer 2020
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”With contributions from Katherine Parkinson, David Hare, Marina Lalovic, Geoff White and Timandra Harkness”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
The Summer 2020 issue of Index on Censorship magazine looks at just how much of our privacy we are giving away right now. Covid-19 has occurred at a time when tech giants and autocrats have already been chipping away at our freedoms. Just how much privacy is left and how much will we now lose? This is a question people in Turkey are really concerned about, as many feel the home was the last refuge for them for privacy, but now contact tracing apps might rid them of that. It’s a similar case for those in China, and the journalist Tianyu M Fang speaks about his own, haphazard experience of using a contact tracing app there. We also have an article from Uganda on the government spies that are everywhere, plus tech experts talking about just how much power apps like Zoom and tech like drones have.
In our In Focus section, we interview journalists in Serbia, Hungary and Kashmir who are trying to report the truth in places where the truth can be as dangerous, if not more, than Covid-19. And we have an interview with and poet from the playwright David Hare.
We have a very special culture section in this issue. Three playwrights have written short plays for the magazine around the theme of pandemics. V (formerly Eve Ensler), the author of The Vagina Monologues, takes you to the aftermath of a nuclear disaster; Katherine Parkinson of The IT Crowd writes about online dating during quarantine; Lebanese playwright Lucien Bourjeily is inspired by recent events in his country in his chilling look at protest right now.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Special Report”][vc_column_text]
Back-up plan by Timandra Harkness: Don’t blindly give away more freedoms than you sign up for in the name of tackling the epidemic. They’re hard to reclaim
The eyes of the storm by Issa Sikiti da Silva: Spies are on the streets of Uganda making sure everyone abides by Covid-19 rules. They’re spying on political opposition too. A dispatch from Kampala
Zooming in on privacy concerns by Adam Aiken: Video app Zoom is surging in popularity. In our rush to stay connected, we need to make security checks and not reveal more than we think
Seeing what’s around the corner by Richard Wingfield: Facial recognition technology may be used to create immunity “passports” and other ways of tracking our health status. Are we watching?
Don’t just drone on by Geoff White: If drones are being used to spy on people breaking quarantine rules, what else could they be used for? We investigate
Sending a red signal by Tianyu M Fang: When a contact tracing app went wrong a journalist was forced to stay in their home in China
The not so secret garden by Tom Hodgkinson: Better think twice before bathing naked in the backyard. It’s not just your neighbours that might be watching you. Where next for privacy?
Hackers paradise by Stephen Woodman: Hackers across Latin America are taking advantage of the current crisis to access people’s personal data. If not protected it could spell disaster
Italy’s bad internet connection by Alessio Perrone: Italians have one of the lowest levels of digital skills in Europe and are struggling to understand implications of the new pandemic world
Less than social media by Stefano Pozzebon: El Salvador’s new leader takes a leaf out of the Trump playbook to use Twitter to crush freedoms
Nowhere left to hide by Kaya Genç: Privacy has been eroded in Turkey for many years now. People fear that tackling Covid-19 might take away their last private free space
Open book? by Somak Ghoshal: In India, where people are forced to download a tracking app to get paid, journalists are worried about it also being used to access their contacts
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”In Focus”][vc_column_text]
Knife-edge politics by Marina Lalovic: An interview with Serbian journalist Ana Lalic, who forced the Serbian government to do a U-Turn
Stage right (and wrong) by Jemimah Steinfeld: The playwright David Hare talks to Index about a very 21st century form of censorship on the stage. Plus a poem of Hare’s published for the first time
Inside story: Hungary’s media silence by Viktória Serdült: What’s it like working as a journalist under the new rules introduced by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán? How hard is it to report?
Life under lockdown: A Kashmiri Journalist by Bilal Hussain: A Kashmiri journalist speaks about the difficulties – personal and professional – of living in the state with an internet shutdown during lockdown
The truth will out by John Lloyd: Journalists need to challenge themselves and fight for media freedoms that are being eroded by autocrats and tech companies
Extremists use virus to curb opposition by Laura Silvia Battaglia: Covid-19 is being used by religious militia as a recruitment tool in Yemen and Iraq. Speaking out as a secular voice is even more challenging
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Culture”][vc_column_text]
Masking the truth by V: The writer of The Vagina Monologues (formerly known as Eve Ensler) speaks to Index about attacks on the truth. Plus a new version of her play about living in a nuclear wasteland
Time out by Katherine Parkinson: The star of The IT Crowd discusses online dating and introduces her new play, written for Index, that looks at love and deception online
Life in action by Lucien Bourjeily: The Lebanese director talks to Index about how police brutality has increased in his country and how that informed the story of his new play, published here for the first time
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Index around the world”][vc_column_text]
Putting abuse on the map by Orna Herr: The coronavirus crisis has seen a huge rise in media attacks. Index has launched a map to track these
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Endnote”][vc_column_text]
Forced out of the closet by Jemimah Steinfeld: As people live out more of their lives online right now, our report highlights how LGBTQ dating apps can put people’s lives at risk
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe”][vc_column_text]In print, online, in your mailbox, on your iPad.
Subscription options from £18 or just £1.49 in the App Store for a digital issue.
Every subscriber helps support Index on Censorship’s projects around the world.
SUBSCRIBE NOW[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Read”][vc_column_text]The playwright Arthur Miller wrote an essay for Index in 1978 entitled The Sin of Power. We reproduce it for the first time on our website and theatre director Nicholas Hytner responds to it in the magazine
READ HERE[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Listen”][vc_column_text]In the Index on Censorship autumn 2019 podcast, we focus on how travel restrictions at borders are limiting the flow of free thought and ideas. Lewis Jennings and Sally Gimson talk to trans woman and activist Peppermint; San Diego photojournalist Ariana Drehsler and Index’s South Korean correspondent Steven Borowiec
LISTEN HERE[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
