Mexican media attacked for election bias

10 Jul 12 | Mexico

After a vote recount of Mexico’s presidential elections, Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) was finally declared the winner by Mexican electoral authorities yesterday.

However, the left-of-centre candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD) continues to claim that the PRI victory was thanks to vote buying schemes and other irregularities, which included biased press coverage and faulty electoral polls. (more…)

Bahrain authorities play games with Nabeel Rajab’s freedom

29 Jun 12 | Middle East and North Africa, Opinion

Nabeel Rajab, BCHR - winner of Bindmans Award for Advocacy

Nabeel Rajab, BCHR - winner of Bindmans Award for Advocacy at the Index Freedom of Expression Awards 2012

OPINION
 This week Bahrain continued its game of cat and mouse with human rights defender Nabeel Rajab, releasing him once more on Wednesday after re-arresting him on 6 June. The outspoken activist and president of Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) has been arrested, released, and arrested again — all in the past two months. Although Rajab is now free, he still faces four charges, two of them for posts he made on the social networking site Twitter, and two others related to organising protests. Charges were brought against the activist for allegedly insulting and publicly defaming the Sunni citizens of the village of Muharraq on Twitter, as well as insulting an authority on the popular social networking site. According to his lawyer, Rajab will stand trial on 9 July.

Rajab’s fearlessness in speaking out against the regime’s human rights abuses mean that the Index on Censorship Award winning activist could very well land in prison again. Still, it is promising that Rajab’s release came after the government announced that it would finally begin compensating families of the 35 individuals killed during a brutal crackdown on the country’s anti-government protests that began on 14 February last year. Shortly after the announcement, human rights activist Zainab Alkhawaja was injured after a tear gas canister was allegedly fired directly at her hit her in the thigh. Alkhawaja is the daughter of well-known dissident and founder of BCHR Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, who is currently serving a life sentence for participating in anti-government protests last year.

Last November Bahrain released the findings of its much vaunted Independent Commission for Inquiry (BICI) but the country’s sluggish progress in implementing the report’s recommendations calls into question the country’s commitment to genuine reform. Whenever Bahraini officials are confronted with evidence of human rights violations they respond with statements about reform and dialogue but little action is taken.

On Thursday, 27 United Nations member states released a joint statement calling on the Human Rights Council to push Bahrain to end human rights violations. Noticeably missing from the list of countries — which included Switzerland, Mexico, Denmark, and Norway — were close allies the United States and the United Kingdom, despite having made statements about helping the country commit to reform. Bahrain responded to the statement by saying that the information in the statement is “inaccurate” and that the countries that signed the statement did not understand the “reality” of the human rights situation in the country.

Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin

Media freedom centre stage as Mexicans go to polls

26 Jun 12 | Americas, Mexico

As Mexican voters get ready to eelect their next president1 July , all four candidates have made statements in support of free expression and the protection of journalists. In the last five years, 44 Mexican journalists have been killed,  most of them in the provinces.

During a June meeting with farming groups in the state of Veracruz, one of the most deadly provincial areas for journalists, Enrique Peña Nieto, the frontrunner candidate for the former ruling party Partido  Revolucionario  Institucional, (PRI) offered a one minute silence in memory of the nine journalists killed in that state in the last few months. Organised crime would not  “force Mexicans to stop expressing their freedom of expression in terms of ideas; this is the pillar and strenght of our democracy,” said Peña Nieto.

Manuel Lopez Obrador, candidate for the leftist Partido de Revolucion Democratica (PRD), has also said that individual, religious, political freedoms and freedom of expression would be the most important rights his government would respect if he won the elections.  And Josefina Vasquez Mota, the candidate for the ruling Partido Accion Nacional also hitched her wagon on freedom of expression. “When the right to freedom of expression is gone, we lose all our other freedoms,” during International Day for Freedom of Expression.  Gabriel Quadri of the smaller Nueva Alianza party also endorsed better security for journalists.

This is good news.  It took several years to reform the legal infrastructure to prosecute crimes against journalists.  A new law that makes the murder of a newsperson a federal crime was recently approved, but many problems remain to make it work, including establishing a new legal infrastructure and incorporating new language in the penal code.

However, for the last few months of the campaign, the elephant in the room has been the mistrust that exists among sectors of the population which feel the media manipulates the information they get, especially at election time — a mistrust that goes back to the 70 years the PRI was in power, and was believed to have fixed elections with the help of the news media.  The YoSoy132 university student movement, which was launchedin May, struck a chord when it protested against television monopolies.  While cable television offers a variety of options, non cable subscribers can only see  two companies, Televisa and Television Azteca. This is difficult in a country where 80 percent get their news from television.

The Guardian also drove the point home, when it published a story based on leaked documents that sought to prove that Televisa had received multi-million dollar payments to promote the image of the PRI´s candidate Peña Nieto.  The documents had been first mentioned in an earlier story in 2006, and their veracity was downplayed by some media in Mexico.

Amedi,  civil society organization that promotes media plurality, suggests that whoever wins the 1 July presidential election should push for two more national open channels at least, and better policies to promote digital television.