17 Sep 2012 | Uncategorized
In the past decade, there has been a boom in mobile phone subscriptions, jumping from fewer than one billion in 2000 to six billion in 2012. Seventy-seven per cent of those subscriptions are now owned by individuals in developing countries. Digital access, on the other hand, trails far behind with only 35 per cent of the world actually online. But this is likely to improve, particularly with the rise of smartphones, which currently make up about a quarter of the 4 billion phones in use globally.
Even with expected improvement in technology and falling prices of production, increasing mobile access relies on more than simply lowering the prices of handsets. Lack of access to a mobile phone is tied to factors such as gender and economic inequality. In developing countries, for example, women are 21per cent less likely than men to own a mobile phone.
India has a high rate of mobile penetration, with 76.8 per cent of its 1.2 billion population using mobile phones. Gender norms also have a role in whose hands mobile phones fall into, as only 28 per cent of India’s mobile phone owners are women, versus 40 per cent for men.
Lower prices are expected to help make smartphones more accessible in India, as they currently only account for 10 million of the estimated 960 million mobile phone users in the country.
While Brazil has a high mobile phone penetration rate (99.8 per cent), the massive economic divide contributes to some of the challenges in mobile access in the country. According to a recent study, many residents of Brazil’s slums (favelas) share phones or steal them because of the outrageous prices of mobile phones and unfamiliarity with technology. The country also has the third-highest rates for mobile services in the world. Smartphone penetration in Brazil is at about 14 per cent, and will only increase if the price of mobile services and handsets decrease.
The United Kingdom has its own divide, with smartphone penetration at 51.3 per cent. However, ownership of a smartphone does not necessarily mean that the owner understands how to use it. Many users only use them to simply make phone calls and send text messages. Users might be unaware that their rights may be diminished through filtering and blocking that automatically comes with many smartphones in the UK. This only shows how important it is to build literacy around technology across the globe. Access also does not simply rely on prices, it also relies on 3G infrastructure.
Thanks to improved mobile phone technology, and improved networks, more people will be online, bringing us a step forward in not only increasing mobile access, but also bridging the digital divide — and that increase in availability only makes it more important to protect free expression online.
Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index on Censorship
14 Aug 2012 | Mexico
Rest stops for migrants operated by Roman Catholic priests across Mexico are coming under attack from top Church officials after centre directors criticised Mexican government policies on Central American migrants.
The most recent case is that of Father Alejandro Solalinde, the Mexican priest who ran Hermanos en el Camino (Brothers in the Road), a rest stop in the state of Oaxaca. Solalinde, who recently returned from two months of forced exile after receiving death threats from organised crime groups, was ordered by the Bishop of Tehuantepec, Oscar Armando Campos, to stop his work with migrants. Solalinde said the Bishop objected to his public statements in the media in support of migrants who face harassment from not only organised crime groups, but also local government and police officials. Local residents have also criticised the centres, whose rest stops draw large groups of the mostly male Central-American migrants. A political backlash has forced Bishop Armando Campos to clarify that he never told Solalinde to leave the centre.
(more…)
10 Jul 2012 | 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…)
29 Jun 2012 | Middle East and North Africa, Opinion
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
