Digital rights activists from around the UK met in Manchester for Open Rights Group’s first ever ORGCon North on Saturday.
John Buckman, chair of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), delivered the keynote speech: “Britain, under the thumb of…”
He filled in the blank with references to the copyright industry, the new Royal Charter on press regulation, overreaching child protection restrictions, the EU, the US, and private web companies, all of which pose significant challenges to digital freedom of expression in the UK.
The rest of the day was split between four panel sessions and eight impromptu “unconference” sessions for which participants pitched ideas and convened small groups to discuss them.
I spoke on a panel about the right to offend, alongside ORG’s Peter Bradwell and The Next Web’s Martin Bryant. Overly broad and outdated legislation, most notably Section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act and Section 127 of the 2003 Communications Act, are regularly used to criminalise freedom of expression both online and offline in the UK. Despite a successful campaign to drop “insulting” words from the grounds on which someone can be prosecuted for offence under Section 5, the fact that neither of these provisions address the speaker’s (or tweeter’s) intentions continues to chill freedom of expression in the UK.
Also troubling is the fact that other states, India and the UAE for example, point to these and other British laws as justification to prosecute offensive expression in their own jurisdictions. I argued that protecting everyone’s fundamental right to freedom of expression is more important than protecting the feelings of a few people who might take offense to satirical, blasphemous or otherwise unsavoury views. For freedom of expression to be preserved in society, potentially offensive expression requires the utmost protection.
Another panel addressed the proposed EU General Data Protection Regulation, which intends to strengthen existing privacy principles set out in 1995 and harmonise individual member states’ laws on data protection. Provisions in the proposal around consent, data portability and the “right to be forgotten” aim to give users greater control of their personal data and hold companies more accountable for their use of it. Many companies that rely on user data oppose the regulation and have been lobbying hard against it with the UK government on their side whereas some privacy advocates argue it does not go far enough.
There were also discussions on the open rights implications of copyright legislation and the UK’s Draft Communications Data bill (AKA Snooper’s Charter), which looks set to make a comeback in the Queen’s speech on May 8.
The “unconference” sessions addressed specific causes for concern around digital rights in the UK and abroad. I participated in a session on strategies for obtaining government data in the UK and another on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008. This Act, along with the Protect America Act of 2007 legalised warrantless wiretapping of foreign intelligence targets. Digital rights activists took notice of the laws because the rise of cloud computing means even internal UK and EU data is potentially susceptible to US surveillance mechanisms.
Other “unconference” sessions focused on anonymity, password security, companies’ terms of service, activism and medical confidentiality.
The full OrgCon North agenda is available here. ORG’s national conference will take place on 8 June and will feature EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow who wrote the much circulated and cited “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996.
Brian Pellot is Digital Policy Adviser for Index on Censorship. Follow him @brianpellot
Digital rights activists from around the UK met in Manchester for Open Rights Group’s first ever ORGCon North on Saturday.
John Buckman, chair of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), delivered the keynote speech: “Britain, under the thumb of…”
He filled in the blank with references to the copyright industry, the new Royal Charter on press regulation, overreaching child protection restrictions, the EU, the US, and private web companies, all of which pose significant challenges to digital freedom of expression in the UK.
The rest of the day was split between four panel sessions and eight impromptu “unconference” sessions for which participants pitched ideas and convened small groups to discuss them.
I spoke on a panel about the right to offend, alongside ORG’s Peter Bradwell and The Next Web’s Martin Bryant. Overly broad and outdated legislation, most notably Section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act and Section 127 of the 2003 Communications Act, are regularly used to criminalise freedom of expression both online and offline in the UK. Despite a successful campaign to drop “insulting” words from the grounds on which someone can be prosecuted for offence under Section 5, the fact that neither of these provisions address the speaker’s (or tweeter’s) intentions continues to chill freedom of expression in the UK.
Also troubling is the fact that other states, India and the UAE for example, point to these and other British laws as justification to prosecute offensive expression in their own jurisdictions. I argued that protecting everyone’s fundamental right to freedom of expression is more important than protecting the feelings of a few people who might take offense to satirical, blasphemous or otherwise unsavoury views. For freedom of expression to be preserved in society, potentially offensive expression requires the utmost protection.
Another panel addressed the proposed EU General Data Protection Regulation, which intends to strengthen existing privacy principles set out in 1995 and harmonise individual member states’ laws on data protection. Provisions in the proposal around consent, data portability and the “right to be forgotten” aim to give users greater control of their personal data and hold companies more accountable for their use of it. Many companies that rely on user data oppose the regulation and have been lobbying hard against it with the UK government on their side whereas some privacy advocates argue it does not go far enough.
There were also discussions on the open rights implications of copyright legislation and the UK’s Draft Communications Data bill (AKA Snooper’s Charter), which looks set to make a comeback in the Queen’s speech on May 8.
The “unconference” sessions addressed specific causes for concern around digital rights in the UK and abroad. I participated in a session on strategies for obtaining government data in the UK and another on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008. This Act, along with the Protect America Act of 2007 legalised warrantless wiretapping of foreign intelligence targets. Digital rights activists took notice of the laws because the rise of cloud computing means even internal UK and EU data is potentially susceptible to US surveillance mechanisms.
Other “unconference” sessions focused on anonymity, password security, companies’ terms of service, activism and medical confidentiality.
The full OrgCon North agenda is available here. ORG’s national conference will take place on 8 June and will feature EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow who wrote the much circulated and cited “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996.
Brian Pellot is Digital Policy Adviser for Index on Censorship. Follow him @brianpellot
Against a backdrop of heavy austerity measures in Greece, free speech and the right to protest are being both challenged and undermined. The policies are the result of agreements between the government and the so-called troika, made up of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. Since 2010, steps taken to restore fiscal balance have led to the impoverishment of large segments of society and unemployment has reached new highs: 26.8 per cent in October 2012. At the same time, the rise of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, with an agenda of targeting immigrants, homosexuals and “dissidents” of all kinds, has created palpable social tensions. Police repress protests and political activity by a range of groups, including anarchists and leftists, a fact that has been widely documented. These tactics have been regarded by many as evidence that the government is adopting an authoritarian stance when it comes to criticism and dissent.
The current government, run by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s conservative New Democracy Party, took office in June 2012. In a report published in July 2012, Police Violence in Greece: Not just “Isolated Incidents”, Amnesty International stated:
The failure of the Greek authorities to effectively address violations of human rights by police has made victims of such violations reluctant to report them. … Between 2009 and the first months of 2012, numerous allegations have been received regarding excessive use of force, including the use of chemical irritants against peaceful or largely peaceful demonstrators, and the use of stun grenades in a manner that violates international standards.
In the report, Amnesty made “urgent recommendations to the Greek authorities”, urging them to ensure that police “exercise restraint and identify themselves clearly during demonstrations” and calling for them to improve “safeguards for those in custody and creating a truly independent and effective police complaints mechanism”. The mainstream media — owned mainly by business leaders seen as having a cosy relationship with politicians — have censored or fired journalists who have attempted to speak out about the costly bailout agreements with the troika.
Those who have reported on allegations of police brutality, such as Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi of the Greek state-owned public radio and television broadcasting corporation ERT have also been targeted. On 9 October 2012, Thanos Dimadis, a correspondent for Greek TV and radio station SKAI, reported that bailout payments had been only “partial” and carried out “under a regime of strict economic surveillance”. Later that day, he received instructions from SKAI TV news director Christos Panagopoulos not to include that information in the afternoon and evening news reports. The text of his story was removed from SKAI TV’s website. Dimadis’s report was annoying for the government, which was keen to prevent details about the bailout from becoming public. Payments from the troika had been suspended since June, after a partial tranche was released. The authorities were worried that the public would believe that payments were conditional on even more stringent austerity measures. Dimadis complained to SKAI’s news directors, threatening to resign if they did not back up his report. He eventually quit.
Dimadis told me that senior management at SKAI argued that the reason they withdrew his report was that the prime minister’s office had dismissed it as false. Moreover, Dimadis’s reactionwas described by SKAI as “over the top”.
Censoring the news
The government’s modus operandi is best illustrated by the Kostas Vaxevanis case. Vaxevanis, an investigative journalist and publisher of Hot Doc magazine, was arrested on 28 October 2012 for publishing the names of over 2000 Greek citizens who held Swiss bank accounts, dubbed the “Lagarde list”. The story focused on alleged tax evasion by wealthy Greeks during a time of economic crisis.
“A few months ago, before the release of the ‘Lagarde list’ and my aggressive arrest, there was an organised attempt to destroy my professional reputation: a publication presenting a fake receipt attempted to incriminate me as being on the payroll of the National Intelligence Service (EYP). I realised I was under heavy surveillance and one night I was ambushed by strangers at my home,”Vaxevanis told me in an interview.
During our discussion, on 26 December 2012, Vaxevanis said free speech in Greece was coming under attack yet again: “It’s not something new. When you have ongoing dealings between politicians and businessmen who own media groups, then it comes as no surprise that journalists are driven to self-censorship. Take a look, for example, at the non-existent coverage of the Reuters story on the Piraeus Bank case. You have such a big story, but what you see in the newspapers instead is an advertisement by the bank.”
On 1 November, Vaxevanis was acquitted and cleared on changes of violating privacy laws. But two weeks later, the prosecutor’s office ordered a retrial, claiming the original verdict was “legally flawed”. He could face up to two years’ imprisonment if he is sentenced. In April 2012, Reuters reported on an investigation into documents, including financial statements and property records, relating to Michalis Sallas, executive chairman of Piraeus Bank, and his wife, Sophia Staikou. The press report said “the couple may also be emblematic of the lack of transparency and weak corporate governance that have fuelled Greece’s financial problems”.
But according to journalist Apostolis Fotiadis, no major national or international media outlet reported on the lawsuit filed by Piraeus Bank against Reuters, though the New York Times anda couple of independent journalists attended the trial, including Fotiadis. The ruling is still pending.
On 29 October 2012, a popular morning talk show on the Greek state broadcasting corporation, ERT, was suddenly suspended, following a decision by ERT’s general director of news, Aimilios Liatsos. Shortly before the show was dropped, Kostas Arvanitis, co-presenter of the programme, and his colleague Marilena Katsimi had made comments on air about the minister of public order’s response to an article published in the British newspaper the Guardian written by Helena Smith.
Arvanitis told me:
I’ve been working as a journalist for 25 years. I’ve never experienced anything like this — not to this extent and with such intensity, at least. I consider what happened as aggressive meddling by the political system. It’s becoming more and more clear: every question that is different, every perspective that is different is considered provocative. You can understand what’s happening if you take a careful look at the media coverage of strikes.
Influential columnists and unsigned editorials very often neglect the reasons lower and middle working classes decide to go on strike. Instead of shedding light on their requests, these outlets prefer to present the strikes as instances of “abusing the public space” or “disturbing public peace”. This is the typical official government response as well. In the broader context, of course, this approach fails to report on the growing pressure on workers — on those who still have a job but with reduced salaries, and on those without one.
A Guardian article written by Maria Margaronis was published on 9 October and mentioned allegations of police brutality against protesters. It also referred to and confirmed an earlier article,published on 28 September, written by Helena Smith, that quoted ‘analysts, activists and lawyers’ as saying that the “far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group”.
Margaronis also wrote:
Fifteen anti-fascist protesters arrested in Athens during a clash with supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn have said they were tortured in the Attica General Police Directorate (GADA) — the Athens equivalent of Scotland Yard — and subjected to what their lawyer describes as an Abu Ghraib-style humiliation. If it hadn’t been for the Guardian stories, it is highly unlikely that Golden Dawn’s purported connection with the police would have reached a foreign audience — or the Greek public. The fact that these claims never made the Greek press and that Arvanitis was censored for simply commenting on one of the articles shows just how prevalent censorship is in Greece today.
Dimitris Katsaris is a lawyer for four of the protesters who alleged that they were tortured in GADA after they were arrested during the 30 October protest. He says the way the situation has been handled is a clear “indication of censorship … interviews with the anti-fascists took place in a climate of terror; at the end, the policemen tried to grab me and push me away while I was complaining to them. All of this has been recorded.” However, the censorship didn’t stop there.
Ignoring the truth
Minister of Public Order Nikos Dendias claimed on SKAI TV talk show New Folders on 16 October that the Guardian report on police brutality was false, and threatened to sue the British paper if no proof of torture was found. He questioned the source of the photographs in Margaronis’s article — which showed an injured protester — and claimed that since the anti-fascists hadn’t gone on record with their names and reports, and hadn’t filed a lawsuit against the police, the Guardian was not justified in publishing the story.
Dendias also denied assertions that the arrested protesters were afraid to go on record because they had been threatened by police or extremist Golden Dawn supporters. According to Katsaris, although SKAI and the New Folders’ presenter Alexis Papahelas were already in possession of the photographs indicating police brutality at the time they interviewed Dendias, they did not report on the evidence or broadcast the photographs; had it not been for SYRIZA MP Dimitris Tsoukalis’s intervention on the show, the photos wouldn’t have been shown on air. “From the moment the Guardian’s report was published,” Katsaris says, “I was in contact with New Folders’ editor-in-chief. A week before the show I was providing him photos and evidence that proved torture by the police.” Katsaris says he called the editor-in-chief and asked him to intervene, but after many calls, he was told there was “‘no sufficient airtime” to provide the other side of the case. “So I could not contrast the ministers’ claims. I even asked them, given the material they had, to question the minister in a fair journalistic manner. They didn’t.”
It seems that every time a story about political actions by anti-fascist protesters unfolds, the censorship machinery of the government and Golden Dawn is set in motion. Niko Ago, an Albanian national who had been working as a journalist in Greece for 20 years, faced deportation after publishing a report about alleged criminal activity by Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, who is a member of parliament. Ago revealed that Kasidiaris was facing charges for allegedly participating in a 2007 attack on a postgraduate student and for illegal possession of a firearm .Since then, Ago has been receiving threatening emails containing defamatory and racist comments, some of which he published, including one that said “Fuck you, Albanian … all you fucking Albanians are going to get what you deserve.”
Muzzling grassroots dissent
A great deal of pressure has also been brought to bear on independent, non-corporate media collectives or individuals who offer grassroots coverage. On 20 December 2012 and on 9 January 2013, police operations were carried out at the Villa Amalias squat in Athens, which has been an important meeting place for alternative political movements for the last 23 years, and at the Radiozones of Subversive Expression, an Athens-based radio station at the University of Economics and Business (ASOEE). Anarchists, leftists and political dissidents used both sites to organise labour, anti-fascist and antiracist rallies. As part of the operations connected with the ASOEE raid, in late December, anti-riot squads and police targeted immigrant street vendors originally from Nigeria, Morocco and Bangladesh who were selling pirated CDs and wooden animal figurines, as well as those who were regarded as supposedly condemning Greece to an economic decline, as the Radiozones website put it. The government, as well as Golden Dawn, tends to regard the economic activities of immigrants as detrimental to the national economy and as a threat to local workers.
Last October, during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Greece, nearly 100 arrests took place, as Avgi newspaper reported. During the 6-7 November general strike, a group of parliamentarians from SYRIZA denounced the massive presence of undercover police on the streets of Athens. According to the coalition, they were both acting as provocateurs among peaceful protesters and arresting people who simply looked “suspicious”. The policy of pre-emptive arrests has been repeatedly called unconstitutional by human rights organisations, including the Hellenic League for Human Rights.
Tomasz Grzyb/Demotix
During the annual Athens’ Polytechnic School rally on 17 November, dozens of pre-emptive arrests were reported on the website of the weekly political newspaper Kontra and activist websites documented many individual complaints. Indymedia Athens, the local collective of the international grassroots and activists network, published two complaints from citizens arrested on the day of the rally. In both cases, individuals were detained before the demonstration and were kept in custody for five hours without being allowed to contact a lawyer.
Mainstream media failed to report the events, while the government officially ignored complaints. Most news on the events came from blogs and free expression activists.
Online censorship
This systematic abuse is also taking place in the online environment. After posting a Facebook page that ridiculed a well-known Greek Orthodox monk, in late September 2012, a 27-year-old man was arrested on charges of‘”malicious blasphemy and religious insult”. Many online activists and commentators reflected that the page, called Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian (which intentionally combines the name of the monk with a popular Greek food), angered members of Golden Dawn, who called for the man’s arrest under Greece’s anti-blasphemy laws. Free expression advocates responded, with the hashtag #FreeGeronPastitios trending on Twitter, and a petition addressed to parliament calling for the immediate release of the Facebook user was circulated online Vassilis Sotiropoulos, a lawyer and blogger specialising in internet legislation, writes:
“The legislature refuses to address the issue of internet censorship, thereby allowing law enforcers (prosecutors, police officers, judges and lawyers) to freely interpret and utilise the existing legal tools. This phenomenon has sometimes led to misunderstandings, which restrict individual rights of freedom of expression and privacy. Sotiropoulos added that the case of Elder Pastitsios provided perhaps the first example in Greece of an internet company disclosing information to the government in order to identify an individual accused of ‘alleged offences relating to religious satire’.
When considering freedom of speech as a universal human right, it is important to comprehend the social and economic context of our times. Currently, the political and economic elites, in Greece but elsewhere in Europe as well, are repositioning themselves within a capitalist system that is undergoing a continuous transformation.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, William I Robinson, Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued that we are currently living through a phase of capitalism where “nation-state constraints” no longer apply. He stated that the “the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s”, are now being effectively and successfully undermined.
Historically, during periods when there have been attempts to devalue the working class, there have also been challenges to the fundamental right to voice dissent, which has had a direct impact on efforts to improve living conditions. The current economic crisis, then, fits this model; it can also be used as an effective tool for the far right and those using fascist rhetoric to attack immigrants and workers.
Freedom of speech and protest in Greece must, then, be seen in very specific terms. The right to free expression is being systematically and effectively challenged by formidable political and economic agendas. It is crucial that activists, journalists and those being censored and abused continue to make their voices heard.
Christos Syllas is a freelance journalist in Athens. He tweets from @csyllas
Egyptian Salafi preacher Ahmed Mahmoud Abdulla — known as Abou Islam — recently made remarks justifying sexual violence against female protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, claiming that women who join protests are asking “to get raped”. The preacher, who owns private religious television channel Al-Ummah, has previously stirred controversy when he burnt a Bible outside the US Embassy in Cairo during last year’s protests over anti-Islam film the Innocence of Muslims.
In a video posted online last Wednesday, Abdulla said that women who join the protests are “either crusaders who have no shame or widows who have noone to control them”. He also described them as “devils”, and added that “they talk like monsters”.
A protester chants during a march against sexual harassment
A few days before he made the controversial statements, at least 19 women were reportedly gang raped in Tahrir Square during a Friday protest marking the anniversary of the January, 2011 mass uprising that toppled authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak. One woman was hospitalised after attackers used a knife to cut her genitals.
Risking stigma and breaking an age-old taboo on sexual violence, many of the women have since spoken out, giving disturbing testimonies of the attacks in interviews published in newspapers and broadcast on radio and television. In a show of solidarity and support for the rape victims, hundreds of women protesters meanwhile staged a rally in downtown Cairo on Wednesday, protesting sexual harassment and demanding an end to sexual violence.
“Women and girls are a red line,” the protesters chanted. Some of the demonstrators brandished kitchen knives to send a message that they were capable of defending themselves.
Sexual harassment has plagued Egypt for decades. In 2008, a study by the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights (ECWR) revealed that more than 80 per cent of Egyptian women have been subjected to sexual harassment. Since Egypt’s revolution two years ago, there has been a surge in sexual violence against women, and rights activists say that harassment over the past two years has become “more violent and more organised”. The warn that the phenomenon has now reached “epidemic proportion”.
Nehad Abou Komsan, Chairperson of ECWR said that she believes the rise in the number of reported incidents since the revolution may be due to the fact that “in the freer post-revolution environment, more women are willing to speak out against harassment”. In the past, victims of harassment or sexual assault rarely reported the incidents for fear of being blamed or stigmatised. Since the revolution however, both women and the media have broken their silence. In recent months, the issue has been publicly debated a number of times in TV talk shows and has been tackled by local dailies.
The first time such assaults were reported in the press was during Egypt’s 2005 presidential elections, when female journalists were molested and stripped by what were believed to be security forces in plain clothes hired to attack the journalists. The following year, a brutal mob attack on girls celebrating Eid Al Fitr in downtown Cairo sent shockwaves across the nation, bringing the issue of harassment to light.
On 11 February 2011 — the night former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced out — CBS Correspondent Lara Logan was sexuallyassaulted by a mob of 200 to 300 frenzied men in Tahrir Square, as tens of thousands of jubilant opposition activists celebrated Mubarak’s ouster. Since then, a series of sexual assaults by mobs have been reported, targeting mainly prominent female activists and journalists.
The wave of assaults has led rights campaigners to infer that the “targeted and systematic attacks are being used by the state to keep women away from the protests”.On 8 March 2011, scores of women demanding equal rights at a rally marking International Women’s Day were verbally abused and shoved by bearded men who shouted at them to go home. The following day, several female protesters arrested by the army near Tahrir Square were electrocuted and subjected to humiliating “virginity checks” performed by a male doctor. Samira Ibrahim, one of the young protesters subjected to such a test filed a lawsuit against the then-ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. She won the case and the military promised that such tests would not be performed on female detainees in military prisons in the future. She however, lost a second case against the military doctor she had accused of performing the tests, who was acquitted by a military court. In December 2011, another female protester was stripped down to her bra, dragged by soldiers and beaten during a protest outside the parliament building. A video of the “girl in the blue bra” went viral on the internet , provoking a public outcry and a wave of anti-military protests.
Sexual harassment has increased since protests calling for “the downfall of the Islamist regime” began at the end of last month. The surge in sexual violence in the protest areas has given rise to informal groups like Tahrir Bodyguard and Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault— initiatives set up by volunteers and rights activists who patrol Tahrir Square during protests, keep track of sexual assault incidents and report them to rights organisations. The volunteers also try and protect female protesters by forming human chains around them or by coming to the rescue of women who are under attack. In their neon vests and helmets, Tahrir Bodyguard members are easy to spot.
Many activists believe that paid thugs are responsible for the spike in recent harassment, which they say is being used to keep female protesters out of Tahrir Square and away from the Presidential Palace.
In a press release issued last Wednesday, Amnesty International stated that rights activists believe that “the state may be behind the organised and coordinated attacks which are aimed at silencing women and excluding them from public spaces.” In most of the assault incidents, similar tactics have been used by the perpetrators to “intimidate and degrade the women”, the statement added.
Morsi’s Islamist supporters meanwhile blame the attacks on former regime loyalists who, they say,” hire thugs to tarnish the image of Islamists”.
“Violence was used by the old regime to silence dissenters. Now, old regime remnants are still using the same methods to further their interests and turn people against the new regime,” argued Walid El Garf, an interpreter with State TV and supporter of President Mohamed Morsi.
Rights activists have called on the government to bring the perpetrators to justice, asking President Morsi to take urgent action to end the culture of impunity.
The Egyptian president has been quick to respond to the call. Last week, he announced via his official Twitter account that a sexual harassment law was currently being drafted and would soon be ratified by the Cabinet. Prime Minister Hesham Qandil has also annnounced that his cabinet was working with civil society organisations and the state-sponsored National Council for Women (NCW) to finalise the law. Mervat El Tellawy, Secretary General of the NCW, has meanwhile urged victims of sexual assault to report incidents to the Council so that legal measures may be taken against the perpetrators. An Interior Ministry source has also said that surveillance cameras would soon be installed in the main squares and on downtown streets to monitor incidents of sexual harassment and assault.
While the increased violence against women has been cause for growing concern, the long-awaited new legislation, the increased willingness of women to speak out and the growing number of NGOs fighting harassment (either by spreading awareness about it, encouraging women to speak out or protecting women during protests) are all encouraging signs of positive change to come. Rights activists welcome the change but insist that more needs to be done to end gender-based discrimination.
“Changing the attitudes of men and women can only take place through education and awareness campaigns, ” said activist Azza Kamel of Fouada Watch, an NGO that has established a round-the-clock hot line for victims to report incidents of sexual harassment, verbal abuse or assaults against women. Kamel also advocates training of the police, traditionally known to take harassment reports lightly . “But above all”she said, there must be zero tolerance for those who incite violence against women (referring to the recent comments by Salafi preacher Abou Islam.)
“Such extremists must be silenced. Incitement is as big a crime as the assault itself”, Kamel added.
Journalist Shahira Amin resigned from her post as deputy head of state-run Nile TV in February 2011. Read why she resigned from the “propaganda machine” here.
