The internet is now a central feature of everyday life but opinion is still divided on how to make it work for the common good. Earlier today in a panel discussion live streamed from the Council of Europe, Bill Echikson (Google), Simon Milner (Facebook), and Felix Treguer (La Quadrature du Net) debate the gap between responsibility and reality
Chaired by Index’s CEO Kirsty Hughes, you can watch the debate live below.
How can we guarantee freedom of expression online? Should governments monitor their citizens’ lives online in the name of security? Is it acceptable for new software to have inbuilt surveillance capacities? In this new landscape, how do we protect free speech online – and who can we count on to do so?
This panel discussion was jointly organised by Index on Censorship and the Parliamentary Assembly Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media and the UK Chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers
News that Peter Hain MP may face contempt of court charges in Northern Ireland is disturbing, but sadly not especially surprising.
Post-GFA Northern Ireland does not have a notably good record on free speech and privacy. Journalists such as Suzanne Breen and Henry McDonald have been put under pressure to reveal their sources, and MP Ian Paisley Junior has faced contempt charges after refusing to divulge confidential correspondence with a constituent.
Hain is facing prosecution under common law contempt charges for, essentially, being rude about a judge. In his memoir published earlier this year, the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Wales described Lord Justice Girvan as acting as if he was “off his rocker” in a 2006 ruling.
The Attorney General of Northern Ireland is now pursuing Hain and his publisher Biteback publishing (run by Iain Dale) for contempt, claiming Hain’s comments “constitute unwarranted abuse of a judge in his judicial capacity that undermines the administration of justice in this jurisdiction, and consequently constitute a contempt of court” .
Essentially the suggestion is that we should not criticise judges, lest we shatter the faith of the wider community in the courts. Leave aside the obvious fact that Northern Ireland’s courts are not exactly seen as citadels of justice by many people in the country, and we’re still left with the notion that a branch of the state should be beyond criticism. This is a dangerous idea, and an absurd move by the Attorney General. No matter what your political allegiance, it is vital that Hain and Dail are supported.
A controversial academic paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics has triggered a torrent of abuse, including threats of violence and death.
Francesca Minerva and Alberto Giubilini, who wrote After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?, argue that given that those who accept abortion typically do so for reasons that have nothing to do with the foetus’s health (even where the foetus clearly is a potential person), then where abortion is permissible, killing a newborn should be permissible, on grounds of consistency. Not a palatable conclusion for many of us, though it could be read as a Swiftian modest proposal that ultimately attacks the morality of permitting abortion.
But should we be free to discuss killing babies at all? Is that on a par with publishing articles that are pro-pedophilia? Julian Savulescu, the journal’s editor, has defended the decision to publish on the grounds that the goal of the publication is not to present an ultimate truth or a simplistic view based on morals, but rather to present well-reasoned arguments based on widely accepted premises. In this spirit, Savulescu is equally ready to publish coherent responses to the controversial article.
This is a test case for the liberal defence of free speech so eloquently advocated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. Mill believed that dissenting, provocative and challenging voices jolt us out of the complacency of our dead dogmas. Mill writes that “Both teachers and learners go to sleep as soon as there is no enemy in the field”. Unless we have had our fundamental views challenged, we are likely to hold them in a drowsy fashion, scarcely aware of why we believe what we do.
Most of us believe that killing babies is wrong; here’s an argument that suggests that if you think that abortion on non-medical grounds is sometimes acceptable, then you probably ought to believe that infanticide is sometimes acceptable. It’s clear from the context of presentation in an academic journal, too, that this isn’t an incitement to actual infanticide, but rather a provocative move in an ongoing debate, a plea for consistency. No doubt there will be a flurry of refutations submitted to the journal.
For Mill, as for many who defend free expression, the limit of free expression is the point where someone incites harm. But the only people directly inciting harm here are those issuing death threats. They seem to have confused a contribution to an academic debate with an invitation to kill. Here context is all and quotation out of context likely to lead to misunderstanding. Yet we can take even this category mistake as a stimulus to clarify what it is we value about freedom of expression in this context and where its limits lie.
Julian Savulescu has taken just this opportunity: “Free speech” he told me, “is not valuable in itself — hate speech, for example, is not something we should seek to protect. Rational argument that seeks to engage others — that is worth protecting.”
The 80 people living at the St Paul’s site and the 40-50 living at an abandoned school building near Old Street were greeted in the small hours of the morning with police vans, bailiffs, riot cops and a gaggle of press photographers. Supporters received text messages and tweets from people on site and those who could make the post-midnight journey came down to stand in support or rubberneck over the police lines set up around it. Occupy’s tech team began a long night of tweeting and livestream broadcasts. As the sun rose over a hazy London, the bulldozers arrived at the School of Ideas and before most people had finished their breakfasts and set off on their morning commutes, the abandoned Islington school was no more. And St Paul’s was, for the first time since 15 October 2011, clear of tents and banners.
After a decision from the Court of Appeal was passed to prevent an appeal for protesters to remain encamped on the St Paul’s site, life there began to show signs of strain. The weekend before the eviction, most of the residential tents were still in place but some of the larger structures at the side of the cathedral were taken down or relocated. People were pre-empting a “dawn raid” — as in the way the Parliament Square anti-war encampments were evicted. It was no longer a case of if, but when.
So when the floodlights arrived just after midnight with its chorus of riot police and neon-vested bailiffs, they were expected. Some people chose to wear their tents instead of have them destroyed, and others built a structure out of pallets and stood on it in token resistance to the eviction. Police arrested 23 protesters but for the most part, people decamped to the remaining Occupy site at Finsbury Square and began the process of asking “what now?”
The High Court’s decision in favour of the City of London Corporation was an attempt to put the nail in the coffin of the Occupy movement’s protest and dissent. The swathe of evictions across all Occupy sites is the state’s way of trying to bury it. Ahead of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the erection of tents and the possession of sleeping equipment on Olympic sites were declared unlawful. Reports that government ministers are drafting legislation loosely based on part 3 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 and that they will invoke the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 to protect Olympic branding and sponsors make this government’s position on what matters crystal clear. This is legislation for the short term that will carry the weight of precedent against your human right to protest in the long term. Do not mess with the money machine. You can have “peaceful protest” but the minute you start cutting near the bone, you will be stopped. Your free speech ends where the profit margin begins.
The bleary eyes of the occupiers are dead today. Their bodies are slumped in exhaustion on a muddy plot of land next to a car park and the Bloomberg building. But their heels are digging into the soil as they vow to carry on.
It matters little what you personally feel about the global Occupy Movement and London’s part in it. You could be devoted to it as a zeitgeist, you can maintain that occupation should be a political tactic used to achieve tangible change or you could say that the sight of riot police on the steps of St Paul’s cathedral at 2am was the most radical thing to come out of that plot of land. The truth is this — gambling by financial institutions around the world has crippled the many for the benefit of the few. The blind eye turned by governments to this wanton destruction of lives shows that our will as the people to form the basis of authority of government has been raped. We are no longer equal before the law.
