17 Apr 14 | Events
Like many other musicians in Mali, Tinawiren were forced into exile by a blanket ban on all music (including mobile ringtones) introduced when hard line Islamists took control of the country in 2012. Tensions continue and award-winning Johanna Schwartz has been capturing this tale in her latest documentary ‘They Will Have To Kill Us First’.
Join us for a preview of this documentary and schedules permitting, a live link up with Manny Ansar – director of the Festival au Desert and central in making the situation for musicians in Mali known to the world.
Subsequently, we’ll explore artistic freedom from a global and local standpoint with renowned writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik, Belfast based international artist Sinead O’Donnell (just back from China) and Julia Farrington of Index.
When: Saturday 3rd may, 15:30-17:00
Where: Belfast Exposed, Donegall St – part of Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival
Tickets: Free – Reserve Your Place Here
#CQAF14
11 Apr 14 | News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture, United Kingdom, Young Writers / Artists Programme
Protesters gathered outside a Stop Porn Culture conference in March 2014 organised by Gail Dines. Protesters included porn stars, filmmakers, artists, sex workers and supporters who believe in freedom of expression. (Photo: Rachel Megawhat/Demotix)
Last year London Mayor Boris Johnson’s aide, Simon Walsh, was arrested for possession of extreme pornography: depictions of anal fisting and urethral sounding. The respected barrister’ very public prosecution tore his life apart and lost him his jobs. In just 90 minutes the jury threw out his case – Walsh’s images were safe and legally produced.
The law under which he was prosecuted (Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008) was intended to affect only 30 people per year, but over 1,300 were prosecuted in 2012/13 alone. Clarification of what should be classed as “extreme”, promised by the Lords, never materialised. Government lawyers have attacked a wide range of materials, many of which juries consider innocent.
Now the government is sneaking through a vast extension to pornographic prohibition. It’s so vaguely worded that it could cover 50 Shades of Grey (if filmed), Game of Thrones or Florentine statues. Those found guilty of possession could face 3 years in prison and an unlimited fine.
Under the cloud of Cameron’s anti-child abuse crusade, possessing explicit/realistic portrayals of “the non-consensual penetration of a person’s vagina, anus or mouth by another,” real or simulated, will be illegal. The rhetoric that launched Claire Perry’s disastrous internet filtering initiative – the one that blocks abuse support, sex education and suicide helpline websites – also mandated this law. That rhetoric displays utterly muddled thinking, a confusion between stopping child abuse, stopping children accessing adult material and stopping anyone accessing non-mainstream material.
The change’s motivation is laudable. Genuine rape or abuse depictions (i.e. filming real crimes) should be illegal, all agree. Some women’s groups argue exposure to violent pornography affects viewers’ behaviour- RASASC calls the move a “step forward in preventing rapists using rape pornography to legitimise and strategise their crime”.
However, campaigners contend the draft law’s language is too ambiguous. A policy researcher from anti-censorship organisation Backlash argues: “The law will cover much more than the legislators imagine or intend.” Passing this law as an appendage in a “bumper bill (that includes) lots of legitimate concerns – a radical overhaul of probation and legal aid – (means this) very delicate matter isn’t getting appropriate democratic oversight”.
The government’s strategy, using child pornography as a blanket justification, makes effective opposition or refinement impossible. No politician spoke against the amendment in the bill’s readings or committee stage. Which MP, mindful of re-election, would stand for the right to possess violent erotica? Labour support the provision uncritically, denying it appropriate scrutiny.
Such a serious proscription, which might endanger harmless women and men, merits its own public debate, not back-door legislation. Solicitor Myles ‘ObscenityLawyer’ Jackman, who represented Walsh, highlights the dangerous subjectivity of judging pornography “realistic”, plus the “absence of any evidence proving…a causal link” between such material and Cameron’s “normalise(d) sexual violence against women”. A representative survey of 19,000 UK adults cited by three academics shows 1/3 of adult fantasies include domination or submission, and about 5% of Britons fantasise about delivering/experiencing violence. These academics’ parliamentary evidence repeated Jackman’s scepticism of the link between pornography and real-world crime. Groups like Rape Crisis South London and the End Violence Against Women Coalition assert such pornography does promote dangerous beliefs. The government itself “believes such images are unacceptable and most people would regard them as disgusting and deeply disturbing,” implying the majority’s moral distaste is grounds for legislation.
Groups like Sex & Censorship and Backlash protest the bill’s wording and justification, arguing millions of law-abiding kink practitioners might be criminalised for depicting safe, consensual, private acts. Sexual minorities including the LGBT community, bondage enthusiasts, horror-movie recreators and “vampire and goth enthusiasts who use fake blood in roleplay” could be covered, Backlash told me. Even Rackley and McGlynn, the Durham University academics who championed this law for years, criticise the bill’s wording, demanding clarification specifically banning “realistic images”, protection for “private depictions of consensual BDSM activity” and consideration of context.
Sex-positive feminism raises questions over what the bill would achieve. Arguments that violent pornography (and general sexual imagery) warps childhood development, perpetuates objectification and enables rape culture are valid, but attacking one subsection of pornography won’t stop children seeing questionable images. They fill celebrity magazines, tabloids, advertising and primetime TV.
In terms of child protection, then, this may be window-dressing. It’s far more important for schools to promote effective sex education covering consent, gender, identity and relationships, rather than a “see no evil” approach. Such education is woefully lacking and outdated. Meanwhile the government has cut funding for sexual health services for vulnerable teens and youth services, and is attacking endangered women’s panic rooms via the “bedroom tax”.
The government may be simultaneously attacking the harmless, and harming those who are helpless. The extension of extreme pornography censorship is dangerous because it’s had minimal public discussion, the wording is poorly considered, and it’s unlikely to address the problem used to promote it.
This article was published on April 11, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
11 Apr 14 | Egypt, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
The trial of three journalists working for the Al Jazeera English Channel (AJE) was adjourned on Thursday until April 22.
For award-winning Australian journalist Peter Greste, AJE ‘s Cairo Bureau Chief Mohamed Fadel Fahmy (a Canadian-Egyptian) and producer Baher Mohamed who have been locked up behind bars in a Cairo prison for more than 100 days, this means spending twelve more days in a dark, cramped cell with only an hour a day of exercise, fresh air and sunlight.
The AJE journalists are among 20 defendants accused by prosecutors of spreading false news that harms Egypt’s national security and aiding a terrorist organisation–charges the jailed journalists have repeatedly denied.
“There is not a shred of evidence incriminating us,” Mohamed Fahmy shouted out to a group of foreign journalists covering Thursday’s hearing. ” The case is political and we are scapegoats caught up in the middle of the Egypt-Qatar political rift.”
The patience of the three journalists is clearly wearing thin. While they had smiled and joked with family members and journalists attending the previous court sessions, signs of fatigue and frustration were evident on their faces Thursday as they appeared in the makeshift court at the Torah Police Institute, south of Cairo, for a fifth time. After 103 days in detention, their nerves were clearly frayed and Fahmy made no attempt to hide his anger. After the judge rejected his pleas to dismiss the charges against them and release him and his colleagues on bail, Fahmy shouted out from his cage , “Our acquittal won’t be enough! We shall seek compensation from prosecutors for the months we have spent here.”
Fahmy also vowed to expose what he said were ” crimes against humanity” being committed inside the prison walls. He however, refrained from disclosing the details of those crimes, telling journalists that what he and the other defendants say in court “is often taken against us” and results in the maltreatment and abuse of the defendants at the hands of investigators and prison guards .
Thursday’s hearing was briefly interrupted when Khaled Abdel Raouf , one of the defendants, fainted inside his cage and had to be carried away by prison guards. Fahmy later explained that Abdel Raouf’s ailing health was the result of the poor conditions at the Scorpion high security prison where he is being held. “The conditions there are inhumane; the prison is not fit for an animal,” Fahmy complained bitterly.
Fahmy himself had spent a month in solitary confinement at the high security prison before being transferred to Torah Prison where he now shares a cell with Greste and Baher and where conditions are slightly better. Some of the other defendants in the case– including Abdel Raouf and Anas El Beltagy– however, remain at the high security prison where hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood leaders also languish. Unlike the Al Jazeera team, the “Scorpion” defendants are being denied family visits and reading materials and have also complained (in a previous court session ) of torture at a detention camp where they were held immediately after their arrest.
Thursday’s court session opened with the screening of video footage that the prosecution had claimed supported the case against the Al Jazeera news team. The video material that was shown however, clearly had nothing to do with the case. It consisted of content from Sky News Arabia’s coverage of the political crisis in Egypt, a press briefing by a Keyan government official on the September terror attack at a Nairobi shopping mall, and part of a news report on Somali refugees in Nairobi that had earned Greste a Peabody Award. Asked by a journalist how he had felt watching his report in the courtroom, Greste replied, ” If they had played more of it, they would realize this is the type of work we do.”
A defence lawyer in the case told the judge that the charges were not against a terrorist news network that was inciting violence but against well-educated, patriotic young Egyptians .”The case is tarnishing Egypt’s image in the eyes of the world and must come to an end soon,” he insisted.
While the judge could not but dismiss the videos as “unrelated to the case”, he however, ordered another hearing later this month to allow a team of experts more time to review the videos in the presence of the Defence lawyers. His decision drew angry condemnation on social media networks from fellow journalists and internet activists around the world who for weeks had expressed their solidarity with the detained Al Jazeera staff via the Twitter hashtag: #FreeAJStaff .
”What a mockery of justice, Egypt!” retorted Australian broadcaster Mark Colvin (who works for ABC Radio) via his Twitter account. In a news report broadcast on CNN after the session, the on-air reporter sarcastically called it “ a trial by error” , saying that justice had been delayed in Egypt not once but five times.
In a statement released on Wednesday (a day before the court hearing), Amnesty International described the AJE detainees as “prisoners of conscience” and called for their immediate release.
Infuriated by the result of the hearing, Greste said he and the other members of his team were “fed up”, describing the evidence presented against them as “a joke.”
“ We have had enough,” he said. “I am unbelievably frustrated. But we still believe that in the end , justice will prevail.”
This article was published on 11 April 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
04 Apr 14 | About Index, Campaigns, Press Releases
World leaders must commit to keeping invasive surveillance systems and technologies out of the hands of dictators and oppressive regimes, said a new global coalition of human rights organizations as it launched today in Brussels.
The Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports (CAUSE) – which includes Amnesty International, Digitale Gesellschaft, FIDH, Human Rights Watch, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, Privacy International, Reporters without Borders and Index on Censorship – aims to hold governments and private companies accountable for abuses linked to the US$5 billion and growing international trade in communication surveillance technologies. Governments are increasingly using spying software, equipment, and related tools to violate the right to privacy and a host of other human rights.
“These technologies enable regimes to crush dissent or criticism, chill free speech and destroy fundamental rights. The CAUSE coalition has documented cases where communication surveillance technologies have been used, not only to spy on people’s private lives, but also to assist governments to imprison and torture their critics,” said Ara Marcen Naval at Amnesty International.
“Through a growing body of evidence it’s clear to see how widely these surveillance technologies are used by repressive regimes to ride roughshod over individuals’ rights. The unchecked development, sale and export of these technologies is not justifiable. Governments must swiftly take action to prevent these technologies spreading into dangerous hands” said Kenneth Page at Privacy International.
In an open letter published today on the CAUSE website, the groups express alarm at the virtually unregulated global trade in communications surveillance equipment.
The website details the various communication surveillance technologies that have been made and supplied by private companies and also highlights the countries where these companies are based. It shows these technologies have been found in a range of countries such as Bahrain, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Nigeria, Morocco, Turkmenistan, UAE, and many more.
“Nobody is immune to the danger communication surveillance technologies poses to individual privacy and a host of other human rights. And those who watch today, will be watched tomorrow” sadi Karim Lahidji, FIDH President. “The CAUSE has been created to call for responsible regulation of the trade and to put an end to the abuses it enables” he added.
Although a number of governments are now beginning to discuss how to restrict this trade, concerns remain. Without sustained international pressure on governments to establish robust comprehensive controls on the trade based on international human rights standards, the burgeoning proliferation of this intrusive technology will continue – fuelling even further abuses.
“There is a unique opportunity for governments to address this problem now and to update their regulations to align with technological developments” said Tim Maurer at New America’s Open Technology Institute.
“More and more journalists, netizens and dissidents are ending up in prison after their online communications are intercepted. The adoption of a legal framework that protects online freedoms is essential, both as regards the overall issue of Internet surveillance and the particular problem of firms that export surveillance products,” said Grégoire Pouget at Reporters Without Borders.
“We have seen the devastating impact these technologies have on the lives of individuals and the functioning of civil society groups. Inaction will further embolden blatantly irresponsible surveillance traders and security agencies, thus normalizing arbitrary state surveillance. We urge governments to come together and take responsible action fast,” said Wenzel Michalski at Human Rights Watch.
The technologies include malware that allows surreptitious data extraction from personal devices; tools that are used to intercept telecommunications traffic; spygear used to geolocate mobile phones; monitoring centres that allow authorities to track entire populations; anonymous listening and camera spying on computers and mobile phones; and devices used to tap undersea fibre optic cables to enable mass internet monitoring and filtering.
“As members of the CAUSE coalition, we’re calling on governments to take immediate action to stop the proliferation of this dangerous technology and ensure the trade is effectively controlled and made fully transparent and accountable” said Volker Tripp at Digitale Gesellschaft.
NGOs in CAUSE have researched how such technologies end up in the hands of security agencies with appalling human rights records, where they enable security agents to arbitrarily target journalists, protesters, civil society groups, political opponents and others.
Cases documented by coalition members have included:
• German surveillance technology being used to assist torture in Bahrain;
• Malware made in Italy helping the Moroccan and UAE authorities to clamp down on free speech and imprison critics;
• European companies exporting surveillance software to the government of Turkmenistan, a country notorious for violent repression of dissent.
• Surveillance technologies used internally in Ethiopia as well as to target the Ethiopian diaspora in Europe and the United States.
