14 Jun 13 | Comment, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
Russia’s new blasphemy law is censorship under the guise of protection for believers, says Padraig Reidy
In his speech on Russia’s Constitution Day in December 2012, Vladimir Putin bemoaned the decline of spiritual values.
“Today, Russia suffers an apparent deficit of spiritual values,” said Putin, as his Orthodox ally Patriarch Kirill nodded along.
The former KGB man continued: “We must wholeheartedly support the institutions that are the carriers of traditional values.”
So far, so Mother Russia.
What was interesting was that the president went on to say that it would be “amoral” to create laws governing spirituality. Putin commented ““Any attempts of the government to intervene with people’s beliefs are effectively a sign of totalitarian rule. It’s absolutely out of the question. It’s not our way.”
This would seem at odds with this week’s passing of a new blasphemy law, which will impose prison sentences and fines on people convicted of “public actions expressing clear disrespect for society and committed with the goal of offending religious feelings of the faithful”.
But it is in fact very much in the mould of the current trend for religious defamation law.
Traditionally, blasphemy was the crime of causing offence to God himself; now it is recast as causing offence to believers. Blasphemy laws are here to protect us. Look back at the testimony durings Pussy Riot’s trial, and again and again you hear the stories of poor innocent believers who were shocked by the women’s behaviour; even if the Patriarch and the president had wished to forgive the punk group, they had to think of the poor pious babushkas who had been rocked to the very core by an act that some admitted to not actually having witnessed.
Shamefully, Ireland has led the way in this trend. The Irish Defamation Act of 2009 established definitions and punishments for blasphemy where none had previously existed (in spite of the fact that the 1937 constitution recognised blasphemy as a crime, it did not define what blasphemy was, and thus, there had never been a conviction for blasphemy, or even a full trial, in the country).
The Irish law defines religious defamation as any action likely to cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion”, with fines of up to e25,000 payable by those found guilty.
The wording of the Irish bill was used as a template in the Organisation of Islamic Conference’s attempts to get the UN to recognise religious defamation as a crime.
Of course, the old-fashioned definitions of blasphemy still exist: in Egypt this week, writer Amer Saber was given a five-year sentence for “contempt of religion” for authoring a short story collection called “Where is God?”. And in Syria, a teenager was reportedly shot in front of his family merely for uttering the name of Muhammad. The abuses of blasphemy law in Pakistan are only too well known.
But the justification for blasphemy laws, as with many other censorious impulses, is increasingly tied up in the idea that people should be protected from offence, from controversy, even from being challenged.
Perhaps the most offensive notion is that we cannot deal with ideas, even aggressively expressed ideas, that we disagree with. Government’s such as Putin’s are all too happy to shut down free speech and repackage censorship as benign protection.
13 Jun 13 | China, Digital Freedom
China has censored an image of Winnie the Pooh strolling with Tigger, after it went viral on popular Chinese microblogging site, Sina Weibo.
The image was circulated after bloggers noticed the similarities between a photo snapped this week of President Barack Obama and Chinese premier Xi Jinping and an illustration of the cartoon characters.
China’s censors are known for their lack of a sense of humour: earlier this month, censors deleted a photoshopped version of a famous picture showing a single protester standing before a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square, where the tanks were replaced with large rubber ducks.
Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin
13 Jun 13 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia
Pussy Riot – videos of their “Punk Prayer” protest are blocked by Russian authorities
April saw a bizarre variety of sites blocked by the Russian authorities or internet service providers – among them Pussy Riot videos, Wikipedia, the Yandex search engine, Blogger blogs, sites promoting bribery and corruption, sites of land developers and the humorous anti-encyclopaedia Absurdopedia (the Russian version of Uncyclopedia). Even the parody website Gospoisk (gossearch.ru) was blocked. The site is a fake search engine, ostensibly created with government support: when a visitor types a query in the search box, he or she is asked to enter his first and last name, patronymic, passport details, address and the reason for the request. Compiled by Andrei Soldatov
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07 Jun 13 | Middle East and North Africa
With the 14 June presidential election approaching, Iran’s leaders are moving to prevent the outburst of protest that followed the disputed 2009 poll by tightening access to the web and silencing “negative” news. Raha Zahedpour reports
Iran’s state television this week held the second of three presidential debates. Unlike the 2009 debates, no one-on-one debating was allowed. In these debates, resembling game shows, candidates have less than five minutes to talk about their policies on different issues, and other candidates were chosen at random to question the speaker. Candidates were then left with very limited time to conclude after the end of questions.
The eight qualified candidates could not escape Iran’s strict censorship during their campaigns. Iranian state TV censored reformist candidate Mohammad Reza Aref’s speech in a programme broadcast for the Iranian diaspora on 26 May. The recording was halted and not resumed.
In another programme on the domestic Channel One, conservative candidate Mohsen Rezaei was censored for talking about how unemployment devastated a family who lost their children in the war, and were led to suicidal thoughts as a result of pressures from the economic crisis and inflation.
State television censored documentaries made by the campaigns of each candidate — including Saeed Jalili, Ayatollah Khamenei’s favoured candidate — showing that even a favourite could not escape the sharp blades of censorship.
Iran carefully vetted the candidates in this year’s race: Hashemi Rafsanjani and Rahim Mashaei were disqualified from the upcoming presidential election by Iran’s Guardian Council. Hashemi Rafsanjani, 78, was dropped from the race for being too old. Mashaei was disqualified because he promotes nationalism and nationalist Islam — despite being a part of hard-liners faction.
Even before the election’s candidates were announced, Iran’s ruling elite moved to slow internet connections, blocked access to Gmail accounts, and clamped down on circumvention tools. All over the country, Iranians are struggling to access social media, or even check their email.
Authorities have also tightened up web censorship — censoring even influential political figures close to the government. A blog belonging to one of Rafsanji’s advisors was blocked recently. The move raised eyebrows, because Hashemi Rafsanji is key revolutionary figure, a former president, a former head of Parliament and the current chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council of Iran.
Iran also shut down sites aligned to presidential hopeful Efandiar Rahim Mashaei.
Meanwhile, Ahmadi Moghadam, the chief commander of Police, said that the authorities would not allow any distractions around the election. Following the announcement, jailed journalists and bloggers who were released after being imprisoned and sentenced after the 2009 uprising were arrested once more. Former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi are still under house arrest.
Iran’s press has also faced enormous challenges in reporting on the election. The ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance invited journalists to a seminar about what could be reported. Officials emphasised that “negative news” should not be published. Subsequently, some papers received official notices for their content. The websites of reformist newspapers Mardom Saalaary and Bahar were blocked, even though print editions of the newspapers continued to be distributed
In light of restrictions, rights organisations have cast doubt on the election’s freedom. In a 24 May statement Human Rights Watch asked, “How can Iran hold free elections when opposition leaders are behind bars and people can’t speak freely?”
Raha Zahedpour is a journalist and researcher living in London. She writes under a pseudonym
