Index Index – International free speech round up 31/01/13

31 Jan 13 | Uncategorized

A woman who said she was raped by state security forces and the journalist who interviewed her were charged by police on 29 January in Somalia. Journalist Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim could face four years imprisonment for insulting a government body and two years for inducing false evidence. Abdiaziz has been charged with insulting a government body, simulating a criminal offence and making a false accusation. The alleged rape victim’s husband and two others who introduced her to the journalist were charged with assisting her to secure a profit for the rape allegation and assisting her to evade investigation. The sentences are five and four year terms respectively. The next hearing will be held on 2 February. Abdiaziz had interviewed the woman on 8 January after she said she was raped by soldiers at a displaced persons camp in Mogadishu. He was detained by the Central Investigations Department of the police two days later.

lawtonjm - Flickr

Non-thinker (2012) by Aida Makoto – A less controversial piece from the Japanese artist

The New York Times has claimed it was hacked by Chinese officials over a period of four months. The attacks are thought to have come from hackers connected to the military in a possible retaliation to a series of stories run by the newspaper —  alluding to the vast wealth accumulated by premier of the state council Wen Jiabao. The hackers entered into the Times’s systems, accessing information on the personal computers of 53 employees, including China correspondents. Mandiant, an internet security company hired by the newspaper on 7 November, said the attacks were likely to have been part of a spy campaign, after discovering that the computers used for the attacks were the same used for Chinese military attacks on US military contractors in the past. Hackers began attacking the Times on 13 September, around the time the Wen Jiabao story was in its final pre-publishing stages.

A former policeman in the Ukraine has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of an investigative journalist, it was reported on 30 January. Oleksiy Pukache was the fourth person to be charged with the murder of Georgiy Gongadze, after his dismembered body was discovered in 2000. The other three were sentenced to 12 and 13 years. As Pukache was sentenced, he announced that equal blame for the murder should be placed on the country’s former president Leonid Kuchma and then presidential chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn.

Gongadze’s headless body was found in the woods six weeks after he was kidnapped in Kiev — a case which caused huge demonstrations and helped prompt the 2004 Orange Revolution. A lawsuit taken out against Kuchma in March 2011 was dismissed when prosecutors deemed it unlawful.

A Chinese man who was sent to a labour camp for making a joke about politician Bo Xilai has received minor damages after his compensation appeal was rejected. Fang Hong was sentenced to re-education for a year in 2011 for posting a poem online mocking the disgraced politician and his then police chief Wang Lijun. Chongqing’s Dianjiang county court rejected Fang’s request for around £37,400 in psychological damages, instead offering him just over £5,800, as well as rejecting his appeal for a public apology. This was the first known case of officials compensating for Bo-era abuses. Fang said he would ask his lawyers about appealing the ruling, but critics said his initial appeal was rejected to prevent a stream of further claims. Fang was freed in 2012 following the fall of Bo — whose wife Gu Kailai was convicted of the murder of British Businessman Neil Heywood in November 2011.

An art exhibition in Japan depicting cannibalism and Sadomasochism has prompted a debate over artistic freedom of expression. Aida Makoto’s  Monument for Nothing exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo on 29 January caused protests from Japanese organisation People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence, who wrote to museum director Nanjo Fumio to demand Makoto’s work be removed. Some of the artists pieces, depicted a giant blender filled with naked women, as well as Japanese pensioners playing croquet with severed heads. Makoto is said to use pornography to prompt people to look beneath Japan’s calm exterior and examine the darker elements of Japanese culture.

Chinese journalists back at work after “tacit agreement” with censors

16 Jan 13 | China

After a week of protests and walkouts over a censored Near Year editorial, and rigorous calls for press freedom, journalists at China’s Southern Weekly have gone back to work. A normal edition of the paper was published last Thursday.

Outrage over the actions of Guangdong’s propaganda chief, Tuo Zhen, seemed to reach another climax when The Beijing News, an offshoot newspaper of Southern Weekly, refused to print an editorial taken from the nationalistic Global Times blaming the protests on “activists outside the media industry” instead of on the censorship apparatus.

Dai Zigeng, the editor-in-chief, was said to have nearly resigned over the editorial. However, the BBC reported this:

When the BBC visited The Beijing News offices, the chief editor’s office manager and several of the paper’s journalists issued assurances that Mr Dai was still at work. Reports that protesters were camping outside The Beijing News offices also appeared to be untrue.

The newspaper printed the directive as a news item the next day.

Maria Repnikova, an academic who writes on state-media relations at Oxford University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that so far the Southern Weekly affair has not helped to make any waves in press freedoms here because

These journalists [at Southern Weekly] did not confront the Central Publicity Department or the Party-state in Beijing. After a few days of protest, when they quietly settled the dispute with local authorities, some netizens were outraged that they didn’t explain their decision to their supporters.

An editorial entitled Dim Hopes for a Free Press in China published on Monday in the New York Times and written by Xiao Shu, a commentator for Southern Weekly for six years, notes that ever since Tuo Zhen started overseeing the Guangdong party propaganda last May, he has “micromanaged every aspect of media operations.”

Xiao Shu went on to say that under Tuo “Guangdong retreated into its darkest period since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening up’ policies in the late 1970s.” Xiao was told to quit in March 2011, as authorities grew nervous of Arab-Spring inspired dissent.

It would seem that some of the most daring journalists in China have settled for a deal which, as Xiao Shu described, was “ending pre-publication censorship by the Communist Party’s propaganda arm in Guangdong Province and permitting greater editorial independence.” I asked Antony Tao, founder and blogger at Beijing Cream, a well-regarded China news blog, how credible these assertions were.

“It sounds good on paper, but I wouldn’t put much stock in ‘tacit’ agreements,” he said. “We should also keep in mind that in most Chinese newsrooms, to the best of my knowledge, editors and censors work in symbiosis to keep themselves out of trouble. No one wants to draw the ire of higher-ranking censors.”

According to Tao, a settlement was best for editors and journalists involved. As for what it means for media freedoms in China, Tao said:

“I don’t think the key players in this drama were ever as concerned about advocating for expanded media rights across China as China watchers perhaps wanted them to be.”