16 Sep 21 | Awards, Egypt, Fellowship, Fellowship 2021
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/4vNPXbJEmyw”][vc_column_text]Abdelrahman “Moka” Tarek is a human rights defender from Egypt, who focuses on defending the right to freedom of expression and the rights of prisoners.
Tarek has experienced frequent harassment from the Egyptian authorities as a result of his work in defence of freedom of expression. In 2012, he was accused of organising a peaceful demonstration without a permit and subsequently placed in detention for five months. He was detained for four years on the same charge between 2015 and 2018, during which he was subject to frequent torture and solitary confinement.
In September 2019, Tarek was arbitrarily detained and tortured by the Egyptian security forces. Since then he spent several extended periods of time in prison, during which he was subject to ill-treatment including the use of electric shocks. His family have not been allowed to visit him since March 2019 and he has only had limited access to his lawyer. Tarek’s mental and physical health has suffered as a result of the prolonged imprisonment and systematic mistreatment.
He has remained in prison since September 2020 and in December 2020, a new case was brought against him on terrorism-related charges. On the same day as the new case was brought, he began a hunger strike to protest the Prosecutor General’s decision. In January 2021, he was transferred to the prison hospital due to a deterioration in his health caused by a hunger strike lasting 53 days. He remains in prison.[/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/xBBFy9AWQ4E”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
15 Sep 21 | Awards, Egypt, Fellowship 2021, Kyrgyzstan, News and features, Niger, United Kingdom
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_images_carousel images=”117457,117451,117452,117454,117456,117458,117459,117460,117461,117462,117468,117469,117470,117471,117472,117463″ img_size=”full” speed=”3500″ autoplay=”yes”][vc_column_text]The winners of Index on Censorship’s 2021 Freedom of Expression awards have been announced at a ceremony in London hosted by actor, writer and activist Tracy-Ann Oberman.
The Freedom of Expression Awards, which were first held in 2000, celebrate individuals or groups who have had a significant impact fighting censorship anywhere in the world. Winners join Index’s Awards Fellowship programme and receive dedicated training and support. This year’s awards are particularly significant, coming as the organisation celebrates its 50th birthday.
Winners were announced in three categories – art, campaigning and journalism – and a fourth Trustees Award was also presented.
- The 2021 Trustees Award was presented to Arif Ahmed.
Arif Ahmed is a free speech activist and fellow at Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge. In March 2020, Ahmed proposed alterations to the Statement of Free Speech at Cambridge. The proposed amendments were created to make the legislation “clearer and more liberal.” He aimed to protect university campuses as places of innovation and invention. That requires protecting the right to freely and safely challenge received wisdom.
- The 2021 Freedom of Expression Award for Journalism was presented to Samira Sabou.
Samira Sabou is a Nigerien journalist, blogger and president of the Niger Bloggers for Active Citizenship Association (ABCA). In June 2020, Sabou was arrested and charged with defamation under the restrictive 2019 cybercrime law in connection with a comment on her Facebook post highlighting corruption. She spent over a month in detention. Through her work with ABCA, she conducts training sessions on disseminating information on social media based on journalistic ethics. The aim is to give bloggers the means to avoid jail time. Sabou is also active in promoting girls’ and women’s right to freedom of expression, and wants to open her own news agency recruiting young people who want to be innovative in the field of information.
- The 2021 Freedom of Expression Award for Art was presented to Tatyana Zelenskaya
Tatyana Zelenskaya is an illustrator from Kyrgyzstan, working on freedom of expression and women’s rights projects. Zelenskaya has found inspiration for her work in the waves of anti-government protests that have recently erupted across Russia and Kyrgyzstan. In 2020, she created the artwork for a narrative video game called Swallows: Spring in Bishkek, which features a woman who helps her friend that was abducted and forced into an unwanted marriage. The game was downloaded more than 70,000 times in its first month. Its purpose is to break the silence around the issue of bride-kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, with the aim of preventing them altogether.
- The 2021 Freedom of Expression Award for Campaigning was presented to Abdelrahman Tarek
Abdelrahman “Moka” Tarek is a human rights defender from Egypt, who focuses on defending the right to freedom of expression and the rights of prisoners. Tarek has experienced frequent harassment from Egyptian authorities as a result of his work. He has spent longer periods of time in prison and has experienced torture, solitary confinement, and sexual abuse. Authorities have severely restricted his ability to communicate with his lawyer and family. Tarek was arrested again in September 2020 and in December 2020, a new case was brought against him on terrorism-related charges. Tarek began a hunger strike in protest of the terrorism charges. In January 2021, he was transferred to the prison hospital due to a deterioration in his health caused by the hunger strike.
Index on Censorship chief executive Ruth Smeeth said: “As Index marks its 50th birthday it’s clear that the battle to guarantee free expression and free expression around the globe has never been more relevant. Inspired by the tremendous courage of our award winners, we will continue in our mission to defend free speech and free expression around the globe, give voice to the persecuted, and stand against repression wherever we find it”.
Trevor Philips, chair of the Index on Censorship board of trustees said: “Across the globe, the past year has demonstrated the power of free expression. For many the only defence is the word or image that tells the story of their repression; and for the oppressors the sound they fear most is diversity of thought and opinion. Index exists to ensure that in that battle, freedom wins – both abroad, and as this year’s Trustee award demonstrates here at home too.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
24 Dec 20 | Opinion, Ruth's blog
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”115942″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]2020 will undoubtedly be a year studied for generations, a year dominated by Covid-19.
A year in which 1.77 million people have died (as of this week) from a virus none of us had heard 12 months ago.
We have all lived in various stages of lockdown, some of our core human rights restricted, even in the most liberal of societies, in order to save lives.
A global recession, levels of government debt which have never been seen in peacetime in any nation.
Our lives lived more online than in the real world. If we’ve been lucky a year dominated by Netflix and boredom; if we weren’t so lucky a year dominated by the death of loved ones and the impact of long Covid.
Rather than being a year of hope this has been a year of fear. Fear of the unknown and of an illness, not an enemy.
Understandably little else has broken through the news agenda as we have followed every scientific briefing on the illness, its spread, the impact on our health services, the treatments, the vaccines, the new virus variants and the competence of our governments as they try to keep us safe.
But behind the headlines, there have been the stories of people’s actual lives. How Covid-19 changed them in every conceivable way. How some governments have used the pandemic as an opportunity to bring in new repressive measures to undermine the basic freedoms of their citizens. Of the closure of local newspapers – due to public health concerns as well as mass redundancies of journalists due to a sharp fall in revenue.
2020 wasn’t just about the pandemic though.
We saw worldwide protests as people responded under the universal banner of Black Lives Matter to the egregious murder of George Floyd.
In Hong Kong, the CCP enacted the National Security Law as a death knell to democracy and we saw protestors arrested and books removed from the public libraries – all under the guise of “security”.
The world witnessed more evidence of genocidal acts in Xinjiang province as the CCP Government continues to target the Muslim Uighur community.
In France, the world looked on in horror as Samuel Party was brutally murdered for teaching free speech to his students.
Genuine election fraud in Belarus led to mass protests, on many occasions led by women – as they sought free and fair elections rather than the sham they experienced this year.
In America, we lived and breathed the Presidential Election and witnessed the decisive victory of a new President – as Donald Trump continued to undermine the First Amendment, the free press and free and fair democracy.
In Thailand, we saw mass protests and the launch of the Milk Tea Alliance against the governments of Hong Kong, Thailand and Taiwan, seeking democracy in Southeast Asia.
In Egypt, the world witnessed the arrest of the staff of the EIPR for daring to brief international diplomats on the number of political prisoners currently held in Egyptian jails.
Ruhollah Zam was executed by his government for being a journalist and a human rights activist in Iran.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. From Kashmir to Tanzania to the Philippines we’ve heard report after report of horrendous attacks on our collective basic human rights. 72 years after United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we still face daily breaches in every corner of the planet.
While Index cannot support every victim or target, we can highlight those who embody the current scale of the attacks on our basic right to free expression.
Nearly everybody has experienced some form of loneliness or isolation this year. But even so we cannot imagine what it must be like to be incarcerated by your government for daring to be different, for being brave enough to use your voice, for investigating the actions of ruling party or even for studying history.
So, as we come to the end of this fateful year I urge you to send a message to one of our free speech heroes:
- Aasif Sultan, who was arrested in Kashmir after writing about the death of Buhran Waniand has been under illegal detention without charge for more than 800 days;
- Golrokh Emrahimi Iraee, jailed for writing about the practice of stoning in Iran;
- Hatice Duman, the former editor of the banned socialist newspaper Atılım, who has been in jail in Turkey since 2002;
- Khaled Drareni, the founder of the Casbah Tribune, jailed in Algeria for two years in September for ‘incitement to unarmed gathering’ simply for covering the weekly Hirak protests calling for political reform in the country;
- Loujain al-Hathloul, a women’s rights activist known for her attempts to raise awareness of the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia;
- Yuri Dmitriev, a historian being silenced by Putin in Russia for creating a memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror and facing fabricated sexual assault charges.
Visit http://www.indexoncensorship.org/JailedNotForgotten to leave them a message.
Happy Christmas to you and yours and here’s to a more positive 2021.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”41669″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
25 Nov 20 | Egypt, News and features
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Kelly and Ennarah in happier times
Two months ago, British documentary filmmaker Jess Kelly was making plans for a happy future. She had just got married and she and her Egyptian husband Karim Ennarah were planning on a life together in London.
Today, the future could hardly be more uncertain. Ennarah is in an Egyptian jail facing charges of belonging to a terrorist group and spreading false news, with the threat of a long jail sentence.
Ennarah’s ‘crime’ was to meet in early November with a group of European diplomats, including from the UK and the Netherlands, to discuss human rights issues in the country. Ennarah works as criminal justice unit director for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. His work focuses on human rights abuses within Egypt’s policing and the criminal justice system.
Speaking to Index, Kelly said, “I was in London on the day of the meeting and we were on the phone. He mentioned he had to get up early and had an important meeting with a couple of diplomats.
“It was typical of him to underplay the importance of these things and also to underplay his role. He joked that he was going to have to wear a suit. I didn’t know then it was going to be such a historic turning point,” said Kelly.
A few days later, Ennarah travelled to the Red Sea town of Dahab for a short break with friends. Kelly planned to join him there.
On the day of his arrival, Ennarah received a phone call to say that his EIPR colleague Mohammad Bashseer had been arrested. He thought about turning around and heading straight back to help but he decided to stay for one night.
Kelly says, “That night he called me, he told me the police had come to his mum’s house and told me to prepare for the worst. He couldn’t couch it in comforting terms.”
A natural advocate
Kelly first met Ennarah in 2009.
“I was doing my degree in Arabic and was spending the second year in Cairo. We were introduced by mutual friends. At the time, he was working for the UN in South Sudan and he started working for EIPR in 2011, just after the revolution. We got together in 2015.”
Ennarah was well suited to his new role.
“He found himself very suited to the job of advocacy,” said Kelly. “His sense of right and wrong was strong and he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of human rights. He is also a very good speaker and can talk to anyone.”
EIPR is one of the few remaining human rights organisations in Egypt.
“Over the years, Karim has supported many journalists who come to him for comment,” said Kelly. “EIPR are the ones in the know, they are the only people taking testimonies and conducting proper research into abuses of human rights, whether of minorities or in the criminal justice system.”
Kelly says that the human rights situation in Egypt has deteriorated over the years and the authorities have been locking up political prisoners at an increasing rate.
“I have made films in most countries in the Middle East – Iraq, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. Egypt is the only place I have never been granted a visa. People see Egypt as a holiday destination where you can drink and people have a good time. It is well known to us in the media that Egypt is the only place that you don’t try and expose things because you will be locked up.”
Someone has to keep fighting
On 18 November, the couple’s concerns materialised. Ennarah was sitting in a restaurant in the Red Sea town when he was arrested by the authorities.
During a four-hour investigation, security forces confiscated his laptop, phone and personal belongings and ordered his pre-trial detention for 15 days on charges of “joining a terrorist group”, “using a social media account to spread false news” and “spreading false news”. The prosecutor said the charges were based on security investigations showing that Ennarah “agreed with a group inside prisons to spread false rumours that could undermine public peace and public safety.”
Ennarah is not alone – Patrick George Zaki, a human rights activist who had previously worked with EIPR, and the organisation’s executive director Gasser Abed El Razek have also been arrested.
“When Patrick Zaki was detained in February, it was a huge shock for everyone,” said Kelly. “We discovered that they had interrogated him and had asked about Karim by name.”
Despite this worrying development, Ennarah did not flinch.
“Karim is someone who is not going to run away from anything until he is forced to,” said Kelly. “We spoke about how it wasn’t safe for him but he just was never going to give up this role. There are not many people who can take it one, he would say, someone has to keep fighting.”
He loves Egypt the most
Kelly has not been able to speak with Ennarah or get him a message since his arrest a week ago but she believes emphatically that he will be strong.
“Karim is very resilient and very pragmatic,“ said Kelly. “He will be confident that he has the best people working on his case get him out. He is very strong-willed but I think it is going to be very hard for him to think about his mum and me. He wouldn’t have wanted me to put my life on hold but I can’t think of anything else.”
Kelly speaks to Ennarah’s mother regularly. “When we talk, she seems pretty strong. She is proud of him. She says to me, ‘He is the person who loves Egypt the most. How could they level these accusations against him?’”
Kelly believes that applying pressure now – before there is a trial or sentencing – offers the best chance of getting him free. Some 90,000 people have already signed a petition started by Kelly to UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab calling for the UK government to demand his release.
Next Monday is Ennarah’s 38th birthday and it will be a difficult day for Kelly and Ennarah’s family.
“Just two months ago when we got married we were dreaming of our future together. Now I don’t even know when I’ll get to see him again,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to have him by my side. Now our life together has been crushed.”
She says the charges against Ennarah are totally unfounded.
“His only crime is to dare to believe that Egyptians deserve the most basic of human rights.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”4060″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
