24 Feb 10 | Uncategorized
Aside from exposing the sins of News International, today’s MPs report boosts our campaign for libel reform, writes Jo Glanville
This article was first published in the Independent.
At the press conference launching the select committee’s report on press standards, privacy and libel, all that anyone wanted to talk about was the News of the World and phone hacking. The committee blasted News International and its witnesses for their “collective amnesia” in providing evidence to the inquiry and lamented the “substantial damage to the newspaper industry as a whole” of the phone hacking fiasco. Less attention was given to the inquiry’s call for libel reform – yet its recommendations are perhaps the most significant element of the report and an unequivocal support for press freedom.
Over the past 18 months, there has been an unprecedented groundswell for reform, as scientists, academics, NGOs, the media and pressure groups have lobbied for action. The committee’s recommendations echo many of those proposed by Index on Censorship and English PEN in a report published last November – tackling libel tourism, making it harder for corporations to sue, developing a public interest defence, reducing costs, a one-year limitation on internet publication. There has rarely been such a convergence of engagement by pressure groups and politicians on an issue. “There’s an opportunity for a thoroughgoing reform of our libel law,” said Paul Farrelly MP, an influential member of the committee.
When Jack Straw gave evidence to the committee last year, he appeared untroubled by the problem of libel tourism. Yet the phenomenon (where foreign claimants bring their libel actions to English courts) made a deep impression on the committee. A number of states in the US have introduced legislation to protect their citizens from being sued in our courts: “We believe it is more than an embarrassment to our system that legislators in the US should feel the need to take retaliatory steps to protect freedom of speech,” says the select committee report, recommending that the Government discuss the situation with its US counterparts.
So will it go anywhere? Some of the issues are already under review, others are being examined by the Ministry of Justice’s working group on libel. There’s little time left before the election and little indication that a Conservative government will be as supportive of reform. But we may never have another opportunity like this for freeing the press, publishers and academics from the tyranny of the UK’s singular chilling libel laws – and will have a greater impact for press freedom than the current flurry of interest in the sins of News International.
Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship and a member of the Ministry of Justice working party on libel reform
16 Sep 09 | Comment
Samuel Beckett wrote a play for Václav Havel when he was in jail. On being freed, Havel returned the favour. It was the making of a great dramatic double-act, reprised this week by Index on Censorship. Jo Glanville reports
In 1982, Samuel Beckett dedicated a new play, Catastrophe, to Václav Havel, then a political prisoner serving a four and a half year sentence for “subversive activities”. He had been asked to write the play by the International Association for the Defence of Artists, who were organising a special night of solidarity for the Czech playwright at the Avignon Festival that summer. Although Beckett had never met Havel, he was deeply concerned by the persecution of writers and artists in eastern Europe and was horrified to hear that Havel had been forbidden to write in prison.
“The fact that Samuel Beckett made himself heard in this way pleased and spoke to me immensely,” recalls Havel. “In my eyes, he was a patriarch or father of modern theatre, who dwelt somewhere up in the heavens isolated from the hubbub down below.” When Havel was released the following year, he returned the honour by dedicating a play, titled Mistake, to Beckett. This literary tennis match is a fascinating, if little known, footnote to the two writers’ careers. The two plays were performed together in Stockholm in 1983 and first published in Index on Censorship in 1984. This week, to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in eastern Europe, Index on Censorship is presenting a rare performance of the two works, for one night only, directed by Jo Blatchley, at the Free Word Festival.
It was Havel’s friend František Janouch who first asked him to write a play when he came out of prison. Janouch, a nuclear physicist, had been granted political asylum in Sweden in 1974. He then founded the Charter 77 Foundation, with Havel’s blessing, to support the dissident movement back home. On Havel’s release, Janouch asked him to contribute a play to a fundraising evening in Stockholm. Havel was at first reluctant. “I told him it will be a fantastic announcement that you are now free and you are the same Havel,” says Janouch. “I called him the week after and he said, “Well, the piece is ready.” He told me that I had stimulated him to write.”
Janouch had also served as a go-between, carrying an exchange of letters between Havel and Beckett. Soon after he was released from prison, Havel asked Janouch to deliver a letter of thanks to Beckett for dedicating Catastrophe to him. “For a long time afterwards,” Havel wrote in his letter, “there accompanied me in the prison a great joy and emotion and helped to live on amidst all the dirt and baseness.” According to Beckett’s friend and biographer, James Knowlson, Beckett was deeply touched by the letter. “He talked to me about the extraordinarily moving letter he’d had from Vaclav Havel‚ remembers Knowlson. “He was very interested indeed and very moved by the plight of Havel.”
Havel’s friend František Janouch then had the brainwave of asking Beckett if they could stage Catastrophe in Stockholm along with Havel’s new play Mistake. “We had six or seven of the best known Swedish actors who did it free of charge for one performance only,” says Janouch. “The director practically made it as one piece – so people who didn’t know the plays had a problem seeing where Havel ended and Beckett started.”
Catastrophe has been described as Beckett’s most overtly political play. “Beckett took political positions, he was against oppression, he was for individualism he was certainly against all forms of totalitarianism and fascism,” says James Knowlson. “But he had this view of art that it suggested rather than stated – if you got too explicit then you countermanded what you were trying to do. People might be put off by that and I think he had a reluctance to go into that area of didactic writing.”
The play for Havel is a very short work consisting of one scene, in which a director and his assistant prepare a mute figure for a performance, manipulating the actor as if he were a tailor’s dummy. He is a dehumanised figure at the mercy of their direction. His only expression of independence is to raise his head at the end of the play. Although there are inevitably a variety of literary interpretations of the work, Beckett’s intention seems clear at least in representing an individual act of resistance in the face of oppression. Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson remembers the writer’s furious response to a review of the play in which a critic had described the ending as ambiguous.
“I can still remember sitting at a table with him outside a café in Paris,” says Knowlson, recalling their conversation about the review. “He almost slammed down his fist on the table: “It’s not ambiguous. He’s saying: ‘you bastards, you haven’t finished me yet!’ He bashed the table with great vehemence. I was quite taken aback by it — it was clearly one of those things he felt very deeply about.
“And that seemed to me to epitomise Beckett. Beckett is about going on and persisting and not just about ending –– ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. That is a vein of dogged determination which comes through and which in fact however much you reify or reduce somebody to an object, a victim, none the less there is this resilience and the persistence of the human spirit. and that I felt was something that was very important and linked really right through his work.” Havel’s play Mistake is less oblique — a group of prisoners intimidate a newcomer who has failed to observe the rituals of their incarceration. Like the protagonist in Beckett’s play, the main character is mute. Each work complements the other as a study in the dehumanisation of an individual.
“The Beckett is looking at a lack of freedom of the spirit,” says director Jo Blatchley. “Havel is looking at what happens physically in that type of situation. We don’t know where they are, but they’re clearly prisoners and they’re recreating tyranny.”
Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot, came to symbolise the agony of the Czech opposition and when the communist government fell in 1989, protestors took to the streets of Prague with posters saying “Godot is Here”. The waiting was over. Beckett died that December – he lived long enough to see the fall of the communist government, but just missed Havel’s election as president.
For Index on Censorship, the staging of Havel and Beckett’s plays completes an historic circle. Index was an assiduous supporter of Havel, publishing his writing and interviews throughout the 70s and 80s. Its dedication to supporting writers under communism was at the core of its mission ever since it was first founded by Sir Stephen Spender and Michael Scammell in 1972. But on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, Havel’s prescience and motivation in writing Mistake remain striking. Even though Havel had only just been released from prison, in ill health, he had a larger purpose in mind when he wrote his play. “Mistake was not intended simply as a kind of snapshot of prison life,” he declared at the play’s first performance. “In its modest way, it is meant to warn against the ubiquitous danger of the kind of self-imposed totalitarianism now present in every community in the world, large or small.” Twenty-six years since Havel dedicated his play to Beckett, the message remains as relevant as ever.
A shorter version of this article is published in the Guardian
Additional research Klara Chlupata and Roman Chlupaty
Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship
Catastrophe and Mistake are being performed at the Free Word Festival on 17 September at 630pm and will be followed by a panel discussion with Misha Glenny and Vladimir Arsenijevic chaired by John Kampfner. To reserve a place email bookings@freewordonline or call 0207 324 2570
27 May 09 | Uncategorized
The National Union of Journalists held a meeting on Tuesday in support of journalist Suzanne Breen. Following Breen’s reports in the Sunday Tribune on the Real IRA, she is facing the prospect of a court order under the Terrorism Act 2000 to disclose information, with serious implications for press freedom and for her own personal safety. Suzanne Breen told the NUJ about the background to her case. Jo Glanville’s speech in support of Breen is posted below. Other speakers included Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Bill Goodwin and Mark Stephens.
Any journalist who reports on terrorism faces a double challenge: the job of reporting in the first place on a highly sensitive subject, where gaining the trust of your sources is paramount. And then the challenge of dealing with the police once you’ve broadcast or published your story when they come after you for your sources, your notes and your research material.
What we’ve seen at Index on Censorship over the past year is an apparent increase in the police’s pursuit for journalists’ material in counter-terrorism investigations. It appears to have become routine for the police to go on fishing expeditions: broadcasters and newspapers can expect to receive vague, poorly defined production orders that ask for anything and everything in the name of counter terrorism — interviews, contacts, details of meetings.
It’s quite clear that journalists are being asked to act as an arm of the state. The potential chilling effect on investigative journalism is profound, the pressure this puts journalists under is extreme and the danger this can place them in — as in the case of Suzanne Breen — is unacceptable. It’s also unnecessary.
What we see happen in most cases is that production orders of this kind end up in months and months of horse trading in the courts — while media lawyers fight to limit the scope of the production orders. Time and money is wasted — and it is a hugely stressful experience for the journalists involved.
In fact, too frequently the police instinct for going after journalists and their sources degenerates into a farce as they put in production orders for material that is already in the public domain. One wonders if they think journalists are some kind of alternative library service. In Suzanne Breen’s case they even had the opportunity of arresting a member of the Real IRA — thanks to the Sunday Tribune story — but chose not to take it up. Instead, they went after Suzanne Breen. Putting her life potentially at risk — not to mention her livelihood as a journalist.
The continuing lack of recognition for the cardinal tenet of the protection of sources remains a grave concern, despite the Bill Goodwin case, where the European Court established the cardinal importance of the protection of sources as the bedrock of press freedom. And even despite the case of Suzanne Breen’s predecessor at the Sunday Tribune, Ed Moloney, where again there was an attempt to jail a journalist for not handing over material, and the judge ruled, “Police have to show something more than the possibility that the material will be of some use. They must establish that there are reasonable grounds for believing that the material is likely to be of substantial value.” Yet none of this seems to make an impact — no one learns any lessons. The same fight for principles has to take place over and over again.
The circumstances surrounding Suzanne Breen’s case — Martin McGuiness’s statement about “dissident journalists”, the fact that Suzanne’s lawyers were not allowed to see the evidence against her, the fact that she’s never been put under this pressure before for her sources — all point to a politically motivated scenario.
Following Shiv Malik’s case last year, Index held a meeting with leading media lawyers, including the lawyer Mark Stephens, the NUJ, the Society of Editors and Newspaper Society, to discuss how best to protect journalists facing production orders. We’ve since met with Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, and he’s now looking at a protocol drafted by the group which is in essence a code of conduct and of best practice that seeks to put an end to these routine fishing expeditions. It also seeks to make the courts and the police aware (although I do wonder how many times we have to make them aware…) that protection of sources is not some high-minded ethical ideal — it is the fundamental principle without which there cannot be a free press.
Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship
