10 Jul 15 | Europe and Central Asia, Greece, Mapping Media Freedom, News and features
On June, 11 2015 the Greek public TV went back to its old name “ERT”, exactly two years after its abrupt closure by the previous conservative-led government.
In June 2013 the government shut down the TV station and fired some 2,600 media workers, accusing the public broadcaster of corruption and mismanagement. Although ERT’s “sins” and disfunction were well known, the real reason behind its brutal shutdown was to meet layoff quotas laid down by Greece’s international creditors.
A few months after shuttering ERT, the government opened the New Hellenic Radio, Internet and Television (NERIT), a shrunken public broadcaster that hired employees under 3-month contracts. The budget was cut from around 300 to 100 million euros.
In April 2015, the three-month-old left wing government led by Syriza abandoned the name “NERIT” and reinstated “ERT”, which fulfilled a pre-electoral promise. It also announced that any of ERT’s 2,600 employees who wished to return to work could do so. A law setting the budget of the broadcaster at 60 million euros a year would be covered by a licence fee of three euros a month.
Under the last government, ERT was derided as bloated and biased.
“ERT is a case of an exceptional lack of transparency and incredible extravagance. This ends now,” government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou had said in a statement aired on ERT back in June 2013, announcing the government’s intention “to shut down ERT”.
On the evening of the 11 June 2013, the Greek state TV went dark for the first time since 1938, triggering outrage but also support for the shocked Greek journalists and people by the international community and press, who saw this event as example of censorship and violation of freedom of speech in crisis-stricken Greece.
“When the microphone of a journalist is cut off, it’s like the voice of democracy being silenced. This has just been brutally done to 1,300 journalists – brutally in all senses because the Greek government has sent in the police to cut off a broadcaster and stop journalists from doing their job. That is the voice of democracy, the counterweight, a pressure group, that the government, the economic power is gagging”, European Broadcast Union President Jean-Paul Philippot commented that day condemning the Greek government’s overnight shutdown of its national broadcaster ERT as an act of violence and “the worst kind of censorship”.
But, this act was not the first and only government intervention in and censorship of the state TV. An example, is that in 2012, Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi, presenters of news-magazine “Morning Information” on NET TV were removed from the programme due to comments about Minister of Citizen Protection Nikos Dendias.
Nikos Dendias had threatened to sue The Guardian over an article about a group of Greek protesters being tortured by the police.
Arvanitis and Katsimi were told about being “cut” from the show by its editor-in-chief who was informed about the decision by the general director of ERT, just hours after the broadcast on Monday morning.
The closure of ERT triggered a wave of protests against the government’s austerity policies, during which demonstrators sent a clear message in favour of a truly public — not state — broadcaster. In the wake of the silencing of ERT, the newly unemployed journalists banded together to launch ERT Open. Ahead of the election that swept Syriza to power, the party promised a modern public broadcaster free of constraints. In announcing the reopening of ERT, the government promised “the actual fulfillment of the objectives of the public broadcasting service for information, education and entertainment of the Greek people”.
However, the new ERT relaunched amid harsh criticism from opposition parties and the press, accusing the broadcaster of promoting the left-wing government’s positions. The critics said that the reality was far from the pre-election promise of a pluralistic and objective public television station.
A government spokesperson denied any intervention and claimed that representatives of all parties were invited to participate in the first informational programmes.
According to an Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso interview with ERT’s Italy correspondent, Dimitri Deliolanes, the new government explicitly spoke of parliamentary oversight for public broadcasting. He said that for the parliament to have a control commission, as happens for example in Italy, a constitutional amendment would be needed. For this reason, the appointment of a new leadership for ERT occurred after a hearing in the parliamentary committee on transparency.
“Today ERT works well, with a very good quality standard, as competitors do not shine for sure. But the government, busy with managing the debt, has not yet managed to structure the committee. So, ERT is subject to the supervision of minister without portfolio Nikos Pappas”, Deliolanes concluded.
It remains to be seen whether Greece’s “new” public broadcaster will grow into the promised medium that is free of political intervention and the sins of the past.
Mapping Media Freedom
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This article was posted on 16 July 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
09 Jul 15 | Campaigns, mobile, Statements
“Impunity is a great threat to press freedom in Russia,” said Melody Patry, Index on Censorship’s Senior Advocacy Officer. “Failing to use appropriate measures to investigate the murder of Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev is not only a denial of justice, it sends the tacit message that you can get away with killing journalists. When perpetrators are not held to account, it encourages further violence towards media professionals.”
Statement
On the 2nd anniversary of the murder of independent Russian journalist, Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev, we, the undersigned organisations, call for the investigation into his case to be urgently raised to the federal level.
Akhmednabiyev, deputy editor of independent newspaper Novoye Delo, and a reporter for online news portal Caucasian Knot, was shot dead on 9 July 2013 as he left for work in Makhachkala, Dagestan. He had actively reported on human rights violations against Muslims by the police and Russian army.
Two years after his killing, neither the perpetrators nor instigators have been brought to justice. The investigation, led by the local Dagestani Investigative Committee, has been repeatedly suspended for long periods over the last year and half, with little apparent progress being made.
Prior to his murder, Akhmednabiyev was subject to numerous death threats including an assassination attempt in January 2013, the circumstances of which mirrored his eventual murder. Dagestani police wrongly logged the assassination attempt as property damage, and only reclassified it after the journalist’s death, demonstrating a shameful failure to investigate the motive behind the attack and prevent further attacks, despite a request from Akhmednabiyev for protection.
Russia’s failure to address these threats is a breach of the state’s “positive obligation” to protect an individual’s freedom of expression against attacks, as defined by European Court of Human Rights case law (Dink v. Turkey). Furthermore, at a United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) session in September 2014, member States, including Russia, adopted a resolution (A/HRC/27/L.7) on safety of journalists and ending impunity. States are now required to take a number of measures aimed at ending impunity for violence against journalists, including “ensuring impartial, speedy, thorough, independent and effective investigations, which seek to bring to justice the masterminds behind attacks”.
Russia must act on its human rights commitments and address the lack of progress in Akhmednabiyev’s case by removing it from the hands of local investigators, and prioritising it at a federal level. More needs to be done in order to ensure impartial, independent and effective investigation.
On 2 November 2014, 31 non-governmental organisations from Russia, across Europe as well as international, wrote to Aleksandr Bastrykin calling upon him as the Head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, to raise Akhmednabiyev’s case from the regional level to the federal level, in order to ensure an impartial, independent and effective investigation. Specifically, the letter requested that he appoint the Office for the investigation of particularly important cases involving crimes against persons and public safety, under the Central Investigative Department of the Russian Federation’s Investigative Committee to continue the investigation.
To date, there has been no official response to this appeal. The Federal Investigative Committee’s public inactivity on this case contradicts a promise made by President Putin in October 2014, to draw investigators’ attention to the cases of murdered journalists in Dagestan.
As well as ensuring impunity for his murder, such inaction sets a terrible precedent for future investigations into attacks on journalists in Russia, and poses a serious threat to freedom of expression.
We urge the Federal Investigation Committee to remedy this situation by expediting Akhmednabiyev’s case to the Federal level as a matter of urgency. This would demonstrate a clear willingness, by the Russian authorities, to investigate this crime in a thorough, impartial and effective manner.
Supported by
ARTICLE 19
Albanian Media Institute
Analytical Center for Interethnic Cooperation and Consultations (Georgia)
Association of Independent Electronic Media (Serbia)
The Barys Zvozskau Belarusian Human Rights House
Belorussian Helsinki Committee
Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine)
Civil Society and Freedom of Speech Initiative Center for the Caucasus
Crude Accountability
Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly – Vanadzor (Armenia)
Helsinki Committee of Armenia
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia
Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights
The Human Rights Center of Azerbaijan
Human Rights House Foundation
Human Rights Monitoring Institute
Human Rights Movement “Bir Duino-Kyrgyzstan”
Index on Censorship
International Partnership for Human Rights
International Press Institute
Kharkiv Regional Foundation -Public Alternative (Ukraine)
Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law
Moscow Helsinki Group
Norwegian Helsinki Committee
PEN International
Promo LEX Moldova
Public Verdict (Russia)
Reporters without Borders
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07 Jul 15 | Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, mobile, News and features
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, of ruling party Fidesz (Pic © European People’s Party/CreativeCommons/Flickr)
The Hungarian parliament has voted yes to plans to allow the government and other public authorities to charge a fee for the “human labour costs” of freedom of information (FOI) requests this week, as well as granting sweeping new powers to withhold information. It just needs the signature of President Janos Ader before it becomes law.
The bill, submitted by Minister of Justice László Trócsányi, was published on the government website just days before the vote, on 3 July, precluding any meaningful debate about the proposal. It is widely believed that through this initiative, governing party Fidesz is trying to put a lid on a number of scandals involving wasteful government spending, uncovered through FOI requests.
According to Transparency International, the bill “appears to be a misguided response by the Hungarian government to civil society’s earlier successful use of freedom of information tools to publicly expose government malpractice and questionable public spending”.
One provision of the bill allows public bodies to refuse to make certain data public for 10 years if deemed to have been used in decision-making processes, according to Index award-winning Hungarian investigative news platform Atlatszo.hu. As virtually any piece of information can be used to build public policies upon, this gives the government a powerful argument not to answer FOI requests.
The bill also allows government actors to charge fees for fulfilling FOI request. Until now, government actors could ask for the copying expenses of documents. From now on, they can ask the person filing the request to cover the “human labor costs” of the inquiry.
It is not yet clear how much members of the public will have to pay. “There will be a separate government decree in the future regarding the costs that can be charged for a FOI request,” Tibor Sepsi, a lawyer working for Atlatszo.hu, says.
Because the public has no means to verify whether these costs are well-grounded, and at some government agencies the salaries are known to be very high, the government might be in a discretionary position to ask prohibitive costs for answering the FOI requests, critics of the amendment say.
“The FOI requests usually ask for data that are already available somewhere in electronic format, therefore no government body can say that fulfilling a request involves gathering information,” says Tamás Bodoky, the editor-in-chief of Atlatszo.hu.
“It is unacceptable to plead for extraordinary workload and expenses when much of the requests refer to things that should be published in accordance with transparent pocket rules. This information should be readily available in the settlement of accounts and reports,” he adds.
The work of investigative journalists and watchdog NGOs is further complicated through another provision, regarding copyright. In some cases, the government will be able to refer to copyright issues and only give limited access to certain documents, without making them publicly available.
While the bill will make life harder for those making FOI requests, Sepsi also points out that the situation is not as bad as it may initially seem: “The government will have half a dozen of new ways to reject vexatious FOI requests, but on the implementation level, ordinary courts, the constitutional court or the Hungarian National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Authority will have the power to keep things under reasonable control.”
Nevertheless, Hungarian and international NGOs working for the transparency of public spending and government decisions are protesting against the bill. An open letter, signed by the groups Atlatszo.hu, K-Monitor, Energiaklub Szakpolitikai Intézet and Transparency International Magyarország Alapítvány has been sent to the Minister of Justice Trócsányi, to the Hungarian National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Authority, as well as the MPs whose votes decided the fate of the proposal.
“We believe the government would do the right thing if – instead of rolling back on transparency – it would increase the so-called proactive disclosure, meaning that it would publish the information regarding its functioning in electronic format, without a request. We can provide international examples where this can be achieved simply, without extraordinary costs. This would increase not only the transparency of public spending, but the number of FOI requests would also decrease significantly,” the letter argues.
After the vote, a group of 50 opposition MPs pledged to ask the constitutional court to review the text.
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
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This article was posted on 6 July 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
07 Jul 15 | Asia and Pacific, Campaigns, Malaysia, mobile
Malaysian cartoonist Zunar is facing charges under a colonial era sedition act. (Photo: Sean Gallagher/Index on Censorship)
Persecuted Malaysian cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Haque, who is facing nine simultaneous charges under the country’s controversial Sedition Act, has had his case pushed back until 9 September.
The artist, known as Zunar, told supporters in an email that his case had been adjourned pending a ruling from the Federal Court in a separate case that challenges the constitutionality of the Sedition Act.
The current case sees Zunar facing 43 years in prison over a tweet criticising the recent jailing of a Malaysian opposition leader. He has been targeted numerous times for speaking out against the Malaysian government in his editorial cartoons. Zunar was investigated under the sedition act for the first time in 2010, much of his work has been banned, and he has been subjected to repeated raids, arrest and detainment.
“Zunar is being prosecuted simply for exercising his right to express himself. We welcome the legal challenge to the Sedition Act; a tool the government uses to try and stifle and silence dissent from Zunar and other critics. But regardless of the outcome in that case, we reiterate our call on Malaysia to immediately drop all charges against Zunar and respect free expression,” said Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg.
You can support Zunar by signing this petition to call on the Malaysian government to drop all charges against him and renew its commitment to freedom of expression.
See cartoons by Zunar and other international artists on the theme of free expression drawn to commemorate our 15th Freedom of Expression awards.
