04 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Members of the IFEX-TMG gathered in Tunis for World Press Freedom Day to mark the launch of four new initiatives to support Tunisian rights to freedom of expression, which remains under threat despite the gains of the past year.
The new work includes a literary anthology edited by the president of PEN Tunisia Naziha Rejiba, a training manual on online advocacy, a workshop for cartoonists, and a national newspaper and billboard campaign championing free expression rights as Tunisia’ Constituent Assembly continues to negotiate a new national constitution.
With hundreds of press freedom campaigners in Tunis alongside the IFEX-TMG to attend UNESCO’s annual World Press Freedom Day conference, the timeliness of these events was underlined by the sentencing of two young Facebook users to lengthy prison sentences and the fining of the head of a TV station for broadcasting the award-winning film Persepolis.
“Things have improved since the fall of the old regime, but there’s no question that the right to freedom of expression in Tunisia is not yet secure or safe,” said Rohan Jayasekera from IFEX-TMG member Index on Censorship.
The anthology, Fleeting Words, edited by Rejiba, the veteran dissident best known as ‘Om Ziad’, is published in partnership between IFEX-TMG, PEN Tunisia and Atlas Publications. Now available in Arabic, French and English editions will be published in June.
The IFEX-TMG also launched a training manual on online free expression campaign strategy developed by the IFEX-TMG member, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), with local partner, the Tunisian Centre for Freedom of the Press (CTPJ). This follows a series of training workshops, with the two most recent held in Sidi Bouzid and Tunis.
This week also sees the launch of a major multi-media campaign in support of free expression rights developed in partnership with the Tunisian online media group Nawaat.org. Using 75 street billboards and adverts in national print and broadcast media, it will be seen by hundreds of thousands of Tunisians across the country.
Also this month, ANHRI and fellow IFEX-TMG member the Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI) organised a two-day workshop in the coastal Tunisian city of Sousse.
Sixteen digital and ink cartoonists from across Tunisia and the region, as CRNI Executive Director Dr Robert Russell put it, “all on the cutting edge of free speech,” gathered to exchange techniques and experiences.
The initiatives are part of the IFEX-TMG project Monitoring & Advocacy in Support of Independent Human Rights Defenders in Tunisia (2010-2012), managed by Index on Censorship and supported by the European Commission and Oxfam Novib.
The need for continuing work in the sector was underlined by the prosecution of Nabil Karoui, director of privately-owned Nessma TV for blasphemy and disturbing public order. The charges followed the station’s screening of the animated film Persepolis in October 2011. Karoui was fined 2,400 Tunisian dinars (961 GBP) on the charge of disturbing the public order, after protesters stormed Nessma TV.
“That Nabil Karoui avoided jail is not cause for celebration, the case should not have been brought to a court of law to begin with,” said Virginie Jouan, IFEX-TMG Chair.
The IFEX-TMG also expressed concern about the sentencing of Ghazi Ben Mohamed Beji and Jabeur Ben Abdallah Majri to over seven years in prison after Beji posted an online manuscript said to be critical of the Prophet, and Mejri reposted some of it.
20 Feb 12 | News and features
His organisation’s name was on the marquee, but no-one invited him to the party. We understand there was no attempt at all to invite Rupert Murdoch to last week’s Paris conference on The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World.
In contrast the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, couldn’t attend the conference, being unable to leave the UK for well-documented reasons.
But his organisation says they only got eight days notice that they could send a representative, circumstances that Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson characterised as a de facto ban on their participation and “censorship”.
Hrafnsson was particularly exercised by the speaker list, which included several journalists who seem to have crossed Assange in the past.
In fact the principles of transparency and justice that WikiLeaks espouse were well defended by the brilliant Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net. It was left to him to remind everyone that of the two accused organisations, only one does what they do for corporate profit.
Not speaking for Assange, but still supportive, was WikiLeaks’ occasional legal advisor, Geoffrey Robertson QC. (Robertson’s quip of the day, after counting Assange as a “great Australian”, was to say the same of Murdoch, but only “in the sense that Atilla was a great Hun”.)
The end result was a shortlived attempt to stoke outrage on Twitter and what turned out to be an unheeded call to WikiLeaks supporters to #OccupyUNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency that was hosting the event.
The organisers, the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC), and UNESCO itself, argued that the conference was about journalism in the wake of the WikiLeaks and News of the World sagas, “and not about the episodes themselves”.
WPFC asserted its right to pick the speakers they liked, but offered to distribute a WikiLeaks statement “and include it in the published conference proceedings”; it was left to UNESCO to invite a WikiLeaks representative a week later.
On the eve of the conference, UNESCO reconfirmed to Index on Censorship that if Hrafnsson wanted to attend, he would be allowed to speak. He didn’t attend. The e-mail trail between Hrafnsson and the organisers is here.
It is odd to call a conference to discuss a media landscape transformed by WikiLeaks and the News of the World, then not invite from the outset, people to speak for the pair that did the transforming.
Most interesting — in what was still a useful event — would have been to hear how the two key actors in the two very different dramas were themselves redefining their own organisations’ roles in their wake.
Murdoch was that very day in London reinventing the News of the World as the Sun on Sunday, while WikiLeaks’ own reinvention, as part of The Global Square, an online global collaboration peer-to-peer platform for activists, is due to prototype next month.
28 Nov 11 | Uncategorized
The jailing of five human rights activists by a United Arab Emirates court Sunday will leave a nasty stain on the state’s elaborate upcoming 40th independence celebrations — unless the country’s ruler reverses the verdicts, annuls the charges and releases the five before the big day on December 2.
A state security court in Abu Dhabi jailed the activists on November 27 for doing no more than adding their voices online to calls seeking greater political openness in the UAE.
No appeal is permitted and a court observer representing a coalition of free speech groups including Index on Censorship found the case to be “riddled with legal and procedural flaws right from the beginning,” to the advantage of the prosecution.
Index on Censorship is urging the UAE authorities to show its commitment to international legal standards, by releasing these men without delay and appointing an independent review of why and how they came to be prosecuted and punitively sentenced on transparently politicised charges.
The five, all members of a now banned pro-reform online forum, Al-Hewar al-Emirati, were arrested in April after signing an online petition demanding political reforms, including a parliament selected by open elections.
The verdict comes days before the Emirate stages a major celebration to mark the UAE’s national day on December 2, after 30 days of exhibitions, light shows and cultural events.
Nasser bin Gaith, a trade and economics expert who has lectured at the Abu Dhabi college of Paris’ Sorbonne University and online rights activists Fahad Salim Dalk, Hassan Ali Al-Khamis and Ahmed Abdul Khaleq were all sentenced to two years each.
Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist and blogger was jailed for three years.
Index and the members of the coalition believe the aim is to strangle at birth any ‘Arab Spring’ type reformism or change. “Clearly, the government of United Arab Emirates has been trying to stifle any kind of criticism and pro-reform movement amidst Arab Spring in the region,” said Nabeel Rajab, the director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, speaking before the verdict.
Ahmed Mansoor had signed a March 2011 online petition with 132 other Emiratis, calling for direct elections to the advisory body, the Federal National Council, and for it to be turned from an advisory agency into a body with real legislative powers.
Before his arrest, Nasser bin Gaith, had written positively on his blog about the Arab Spring and its impact on economies in the Arab world, pointing out that it can bring bigger transparency, end corruption and bring back Arab professionals to their home countries.
Supported by the IFEX network of free expression groups, the coalition of rights groups called in civil liberties lawyer Jennie Pasquarella of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to monitor the trial process in September and October 2011 and attend the October 2 hearing. Coalition representatives also attended subsequent trial sessions on October 9 and 23.
Pasquarella found that “flagrant due process flaws” essentially denied the five men the right to a fair trial. The defendants have not been able to see all the documents setting out the charges against them and have not — despite repeated requests — had full access to all the evidence against them. They have also not been allowed to hold confidential meetings with their lawyers.
The first four sessions of the trial were held in secret, contravening international standards, with only UAE State Security agents allowed to attend and take notes on the trial. Pasquarella also found that there was no legal basis for the case against the men, saying that the vague laws under which the five were charged do not comply with international and UAE constitutional requirements that allow for freedom of opinion and other expression.
She also criticised the decision to prosecute the case under State Security procedures, which deprives the men of basic due process rights such as the right to appeal.
The government’s aim, she reported before the verdicts, was “to further distort the public’s understanding of this case and to create public confusion about the actual conduct at issue in this case – not state security threats, but rather allegedly insulting statements.”
The seven groups in the coalition are: Al Karama (Dignity), Amnesty International, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), Frontline Defenders, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch and Index on Censorship.
Some observers have speculated that the activists could receive a presidential pardon as to mark the anniversary. The same day as the five dissidents were jailed, 554 minor criminals were freed, their fines and debts settled by the state as an anniversary gesture.
However the defendants have previously rejected the idea of a pardon and want the charges dropped and the case permanently thrown out.
Rohan Jayasekera is deputy CEO of Index on Censorship
24 Oct 11 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Tunisians flocked to voting stations yesterday in the country’s first-ever free elections, but only the cultivation of an independent media will safeguard democracy and free expression, writes Rohan Jayasekera
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