Category Archives: Censorship

DOHA (Reuters) - Qatar's draft media law came under fire on Tuesday from Human Rights Watch, which singled out "loosely worded provisions" penalizing criticism of the Gulf emirate and its neighbors.

The New York-based organization urged Qatar's Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani not to approve the law as drafted, calling it "a commitment to censorship".

Qatari officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Freedom of expression is tightly controlled in the tiny autocratic Gulf state, with self-censorship prevalent among national newspapers and other media outlets.

A close U.S. ally that hosts a large U.S. military base, Qatar has escaped the unrest that has engulfed other parts of the region. It lacks any organized political opposition.

Qatar finances and hosts the pan-Arab satellite TV network al-Jazeera, which has closely covered Arab revolts elsewhere.

Although the draft calls for abolishing criminal penalties for media law violations, it contains some sweeping provisions.

Article 53 prohibits publishing or broadcasting information that would "throw relations between the state and the Arab and friendly states into confusion" or "abuse the regime or offend the ruling family or cause serious harm to the national or higher interests of the state".

Violators would face fines of up to 1 million Qatari riyals ($275,000).

The draft approved by the emir's advisory Shura Council in June would be the first change to Qatar's media law since 2008, when the government set up the Doha Centre for Media Freedom.

Excerpt from:
Qatari draft media law criticized by rights group

From left: Owen Bonnici, Mario de Marco and Adrian Buckle.

Teodor Reljic

With film and stage classification as we know it set to disappear from the local scene in the coming weeks, Labour spokesperson for culture Owen Bonnici has said that this development would most likely have not come into effect had the outcome of the divorce referendum been different.

"I am sure that had the divorce referendum not come about, or worse still, had the Nationalist Party won the referendum, today the two sides of the House would be still locking horns on the issue," Bonnici said.

In a move perceived by many to be a response to controversy arising in the wake of several instances of State-condoned censorship, Culture Minister Mario de Marco submitted a draft proposal in January which called for all matters related to film and stage to be moved away from the jurisdiction of the police and into the hands of the Ministry for Culture.

READ MORE: Censored no more what is the future of Maltese theatre?

It was the landmark 'Stitching' case that brought the issue to public attention, after local theatre company Unifaun Theatre attempted to stage the hard-hitting UK relationship drama - penned by Anthony Nielson, and staged in Edinburgh with a '14' rating - in 2009, only to be banned by the Film and Classification Board at the time.

A parallel case involved author Alex Vella Gera and student editor Mark Camilleri, who were taken to court on obscenity charges after Vella Gera's short story 'Li Tkisser Sewwi' was published on the University and Junior College-distributed magazine Ir-Realta'.

De Marco also proposed that the Film and Stage Classification Board be dissolved, to give way to a more relaxed system of self-regulation which would leave it up to theatre directors, producers and sometimes venue owners to age-rate their productions.

The proposal was discussed in parliament last Tuesday, and was approved in its second reading.

More here:
‘Censorship would still be around were it not for divorce’ – Owen Bonnici

BEIJING For most of the last two decades, director Lou Ye has angered Chinese authorities by making movies that touch on sensitive subjects like sex and politics and then by screening them at foreign festivals without official approval. He's had multiple films banned, and was barred for years from even practicing his craft.

His newest work, the dark melodrama "Mystery," looked like a chance for the 47-year-old to come in from the cold. Lou received approval from China's censorship body before screening his movie at the Cannes International Film Festival in May. After the festival, he registered the $2.6 million noirish tale, made with 20% French financial backing, as an official French-Chinese co-production.

But weeks before the mid-October opening of "Mystery" in Beijing, Chinese authorities told Lou to edit two scenes containing sex and violence. They also asked him, without explanation, to cancel the co-production agreement.

PHOTOS: U.S.-China box office comparisons

In China, the world's second-largest and fastest-growing movie market, friction between filmmakers and government regulators is a regular occurrence, yet often, the difficult back-and-forth takes place behind closed doors. This time, Lou took the fight public, posting documents online and blogging for weeks about each interaction and negotiation with authorities. The skirmish raises unsettling questions about Chinese officials' willingness to scuttle business deals and impose new censorship requirements, even after issuing approvals.

"This is the Chinese way. It's not good, but this is the way," Kristina Larsen, the French producer on "Mystery," said in a phone interview from Paris. "Basically in France, no one wants to go into co-productions with China you have this different culture, and all the censorship. It's too complicated."

Over the years, Lou has suffered repeated censorship at home and enjoyed a growing reputation abroad. Officials from China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television banned his first film, "Weekend Lover," for two years. His 2000 movie "Suzhou River" was also banned. "Summer Palace" which chronicled a generation's political awakening and disillusionment amid the pro-democracy protests that led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was submitted to the Cannes festival without government approval in 2006, and afterward Lou was prohibited from filmmaking for five years. He defied the ban to make "Spring Fever," about a doomed gay affair, and the film won best screenplay at Cannes in 2009.

REPORT: Reel China - coverage of the Chinese movie industry

"Mystery" centers on a wife's discovery of her husband's affairs, and touches on some potentially sensitive subjects like the behavior of police. In his postings on Sina Weibo the Twitter of China Lou said officials had asked him to reduce the number of hammer blows in one bludgeoning scene from 13 to 2.

After two weeks of negotiations, Lou was able to declare a victory of sorts: He agreed only to darken the final three seconds of the bludgeoning sequence. And, to voice his displeasure, he said he would remove his name from the credits on the film though it still appears on posters and other promotional materials. The film was scheduled to open in China on Friday.

Read more here:
Director takes Chinese censorship, business battles public

Approach 1: The Internet is a revolutionary leap forward for the exchange of ideas and free markets. Direct or indirect censorship could stifle this great resource. No single creation has revolutionized the human existence the way the Internet has.

For the first time in human history, we live in an era of true knowledge. In this modern-day Library of Alexandria , there exists instant access to a vast wealth of knowledge on virtually any subject, available to any individual who seeks it.

We have the opportunity to be informed in a variety of mediums previously unavailable. From text to video, laypeople to experts, this revolutionary presence of information is the essential foundation for the presence of an informed global population.

We are now a single civilization, no longer separated by geographic concerns, united on a digital plane in a manner unprecedented in human history. The Internet allows for a truly flat world; individuals in China may be communicated with just as easily as texting a next-door neighbor.

And this age of immediacy demands more from every participant of this global civilization. The Internet calls for information to be more thorough, more accurate, more eloquent and easily understood. It demands that the information of tomorrow be available today and hails those who deliver our needs.

Most importantly, however, the Internet is the first truly interactive medium of information. Just as our knowledge may be instantly updated, we have the opportunity to immediately respond to its authors and to our peers. The knowledge we keep on the Internet has the opportunity not only to be published, but to be consistently and persistently responded to, altered and viewed in new lights.

The global economy may be built on a free exchange of goods, but global knowledge the Internet is built on the free exchange of ideas, where any mind may come and freely discuss any number of subjects.

To allow a governing force to mandate what may and may not be present on the Internet is to inherently quiet the uncensored exchange of ideas it allows.

Any form of censorship, whether from special-interest groups, concerned citizens or an appointed group, destroys the most valuable characteristic of the Internet.

Without censorship, any voice, any thought, any mind has an equal opportunity to be recognized, to be heard, to be understood. To place restrictions on what may be published on the Internet is for us to decide that some minds are less valuable than others, that some voices do not deserve to be so loud.

More here:
Censorship would hinder the Internet revolution

I am still in only shaky post-hurricane connection to the Internet, so here is one update before catching up on a variety of other topics soon:

By all means read Wen Stephenson's impassioned essay* in the Phoenix today on what he views as the tyranny of complacency and business-as-usual in the media's approach to climate change.

It is one thing for politicians to decide that they simply can't touch certain issues. Politicians need to keep raising money. They're vulnerable to concerted opposition campaigns. They are acutely aware of the tiny distance they can afford to get "ahead" of the sometimes-uninformed center of public opinion on any issue.**

Thus we've come to recognize the inch-wide boundaries of political argument when it comes to anything involving guns (as I argued at length here). Stephenson says that, even if politicians have come to a similar calculation about the impossibility of discussing climate policies and therefore climate change itself, the media should not accept their definition of what "can" and "cannot" be discussed.

That is: It's the politicians' fault that neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama mentioned climate change during their debates. It's the press's fault that they weren't asked.

For cultural, commercial, intellectual, and political reasons, it is tricky for members of the press, especially those in organizations that still quaintly think of themselves as "mainstream," to decide that they, rather than elected leaders, should announce what "matters" to the public. But they do it all the time. The push-and-pull of the press "leading" versus merely "reflecting" public opinion has gone on for a very long time, on a very wide range of issues.*** In this article Stephenson admits all the difficulties but still argues, fiercely, that it's time for the established media to do more.

This is an angry, polemical piece, which says both good and bad things about many specific people in the media -- including us here at The Atlantic, where Stephenson once worked (he was deeply involved in the creation of The Atlantic's original web site) and still has many friends. At a time when both parties are saying that this is an "exceptionally important" election, yet neither will even discuss an issue that (I contend) will loom larger in historical accounts of this era than 99 percent of what is discussed in speeches, news analyses, and debates, this article is worth reading and thinking about. And after a "historic" hurricane, following a historic drought and heat wave, following historic rains .... Stephenson said in a note to friends that it was the "hardest thing I've ever written." It is not comfortable to read, and I have various things to say about the Atlantic's long-term performance on this issue; but I am glad he wrote it.

__ * The Phoenix unfortunately portions the piece out in eight separately clickable chunks, with no "single-page" option. You could support their online ad model by clicking through all eight. Or you could try the "article print" ruse.

** Still-relevant historical example: LBJ's decision to go ahead and support civil rights legislation in the Martin Luther King era, despite the likelihood that it would switch the previously Democratic "Solid South" to a solid Republican stronghold.

*** It's more than I can get into now, but in widely varying ways the press has "led," "reflected," and "lagged" on issues ranging from slavery, to worker mistreatment and workplace safety, to immigration, to environmental protection, to race relations, to today's "debt crisis." The history of press "leadership," good and ill, on the sequence of U.S. wars from the one against Mexico in the 1840s, through the Civil War and the war with Spain, through the two 20th-century world wars to Korea and Vietnam, and on to the CENTCOM wars of the moment and the open-ended "war on terror," is its own important both heartening-and-discouraging theme.

Excerpt from:
Pre-Election Reading: Wen Stephenson on Climate Self-Censorship

U.S.-funded programs to beat back online censorship are increasingly finding a ready audience in repressive countries, with more than 1 million people a day using online tools to get past extensive blocking programs and government surveillance.

But the popularity of those initiatives has become a liability.

Activists and nonprofit groups say that their online circumvention tools, funded by the U.S. government, are being overwhelmed by demand and that there is not enough money to expand capacity. The result: online bottlenecks that have made the tools slow and often inaccessible to users in China, Iran and elsewhere, threatening to derail the Internet freedom agenda championed by the Obama administration.

Every time we provide them with additional funding, those bottlenecks are alleviated for a time but again fill to capacity in a short period of time, said Andr Mendes, director of the Office of Technology, Services and Innovation at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which funds some of the initiatives. One could reasonably state that more funding would translate into more traffic and, therefore, more accessibility from behind these firewalls.

The United States spends about $30 million a year on Internet freedom, in effect funding an asymmetric proxy war against governments that spend billions to regulate the flow of information. The programs have been backed by President Obama, who promoted the initiatives at a town-hall-style meeting in Shanghai three years ago.

During his debate last week with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Obama briefly raised the topic of government surveillance in China, accusing the former Bain Capital chief executive of investing in firms that provide surveillance technology to Chinas government.

For his part, Romney has repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for what he calls its failure to stand up to the authoritarian governments in China, Iran and other countries where Internet freedom is curtailed. The two candidates meet Monday for the third and final debate, this one focusing on foreign policy.

The U.S. government funds nonprofit groups and others to develop software that can be downloaded by users in other countries with pervasive censorship. The most widely used tools route Internet traffic through other countries, allowing users to bypass Internet firewalls as well as surveillance.

The task of keeping the Internet free, however, is becoming harder.

Chinas Great Firewall has grown more sophisticated in recent years, with the Communist government employing tens of thousands of monitors to filter content and watch users. Iran, meanwhile, has stepped up its already-substantial censorship efforts amid a mounting economic crisis, instituting new bans on overseas audio and video content and advancing plans for an Iran-only intranet.

Excerpt from:
Internet anti-censorship tools are being overwhelmed by demand

Photo from an Off-Broadway production of Stitching. Banned in Malta in 2009, the play was staged with a 14 rating in the UK.

Teodor Reljic

Though the death of theatre censorship as we know it was signalled by Minister for Culture Mario de Marco as early as January, the long-awaited decision to strip the Police of all matters related to classification of film and theatre was finally passed in its second reading in parliament yesterday, which signifies broad agreement on its contents from both sides of the House.

The act officialises a proposal to transfer all laws regulating the classification of film and theatre productions from the Police to the Ministry for Culture.

The move comes in the wake of an often-torturous censorship debate which was sparked more than once on the island over the last couple of years, impacting more than just the theatrical scene.

Pia Zammit and Mikhail Basmadjan

It was the landmark 'Stitching' case that brought the issue to public attention, however, after local drama company Unifaun Theatre attempted to stage the UK drama -penned by Anthony Nielson, and staged in Edinburgh with a '14' rating -in 2009, only to be banned by the Film and Classification Board at the time.

READ MORE: Censored no more what is the future of Maltese theatre?

The Board itself has since been dissolved in favour of a system of self-regulation - as proposed by de Marco in the original draft law calling for a relaxation on censorship laws -however this particular proposal remains to be formalised.

Go here to see the original:
Theatre censorship set to be a thing of the past

HONG KONG It didnt take long for the Chinese government to try to take control of the conversation about Mo Yan.

Days after the 57-year-old novelist thrilled his country by winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Chinas central censorship organ issued a directive to media companies instructing them to strictly police online discussion for anti-party chatter or mentions of two other Chinese-born Nobel winners.

China Digital Times has atranslationof the leaked directive:

To all websites nationwide: In light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature, monitoring of microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be strengthened. Be firm in removing all comments which disgrace the party and the government, defame cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo and Gao Xingjian and associated harmful material. Without exception, block users from posting for ten days if their writing contains malicious details.

Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist and author, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, but he remains in prison in China. Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000 after giving up his Chinese citizenship in 1996.

More from GlobalPost: Kernels of truth in "China bashing"

Official media has also been trying to steer the public toward acceptable lines of thinking about Mo Yan. In the state-run Peoples Daily, an editorial urges people to adopt one of three mentalities about Mo Yan that can be considered correct.

These prescribed perspectives are: seeing his victory as a blessing for those in China who have long had the Nobel Prize complex; seeing it as a good thing that should not be over-interpreted; and rejecting those who criticize his work.

The last order presumably targets those in China who reacted to Mos victory with anger. While the overwhelming response was celebratory, a number of reform-minded Chinese knocked Mo Yan for having an apparently cozy relationship with authorities. Mo Yan remains a member of the Communist Party, and the vice chairman of the party-run Writers Association. He also contributed to a book of calligraphy in tribute to Mao Zedong.

Liao Yiwu, a celebrated author who was imprisoned for writing about the Tiananmen Square massacre, called the prize a woeful example of the West's fuzzy morals, in an interview with Der Spiegel in Germany, where he has lived since fleeing China in 2011.

See original here:
China scrambles to censor novelist Mo Yan's Nobel Prize

On Monday, a judge will oversee pretrial hearings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo prisoners who are accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. One of the key issues Army Col. James Pohl will decide on is whether or not there will be any public testimony by the prisoners regarding their torture and detention in CIA custody.

Guantanamo pretrial hearings this week weigh in on censorship versus state secrets. (Photo by The U.S. Army via Flickr) The defense lawyers are asking to abolish a "presumptive classification" process that treats any discussion of what happened to the defendants their time in secret CIA detention as a top national security secret. Mohammeds defense attorney, David Nevin, called the war court system a "rigged game, reports the Miami Herald. According to Nevin, attorneys and defendents "are forbidden to discuss between themselves anything from what Mohammed says the CIA did to him to his 'historical perspective on jihad.'"

The ACLU is at the hearings this week and will give a statement arguing that the censorship of torture is a constitutional challenge. In a press release, the ACLU cites the government's most recent filing (PDF):

The government has effectively claimed that it owns and controls the defendants memories, 'thoughts and experiences' of government torture. These chillingly Orwellian claims are legally untenable and morally abhorrent.

"The government has effectively claimed that it owns and controls the defendants memories, 'thoughts and experiences' of government torture."ACLU

The chief war crimes prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins claims that the defendants' exposure to the CIAs detention and interrogation program is classified to safeguard genuine sources and methods of intelligence gathering that can protect against future attack." In addition to the "presumptive classification," the government is pushing for a related requested of a 40-second delay in the audio feed of the commission proceedings, for censorship purposes.

The ACLU filed their motion (PDF)in May in response to the protective order and proposed audio delay:

The eyes of the world are on this Military Commission, and the public has a substantial interest in and concern about the fairness and transparency of these proceedings. This Commission should rejectand not become complicit withthe governments improper proposals to suppress the defendants personal accounts of government misconduct.

The prisoners were in the custody of the CIA for up to four years before being brought to Guantanamo in 2006. After being captured in Pakistan in 2002-2003 their detention was concealed from the International Red Cross, whose mandate is to monitor treatment of prisoners around the globe. The CIA's own declassified documents disclose that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in an attempt to get him to give up al Qaida's secrets.

Excerpt from:
As 9/11 Pretrial Begins, ACLU Calls Out "Orwellian" Censorship of CIA Torture

As the Internet connects more people to one another, religious tensions have become more sensitive than ever before. In some Muslim-majority countries, conservative governments have seized on online censorship as a way to restrict citizens access to global ideas and materials.

But Islam itself is not to blame for this phenomenon. Authors of a recent Freedom House study found that religion and censorship are not so closely linked -- instead, political and developmental differences may be to blame.

Clamping Down

All across the Middle East, the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular have recently caused massive changes in a few divergent ways.

In 2010 and 2011, it helped young activists spread information and build bridges between networks, eventually spurring the Arab Spring revolutions that overturned oppressive governments in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen.

In terms of expanding global freedoms, this was a positive outcome -- but it had some detrimental effects. Some governments that were not overthrown, like those of Bahrain and Pakistan, clamped down on Internet freedoms in an effort to prevent further dissent.

Things took a turn for the worse in September, when a YouTube clip produced in the U.S. was dubbed in Arabic and went viral. The video, called "Innocence of Muslims," portrayed Islam's Prophet Muhammad as a buffoon and sexual deviant. Demonstrations erupted in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Dozens died as a result of the protests.

Several Muslim-majority countries banned the film on YouTube, including Egypt, Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Some governments cited a wish to prevent further violence; others objected to the productions blasphemous nature.

The episode cast fresh doubts on the potential of the Internet to bridge cultures across borders -- especially in conservative Muslim states in the Middle East.

Measuring Up

Read more here:
The Surprising Truth About Internet Censorship In The Middle East