The long
read
How the free press worldwide is under threat
From Mexico to Malta, attacks on journalists and
publishers have proved deadly to individuals and chilling to broader freedoms.
And now Covid-19 is being used as an excuse to silence more voices. By Gill
Phillips
by Gill
Phillips
Published
onThu 28 May 2020 06.00 BST
Just after
7am on the morning of 23 March 2017, journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea, a
54-year-old mother of three, was driving her 14-year-old son to school in the
city of Chihuahua, Mexico, when a man walked up to her car and shot her eight
times. According to reports, her son was not injured, but Breach died on the
way to hospital.
The Mexican
newspaper la Jornada reported that a cardboard note was found at the scene of
the murder, which read: “For being a snitch. You’re next, Governor – El 80.”
According to Mexican police, “El 80” was Carlos Arturo Quintana, son of the
leader of an organised crime syndicate known as La Línea, which in its heyday
controlled one of the lucrative smuggling routes for the supply and transfer of
drugs from Colombia to the US. Three days before Breach was murdered,
Quintana’s father had been killed in a confrontation between rival gangs.
Breach
worked for la Jornada and for the regional paper Norte de Ciudad Juarez,
covering politics and crime; she had also set up her own news agency, Mir. She
had reported extensively on the links between organised crime and politicians
in Chihuahua state. On 4 March 2016, Breach wrote in la Jornada about the
alleged criminal connections of mayoral candidates in several small towns in
western Chihuahua. Breach had received threats to her life on at least three
occasions as a result of her reporting. In October 2016, she had told a meeting
of the Federal Mechanism for Journalists and Human Rights Defenders that she
had been threatened. Nevertheless, on the day she was killed, she had no
protection.
Breach’s
story is not an isolated one. She was one of six journalists killed in Mexico
in 2017; more than 150 journalists have been killed there since 2000, 22 of
them in the state of Chihuahua. In 2019, according to data compiled by the Committee
to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Mexico had the seventh-highest number of unsolved
murders of journalists in the world, behind Somalia, Syria, Iraq, South Sudan,
the Philippines and Afghanistan. On 18 May this year, gunmen killed the owner
of a newspaper, Jorge Miguel Armenta Ávalos, and one of the policemen assigned
to protect him, following earlier threats. Armenta, who is at least the third
journalist to be murdered in Mexico in 2020, was attacked in broad daylight
while leaving a restaurant.
According
to the World Press Freedom Index for 2020, compiled by Reporters Without
Borders (RSF) and released in March, journalists in Mexico face a dire
situation: “Collusion between officials and organized crime poses a grave
threat to journalists’ safety and cripples the judicial system at all levels.
Journalists who cover sensitive political stories or organized crime are
warned, threatened and often gunned down in cold blood.”
Attacks on
journalists around the world take many forms, some of which are sanctioned in
law. Legal or quasi-legal mechanisms include the use of civil or criminal legal
actions, covert surveillance, overt censorship and financial threats (such as
withdrawing state advertising), as well as more direct intimidation and
threats.
In recent
years, another way of silencing journalists has proliferated: the use of what
are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or Slapps, where
defamation or criminal lawsuits are brought with the intention of shutting down
forms of expression such as peaceful protest or writing blogs. Originally
regarded as an American legal mechanism, such lawsuits are now fairly
widespread in Europe. Before she was killed in 2017, the Maltese journalist
Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing around 40 libel lawsuits filed by companies,
government officials and individuals, which were described by her son Matthew
as a “never-ending type of torture”.
Věra
Jourová, the vice-president of the European Commission, the executive branch of
the EU, has been working on introducing protections against Slapp lawsuits, the
defence of which can cost individuals a fortune and tie up their time and
resources. Justin Borg-Barthet, a legal academic at Aberdeen University, has
called for EU law to be changed to prevent “forum shopping” to countries with
claimant-friendly laws, so that defamation suits would have to be filed in the
courts of the country where the media organisation or journalist was based.
Slapp lawsuits are commonly used against journalists investigating government
corruption or exposing corporate abuses, but are also used against civil
society organisations, activists such as environmental campaigners, trade
unionists and academics, to shut down or silence acts of criticism and protest.
In France,
media organisations and NGOs have been hit with what they view as Slapp suits
for publishing accusations of land-grabbing from villagers and farmers in
Cameroon by companies associated with the Bolloré Group. In the UK, fracking
companies including Ineos, UK Oil & Gas, Cuadrilla, IGas and Angus Energy
have since 2017 sought and been granted wide-ranging court injunctions, often
directed against persons unknown, to prevent protests and campaigning
activities at drilling sites. These injunctions had a chilling effect on the
right to protest and free speech, until the court of appeal ruled in April 2019
that parts of an Ineos injunction prohibiting protests on the public highway
and against the Ineos supply chain, and which had been used as a template for
similar orders granted to other oil and gas companies, were unlawful.
Alongside
Slapp suits, there are more traditional ways to keep journalists quiet. More
than 150 countries retain some sort of criminal defamation laws, many of which
include the possibility of imprisonment. Blasphemy and insult laws remain
commonplace in many countries, and are often used by politicians and government
officials against any critical media. A number of countries including Turkey
and Egypt have expansive definitions of “terrorism” that allow them to arrest
and detain anyone who voices political dissent or opposition, including
journalists.
In
countries such as Hungary and Poland, governments and political allies exercise
quasi-legal control of public information. Media owners can be pressured on
what content to publish by threats to limit access to finance and advertising
revenues.
Separately,
the lack of legal protections for journalists against those who attack them
acts as a strong deterrent. Impunity fuels a vicious cycle of violence,
bolstering those who aim to silence public debate and block sensitive
information.
In 2013,
the UN published a plan of action on the safety of journalists, and the problem
of impunity for perpetrators. The plan provides a framework for co-operation
between UN bodies, national authorities, media actors and NGOs. Spearheaded
through Unesco, the plan was incorporated into the Declaration of the Council
of Europe in April 2014, and in guidelines published by the EU soon after. In
April 2016, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a
recommendation on the protection of journalism and safety of journalists and
other media actors.
By the end
of 2018, the Council of Europe’s Platform for the Protection of Journalism and
Safety of Journalists, set up to record information on serious concerns about
media freedom and the safety of journalists in Council of Europe (CoE) member
states, had registered more than 500 alerts, with year-on-year rises of
incidents in every year except 2017. Nearly half of all alerts are marked as
category 1, covering the most severe and damaging violations of media freedom,
such as murder, direct threats to life and physical assaults. The majority of
threats came from the state, with physical attacks and detentions making up
nearly half the alerts. Since 2015, only 11% of all alerts have been marked as
resolved, a figure that goes down to 1.82% for alerts entered in 2018. Interviews
with journalists echo these statistics. In 2017, a study that interviewed 940
journalists from all CoE member states found that a staggering 40% of them had
suffered slander.
According
to a May 2020 report by Peter Noorlander on the implementation of the 2016 CoE
recommendation, attacks against journalists remain insufficiently investigated,
and a very high percentage of incidents go unpunished. “Journalists have little
confidence that attacks or threats against them will be investigated, and often
do not report them,” the report said. “This has a grave effect on them, and
many no longer report attacks but instead self-censor and shy away from
potentially controversial issues … [CoE] Member States have committed to
creating an enabling environment for freedom of expression, yet, what
journalists experience on the ground is increased violence, threats,
denigration, arbitrary arrests and detention.”
Some of the
most high-profile cases of attacks against the media in the last few years have
involved journalists in countries where neither democracy nor the rule of law
is respected. Many of the more recent attacks have been perpetrated or
encouraged by heads of state.
They
include cases such as the politically sponsored harassment of Philippines
journalist Maria Ressa, the editor of Rappler, a social news network. Under
Ressa, the site has revealed the activities of the online “troll army” that
supports the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte and spreads disinformation about his
opponents. Rappler has also reported critically on extrajudicial killings,
human-rights violations and the rising death rates from Duterte’s war on drugs.
The law suits that would follow were presaged during Duterte’s state of the
union speech in July 2017, when he declared that Rappler was “fully owned” by
the Americans, and therefore in violation of the constitution.
In January
2018, the Philippine securities and exchange commission revoked Rappler’s
licence. The government then investigated Rappler for tax evasion, and a
warrant for Ressa’s arrest was issued in November 2018. In February 2019, Ressa
and Rappler were hit with another lawsuit alleging libel relating to a story
published in 2012, using a law enacted four months after the story was
published.
Other
infamous cases of state-sponsored crimes against journalists include the brutal
murder, on 2 October 2018, of Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist
Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. The CIA have
concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the
journalist’s assassination. On 19 July 2019, the office of the UNHCR released a
report describing Khashoggi’s death as “premeditated extra judicial execution”.
In many
western countries, there is a risk that intimidation and violence against the
media is becoming normalised. On Czech election day in October 2017, Czech
president Miloš Zeman held up a mock assault rifle with an inscription that was
translated as “At journalists”. Donald Trump has regularly shouted at and
abused journalists, and a BBC camera operator was violently shoved and abused
at a Donald Trump rally in 2019; in May 2017, a Guardian reporter was assaulted
by a Republican candidate, now an elected congressman. Most recently there have
been threats against reporter Glenn Greenwald from the far-right government of
President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. This sort of hostility towards journalists
by political leaders has global as well as domestic repercussions.
The
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is currently held in HMP Belmarsh, while the
UK decides if he can be extradited to the US, where he has been charged with
violating the Espionage Act, and faces the prospect of spending the rest of his
life in prison if he is found guilty. As Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of
the Guardian, has written, the charges against Assange are “attempting to
criminalise things journalists regularly do when they receive and publish true
information given to them by sources or whistleblowers”.
According
to the RSF, “the next 10 years will be pivotal for press freedom because of
converging crises affecting the future of journalism: a geopolitical crisis
(due to the aggressiveness of authoritarian regimes); a technological crisis
(due to a lack of democratic guarantees); a democratic crisis (due to
polarisation and repressive policies); a crisis of trust (due to suspicion and
even hatred of the media); and an economic crisis (impoverishing quality
journalism).”
It is easy
to dismiss concerns about press freedom as relevant only to countries led by
repressive, unelected regimes. But that would be a mistake. In 2007, Thames
Valley police searched the home and office of Sally Murrer, a local journalist.
“I was just pottering around doing typical local stories and in May 2007, eight
police officers swooped at my home while eight swooped simultaneously at the
office,” she told reporters from the Press Gazette. “They seized all my
computer equipment, searched my house, phones, laptops. They took me into custody
where I stayed for a couple of days, strip-searched me. I honestly had no idea
[why]. They said the charge was aiding and abetting misconduct in a public
office and it carried life imprisonment.
“It was
only later when they interviewed me, which they did copious times, and played
me tapes and showed me transcripts of texts, that I realised I had been under
surveillance for the previous eight weeks. It was just a ghastly feeling.”
Thames
Valley police had secretly recorded a conversation that took place between her
and a police officer. Murrer was accused of receiving sensitive stories from
the police officer and selling them to the News of the World. “The stories were
about a local GBH committed by a footballer, and the murder of a local man
where there was a link to cannabis and his wife was the secretary of the
then-MP.” After 19 months, during which she had been on police bail, Murrer’s
trial collapsed after the judge ruled police had breached her rights.
More
recently, in August 2018, the police in Northern Ireland arrested two
journalists, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, over the alleged theft of
documents from the Northern Ireland police ombudsman into the 1994
Loughinisland massacre, when members of a loyalist paramilitary group, the
Ulster Volunteer Force, burst into a pub with assault rifles and fired on the
customers. Six were killed and five wounded. Birney and McCaffrey’s homes and
offices were raided. In May 2019, three appeal judges quashed the search
warrants.
In the US
in 2019, San Francisco police officers investigating the leak of a police
report following the death of a public defender, Jeff Adachi, obtained a
warrant “to conduct remote monitoring on a journalist’s telephone number
device, day or night, including those signals produced in public, or location
not open to public or visual surveillance”. In May 2019, the police raided the
journalist Bryan Carmody’s home and office, and seized computers, phones and
other electronic devices. A court has now ruled that the raid was unlawful, and
the San Francisco police department has reportedly paid a substantial amount of
damages to the journalist.
In
Australia, in June 2019, police launched raids on the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation’s Sydney HQ, with search warrants naming two reporters and a news
director; and on the home of a News Corporation journalist. The ABC raid
related to articles published in 2017 about alleged misconduct by Australian
special forces in Afghanistan, “based off hundreds of pages of secret defence
documents leaked to the ABC”. The raid on the home of the News Corporation
journalist was in response to a story she had written about how the Australian
Signals Directorate was seeking new powers to spy on Australian citizens. In
February, a court ruled the search was legitimate as the police were
investigating valid national security offences. ABC’s managing director, David
Anderson, described the decision as “a blow for public interest journalism” and
argued that it highlighted a “serious problem” with Australia’s national
security laws.
Since the
outbreak of coronavirus, protections for journalists have become more urgent
than ever. According to RSF’s secretary-general, Christophe Deloire, “The
coronavirus pandemic illustrates the negative factors threatening the right to
reliable information, and is itself an exacerbating factor.”
“Both China
and Iran censored their major coronavirus outbreaks extensively. In Iraq, the
authorities stripped Reuters of its licence for three months after it published
a story questioning official coronavirus figures. Even in Europe, prime
minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary had a ‘coronavirus’ law passed with penalties
of up to five years in prison for false information, a completely
disproportionate and coercive measure.” RSF also say reporters have been arrested
in Algeria, Jordan and Zimbabwe while reporting on lockdown-related issues, and
that Cambodia’s prime minister has used the coronavirus crisis to bolster his
authority.
In March,
the Guardian journalist Ruth Michaelson was forced to leave Egypt after she
reported on a scientific study that said Egypt was likely to have many more
coronavirus cases than have been officially confirmed, and the New York Times
Cairo bureau chief was reprimanded over supposed “bad faith” reporting on the
country’s coronavirus cases. The Columbia Journalism Review, in an article
entitled “Covid-19 is spawning a global press-freedom crackdown”, reported at
the end of March that police in Venezuela had violently detained a journalist
in reprisal for reporting on the pandemic, and that in Turkey, seven
journalists were detained in reprisal for their reporting. In South Africa, the
government has enacted a new law that makes it a crime to publish
“disinformation” about Covid-19.
In light of
the pandemic, the UK and other members of the executive group of the Media
Freddom Coalition (Canada, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands and the US), agreed
a statement on 6 April 2020, reaffirming the fundamental importance of media
freedom, and calling on all states to continue to protect access to free media
and the free exchange of information. The statement said that the executive
group were concerned by the efforts by some states to use the crisis to put in
place undue restrictions on a free and independent media: “Such actions deny
societies critical information on the spread of the disease and undermine trust
in responsible government”. It also urged “governments to continue guaranteeing
the freedom and independence of media, the safety of journalists and other
media professionals, and to refrain from imposing undue restrictions in the
fight against proliferation of the coronavirus”.
On the day
of the murder of Miroslava Breach Velducea in 2017, Mexico’s federal special
prosecutor for crimes against freedom of expression stated that a federal
investigation had begun. Seven days later, according to la Jornada, Chihuahua’s
attorney general said that two suspects had been identified in the shooting,
and that Breach was killed because her reporting affected the interests of
organised crime.
Later that
year, the finger of blame for the killing was pointed at “Los Salazares”, a
criminal organisation linked to the Sinaloa cartel, led by the Mexican drug
lord El Chapo, who has since been convicted in the US for trafficking tons of
cocaine, heroin and marijuana and engaging in multiple murder conspiracies, and
sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison . A hitman linked to Los
Salazares – Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa, alias “El Larry” – was arrested by
authorities on Christmas Day 2017 during an early morning raid. Surveillance
cameras had captured him walking in the vicinity of the murder scene.
In March
2020, a federal court judge found Morena guilty of overseeing the journalist’s
murder. Testifying under the alias “Apolo”, the son of the leader of Los
Salazares gave evidence about how his father was upset that a relative lost a
mayoral election in the town of Chinipas, el Heraldo newspaper reported. The
judge found that Morena supervised the crime and enlisted the help of two other
people, Jaciel Vega Villa, who allegedly drove the car to Breach’s home, and
Ramón Andrés Zavala Corral, who was suspected of having fired the shots that
fatally wounded her. Zavala had been found dead in December 2017, a few days
before Moreno Ochoa’s arrest. Vega remains at large, a fugitive from justice.
The guilty
verdict came too late to save Breach’s newspaper. In April 2017, the editor of
Norte de Ciudad Juarez, where Breach had worked, announced that the paper was
closing. In an editorial published shortly after the assassination, Oscar Cantú
said he could not continue to publish in the face of the violence against
journalists in Mexico and the impunity of those responsible. “There are neither
the guarantees nor the security to exercise critical, balanced journalism,” he
wrote. “Everything in life has a beginning and an end, and a price to pay, and
if the price is life, I am not prepared for any more of my colleagues to pay
it, nor am I prepared to pay it either.”
The work of
journalists in all media around the world is even more important at a time when
misinformation and disinformation spread so rapidly across the internet, and
when powerful political and business actors can attack journalists with
impunity. As Unesco said in their campaign literature for this year’s World
Press Freedom Day: “Today, citizens are on lockdown, eager for news like never
before. And more than ever, the news must be fact-checked, verified. Because
disinformation spreads as fast as the virus itself, and journalists are on the
frontline in the fight against the distortion of truth. More than ever we need
facts. Facts to avoid spreading fear, fake news and panic. More than ever we
need a free press.”
Gill Phillips
is director of editorial legal services at the Guardian
• This
article was amended on 28 May 2020 to clarify details of the respective raids
on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and on the home of a News
Corporation journalist in 2019.
• Follow the
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