Tag: Repression

  • Repression deepens in Hong Kong with Jimmy Lai’s guilty verdict and censorship over deadly Wang Fuk Court fire

    Repression deepens in Hong Kong with Jimmy Lai’s guilty verdict and censorship over deadly Wang Fuk Court fire

    Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter.

    For challenging the CCP, Jimmy Lai may spend the rest of his life behind bars

    The result press freedom and human rights advocates feared has arrived: 78-year-old media tycoon, Chinese Communist Party critic, and Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai was found guilty in Hong Kong this week. After five years in detention, much of it in solitary confinement, a West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court found him guilty of sedition and collusion with foreign forces on Monday morning.

    He will be sentenced at a later date. Lai, who has suffered deteriorating health amidst his detainment, may very well die in prison. 

    Authorities launch censorship campaign after Hong Kong’s tragic Wang Fuk Court fire

    It’s a page straight out of the authoritarian playbook: Censorship after a crisis to protect the interests of the state from the fallout. Unfortunately, authorities in Hong Kong are not straying away from this strategy. In the aftermath of a deadly residential fire that took at least 159 lives, some of those who have spoken out about the tragedy are now themselves at risk. Hong Kong officials warned they would punish those who “exploit” the tragedy and threatened foreign media against “spreading false information, distorting and smearing the government’s disaster relief and aftermath work” or “provoking social division and opposition.”

    Miles Kwan, a university student, started a petition calling for “four big demands” including more regulation, investigation, and assistance to displaced residents after the fire. His position caught the attention of authorities, but not in the way he’d hoped — Kwan was quickly arrested on sedition charges. Other arrests followed, including of a solicitor who intended to speak at a pre-emptively canceled press conference about the fire and a former district councillor. Hong Kong Baptist University suspended the campus student union and “blocked from sight by tall barriers” a union notice board featuring messages about the fire. Separately, authorities also charged a man with sedition for encouraging others on social media not to vote in the latest “patriots only” election. 

    Proposed Trump admin policy could make self-censorship a condition of entry for tourists

    Last week, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced its intention to impose a new policy on tourists from dozens of countries that do not require visas for short visits to the country. Under the proposal, tourists will have to provide five years of social media history in their Electronic System for Travel Authorizations applications, just so they can visit Yellowstone or Disney. Tourists will no doubt worry that their travel plans could be disrupted over years-old tweets and social media commentary.

    “Requiring temporary visitors here for a vacation or business to surrender five years of their social media to the U.S. will send the message that the American commitment to free speech is pretense, not practice. This is not the behavior of a country confident in its freedoms,” FIRE warned in response. Keep an eye out for a forthcoming formal comment from FIRE on the matter.

    China’s censorship targets underground pastors — and the global internet

    After dozens of arrests, 18 leaders of the underground Zion Church were charged with “illegally using information networks,” which can result in up to three years in prison. The church is not sanctioned by the government.

    Meanwhile, Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent is reportedly abusing trademark claims to pressure U.S. based cloud hosting service Vultr to halt operations of FreeWeChat, a censorship watchdog tool run by GreatFire.org. FreeWeChat monitors censorship on WeChat, Tencent’s immensely popular social app. After months of back and forth over Tencent’s allegations, Vultr issued “a formal 30-day notification of termination of services.” FreeWeChat has moved to another hosting provider, but expects the new one to face similar threats.

    Prosecutors seek to reverse important UK free speech victory

    In October’s Free Speech Dispatch, I celebrated the overturning of Hamit Coskun’s conviction for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. But that victory, a rare one in the UK these days, may be short-lived. 

    Late last month, the Crown Prosecution Service appealed the Southwark Crown Court’s ruling in favor of Coskun, where Justice Joel Nathan Bennathan said that free expression “must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.” The CPS asserts that Quran burning itself is not a criminal act but Coskun “demonstrated hostility towards a religious or racial group, which is a crime.”

    In Quran burning conviction, UK judge uses violence against defendant as evidence of his guilt

    UK judge cites violence against Quran-burning protester as proof of his guilt, Brazil sentences comedian to over eight years for telling jokes, and France targets porn.


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    “Our case remains that Hamit Coskun’s words, choice of location and burning of the (Quran) amounted to disorderly behaviour,” CPS said in a statement. “We have appealed the decision, and the judge has agreed to state a case for the High Court to consider.” The CPS may be claiming this doesn’t amount to a restriction on blasphemous expression, but the UK’s National Secular Society rightly worries that “CPS seems determined to establish a blasphemy law by the back door.”

    Meanwhile, former Premier League player Joey Barton was found guilty of 6 out of 12 counts of sending grossly offensive electronic communications with intent to cause distress or anxiety, earning a suspended prison sentence over a series of social media posts. In them, Barton attacked commentators Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, calling them “the Fred and Rose West of football commentary,” a comparison to a notorious serial killer couple, and photoshopped their faces onto the Wests in a photo.. In another post he said Aluko was “only there to tick boxes” and because of DEI and affirmative action. Barton also called another broadcaster a “bike nonce” and implied he had been on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

    Trump minimizes Jamal Khashoggi murder, transnational prosecutions, and other press freedom news

    • Last month, President Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office — and berated an ABC journalist in the room who asked about MBS’s role in the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump said to the journalist, and called Khashoggi “extremely controversial.” Trump also said of Khashoggi, “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he [gesturing toward Mohammed] knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that.” U.S. intelligence previously confirmed MBS’s involvement in ordering the killing.
    • After Trump’s repeated threats to sue the BBC in U.S. courts for its edits to his Jan. 6, 2021 speech, FCC Chair Brendan Carr announced an investigation targeting the BBC. In a letter to NPR and PBS, which sometimes broadcast BBC material, Carr said he sought “to determine whether any FCC regulations have been implicated by the BBC’s misleading and deceptive conduct.” And this week, Trump did indeed file his suit against the BBC in Florida, seeking $10 billion in damages — yet another frivolous lawsuit filed by the president.

    Carr’s threats to ABC are jawboning any way you slice it

    ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel hours after FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested they could face consequences for remarks Kimmel made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder.


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    • Vietnamese police are targeting a journalist over his reporting — and he doesn’t even live in Vietnam. Authorities have issued an order to prosecute and arrest Berlin-based Le Trung Khoa for “making, storing, spreading information, materials, items for the purpose of opposing the state.”
    • Malaysian authorities are also pursuing a transnational prosecution, with the assistance of Thai courts. Australian academic and Thai resident Murray Hunter will go on trial this month in Thailand on criminal defamation charges over Substack posts about Malaysia’s internet regulator. He could face a fine or up to two years imprisonment.
    • American right-wing journalist Andy Ngo is suing the UK’s Guardian News and Media for libel over its description of Ngo as an “‘alt-right’ agitator” in a Mumford and Sons album review.
    • Bianet editor Tuğçe Yılmaz is facing charges of “insulting the Turkish nation, the state of the Republic of Turkey, and its institutions and organs” for her reporting on Armenian youth today and their relationship to the Armenian genocide.
    • Turkish police arrested a man, and the YouTuber who interviewed and broadcast him, over a poem the man read that prosecutors claim insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and “incit[ed] hatred among the public.”
    • British musical duo Bob Vylan are suing Irish public broadcaster RTÉ for defamation, alleging that RTÉ defamed the duo in a report calling the band’s “death, death to the IDF” chant at this summer’s Glastonbury music festival “anti-Semitic.”

    American writer in Germany receives another visit from police

    Berlin-based American writer CJ Hopkins, whose prosecution FIRE covered last year, is in trouble with authorities again. Hopkins says Berlin police arrived at his home on the morning of Nov. 26 and proceeded to interrogate him and his wife and seize his computer. He is apparently facing new charges over the “publication and distribution” of his book The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021). The cover art of the book, which showed a swastika and medical mask, was the root of Hopkins’ previous legal trouble. He had posted the image to social media to compare European COVID policies to Nazism and was charged with “disseminating propaganda.”

    So to Speak Podcast Transcript: CJ Hopkins compared modern Germany to Nazi Germany. Now he’s standing trial.

    J Hopkins is an American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. He moved to Germany in 2004.


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    Tech censorship news from Australia, India, Russia, and more

    • Reddit is challenging Australia’s age restrictions on social media, citing the country’s free expression protections, and the application of that ban to the message forum. Australia’s government is digging in, though. Health Minister Mark Butler, who promised to “fight this action every step of the way,” said, “It is action we saw time and time again by Big Tobacco against tobacco control and we are seeing it now by some social media or big tech giants.” 
    • The under-16 social media bans are spreading. Following Australia’s lead, the Malaysian government is planning for a system of age verification to limit social media access to people 16 and older. Denmark and Norway are pursuing similar plans. 
    • Due to privacy and security concerns, Apple said it would not comply with an order from the Indian government to require its phones to automatically come with Sanchar Saathi, a cybersecurity app the government says addresses phone theft. The pushback was successful — the government shortly after announced it was rolling back its mandate to phone manufacturers.
    • Claiming to combat “content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children,” particularly LGBT content, Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor cut off access to the popular online game platform Roblox.
    • Italian YouTube channel Parabellum, which has covered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, also says it’s received warnings from Roskomnadzor, particularly over its map of operations within Ukraine. Parabellum analyst Mirko Campochiari shared that he received an order from a Russian court to “remove information prohibited in the Russian Federation, to block traffic from Russia to the map, and to notify the Russian authority of the censorship carried out.”

    Award-winning director Jafar Panahi sentenced in absentia

    Iranian director Jafar Panahi was sentenced in absentia to a year in prison by a Tehran court for “propaganda activities against the system.” Panahi is also subject to a two year travel ban. Panahi filmed It Was Just an Accident, which recently received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, “clandestinely in Iran following a seven-month stint in prison.”

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  • Demands of Harvard Are Blueprint for Repression (opinion)

    Demands of Harvard Are Blueprint for Repression (opinion)

    Harvard University’s courageous refusal to obey the demands of the Trump administration—and its subsequent filing of a lawsuit this week seeking restoration of its federal funding—has inspired praise across academia. But there has been less attention to just how terrible those demands were. No government entity in the United States has ever proposed such repressive measures against a college. By making outrageous demands a condition of federal funding—and freezing $2.2 billion in funds because Harvard refused to obey—the Trump administration is setting a precedent for threatening the same authoritarian measures against every college in America.

    The April 11 letter to Harvard from Trump administration officials proposed a staggering level of control over a private college. Although at least one of the authors reported that the letter was sent in error while negotiations were still ongoing, this mistake didn’t stop the Trump administration from punishing Harvard for refusing to accept its dictates.

    After Harvard rejected the demands, Trump himself posted further threats to Harvard’s tax-exempt status on social media, even though federal law bars presidents from directly or indirectly requesting Internal Revenue Service investigations against specific targets: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Of course, if Harvard obeyed the Trump regime’s orders to silence political speech, it would be pushing a right-wing ideological agenda.

    Among the stipulations in the April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded the power to compel hiring based on political views to, in effect, give almost complete preference to political conservatives: “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” Since most people who enter academia are liberal, as are most current academics, this demand for ideological balance would effectively ban the hiring of liberal professors in virtually all departments for many years.

    Decisions on how to measure the presence or lack of viewpoint diversity would be made by “an external party” hired by Harvard with the approval of the federal government (meaning Trump). Government-imposed discrimination based on viewpoint would also apply to students, since the letter requires the “external party … to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” If every department “must be individually viewpoint diverse,” then students with underrepresented viewpoints (Nazis, perhaps?) must receive special preferences in admissions. This concept that every department’s students, faculty and staff must match the distribution of viewpoints of the general population is both repressive and crazy to imagine.

    The Trump administration letter also ordered Harvard to commission a Trump-approved consultant to report on “individual faculty members” who “incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7”—and asserted that Harvard must “cooperate” with the federal government to “determine appropriate sanctions” for these professors. Retroactively punishing professors who violated no rules for allegedly encouraging student protesters is an extraordinary abuse of government power.

    Not to stop there, the Trump administration letter seeks to suppress the right to protest: “Discipline at Harvard must include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions … including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption.” Since the Trump administration seems to regard every protest as a “disruption” (and Harvard itself has wrongly banned silent protests), this could require immediate police intervention to stop a broad range of actions.

    The Trump administration also demanded unprecedented control over Harvard’s disciplinary system to order punishments of student protesters without due process. Among other specific steps, the Trump administration ordered Harvard to ban five specific student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and the National Lawyers Guild, and “discipline” all “active members of those student organizations,” including by banning them from serving as officers in any other student groups. And Harvard would be compelled to implement government-imposed punishments by “permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student and suspending students involved in occupying university buildings.”

    Shared governance is another target of Trump and his minions. The Trump administration’s demands for Harvard included “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty” and “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” It’s bizarre to imagine that a university could be forced by the government to determine whether a professor is committed to “activism” before banning them from any position of power such as a department chair or committee member. The letter also demands “removing or reforming institutional bodies and practices that delay and obstruct enforcement [of campus rules governing protests], including the relevant Administrative Boards and FAS Faculty Council.”

    Not surprisingly, the Trump administration’s letter also demands a complete ban on diversity programs: “The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name.” This repression not only interferes with the ability of universities to run their own operations, but it is also designed to suppress speech on a massive scale by banning all programs anywhere in the university that address issues of diversity and equity, with no exceptions for academic programs.

    There’s more. Harvard would be forced to share “all hiring and related data” to permit endless ideological “audits.” A requirement that “all existing and prospective faculty shall be reviewed for plagiarism” could be used to purge controversial faculty. Perhaps the most ironic part of the letter to Harvard is its command for ideological control over foreign students: “the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” Trump’s regime is undermining the Constitution and shredding the Bill of Rights, while demanding that foreign students prove their devotion to the very documents that the Trump administration is destroying.

    The Trump administration’s letter to Harvard should shock and appall even those conservatives who previously expressed some sympathy with the desire to punish elite universities by any means necessary. This is fascism, pure and simple. It portends an effort to assert total government control over all public and private universities to compel them to obey orders about their hiring, admissions, discipline and other policies. It is an attempt to control virtually every aspect of colleges to suppress free expression, ban protests and impose a far-right agenda.

    It’s tempting to hope that the Trump administration merely wanted to target Harvard alone and freeze its funding by proposing a long series of absurdly evil demands, knowing that no college could possibly agree to obey.

    But the reality is that the letter to Harvard is a fascist blueprint for total control of all colleges in America, public and private. The demand for authoritarian control by the Trump administration is an assault on higher education and free speech in general. If Trump officials can impose repression on any college they target, then private corporations (as the assaults on private law firms have indicated) and state and local governments will soon follow.

    The government repression that began with Columbia University will not end with Harvard or the Ivy League institutions. These are the first volleys in a war against academic freedom, with the clear aim of suppressing free expression on campus or destroying colleges in the battle.

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