July 2022 in Europe and Central Asia: A free expression round up produced by IFEX's Regional Editor Cathal Sheerin, based on IFEX member reports and news from the region.
The battle for information integrity in Russia’s war on Ukraine; ongoing intolerance of dissent in Belarus; a qualified welcome for the EU Digital Services Act; backsliding on human rights, but promising developments in the battle against SLAPPs in the UK.
Information integrity V the forces of disinformation
The tally continues to rise. The Institute of Mass Information’s (IMI) reports that, in the first five months of the war, Russia’s forces committed 428 crimes against the media in Ukraine. These include killing, wounding, kidnapping and shooting at journalists, bombing TV broadcast towers, and cyber attacks against media outlets. According to IMI, 36 journalists have now been killed (8 in the course of their reporting). Six women journalists have lost their lives due to the invasion, and the whereabouts of four journalists who went missing in Russian-occupied territory are still unknown.
The battle between the forces of information integrity and disinformation goes on. Russia continues to target both media outlets and Russian citizens for communicating openly about the true nature of its invasion of Ukraine. This month saw: a Moscow district councillor handed a seven-year prison sentence for criticising the war; 30 music acts banned from performing in Russia due to their comments about the war; major music agencies reportedly set to prohibit on-stage political comments; investigative news outlet Bellingcat branded a security threat and banned from working in Russia; and moves by the authorities to shut down the Journalists’ and Media Workers’ Union for publishing “misleading content” about the war aimed at “discrediting” Russian forces. According to a recent statement by UN experts condemning Russia’s “clampdown on civic space”, more than 60 criminal cases have now been opened for spreading so-called “fake news” about the war (a criminal offence since March 2022).
Pushback
While the Russian authorities and their supporters try to disrupt access to accurate information about the war – via a ban on Google, for example, or the use of fake video calls with foreign politicians – innovative anti-war activists are finding ways to connect with Russian citizens, including by buying advertisement space on little-moderated porn and gambling websites, and using that to link to independent reports about the invasion.
An absolutely essential weapon in the battle against disinformation is collecting on-the-ground, accurate data about Russia’s human rights violations in Ukraine. Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) ongoing investigations are doing just that. Findings published in July showed that Russian forces have “tortured, unlawfully detained, and forcibly disappeared civilians in the occupied areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions”. According to HRW, “the purpose of the abuse seems to be to obtain information and to instil fear so that people will accept the occupation”. HRW has also documented the cases of nine civilian men who were detained by Russian forces during their occupation of the Kyiv region and then illegally transferred to Russia.
Ongoing intolerance of dissent
In Belarus, the Lukashenka government’s intolerance of dissent was on full display in July when jailed journalist Katsiaryna Andrejeva was sentenced to serve a further eight years in prison on spurious treason charges. A correspondent for Belsat TV, Andrejeva was due for release in September 2022, by which time she would have completed a separate two-year sentence handed to her in 2021 for “organising mass protests”.
Andrejeva has been behind bars since November 2020, when she was arrested while reporting on an opposition rally in Minsk. The authorities declared her employer Belsat TV an “extremist organisation” in 2021. Anyone caught sharing its content faces 30 days’ detention.
Andrejeva’s case was one of a handful highlighted this month by the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Teresa Ribeiro, when she repeated her call on the Belarusian authorities to end their attacks on the press and release all journalists from detention.
Another case that Ribeiro pointed to was that of Intex-press reporter Yury Hantsarevich, who was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for “facilitating extremist activities”. He is one of a number of detained journalists who have been forced by the authorities to confess to their ‘crimes’ on video (for later publication online).
Former NEXTA editor Raman Pratasevich is perhaps the most famous detainee to be forced by the authorities to make a confession for broadcast. He was arrested in May 2021 after the Belarusian authorities forced his Lithuania-bound Ryanair flight to land in Minsk. This month, following updates to their investigation, the UN aviation agency – the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) – formally blamed the Belarusian government for faking a bomb threat in order to force the flight to be re-routed. In doing so, the ICAO said, it had “endanger[ed] the safety of an aircraft in flight”, which “is an offence under the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the safety of Civil Aviation”.
Lukashenka’s ongoing crackdown on civil society claimed further victims this month, when the Supreme Court ruled to liquidate Belarus’s independent trade union movement. Several unions were accused of participating in ‘mass disorder’ and distributing ‘extremist’ material.
UK backsliding on human rights
Following a five-day visit to the UK (27 June to 1 July), the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, laid out her concerns about the country’s backsliding on human rights. Among the issues she highlighted was the populist, right-wing government’s proposed repeal of the Human Rights Act and its replacement with a ‘Bill of Rights’, which rights groups argue will weaken human rights protections in the country.
Mijatović also pointed to the hostile public discourse (promoted by some politicians and media) on LGBTQI+ people generally and trans persons specifically. “Contrary to what some are trying to suggest,” she said, “protecting women’s rights and the rights of trans people is not a zero-sum game. The current discourse is engraining harmful gender stereotypes, which will negatively affect the protection of the rights of all involved in the long run.”
By way of context, ILGA-Europe’s 2022 Annual Review of LGBTQI+ rights across Europe notes that anti-trans hatred increased in the UK during 2021, with mainstream newspapers running “one or more anti-trans articles every day”.
The UK government has introduced a raft of laws and policies that negatively impact refugees, asylum seekers, Gypsy and Roma people. And while it has pledged to ratify the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women before the end of July, it is set to do so while excluding or modifying safeguarding provisions for migrant women in two articles of the Convention.
These articles compel countries to provide protective measures to migrant victims of abuse whose residency status is dependent on their abusive partner. Human Rights Watch says that the UK’s decision could deter such women from seeking protection and justice “as they may fear expulsion from the UK if they seek help for domestic violence”.
However, the month also saw promising developments when the government announced that it would introduce legislative measures aimed at clamping down on the use of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). The new measures will involve a three-part test to decide whether a lawsuit can be dismissed at an early stage. Suits will be assessed as to whether they relate to a public interest case, whether there is evidence of abuse of process, and whether the claimant has a realistic chance of winning. The Co-chairs of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition welcomed the news, but urged the government to apply a higher threshold to filter out SLAPPs and to introduce compensation for SLAPP targets.
“Could have been more ambitious”
July saw the European Parliament adopt the Digital Services Act (DSA), setting rules for internet platforms across the EU.
The DSA was presented as opening up the big tech giants to scrutiny and protecting users’ rights online. It was given a qualified welcome by IFEX members, who generally praised its strong emphasis on ensuring transparency (for example, requiring platforms to explain content moderation policies and the use of automated tools), but also raised concerns over (among other things) its failure to decentralise content curation, its lack of an explicit right for users to encryption and anonymity, and its failure to provide stronger safeguards against potentially expanding government censorship.
The general verdict was that it “could have been more ambitious”. Access Now provides a brief guide to some of the key aspects of the DSA, which will become applicable across the EU in 2024.
