United Kingdom

UK ministers backed over £4 million of tear gas, crowd control ammunition and CS hand grenade sales over the last two years to Saudi Arabia – one of the most repressive states in the world. The British government also allowed crowd control ammunition to be sold to Malaysia and Oman, as well as tear gas to Hong Kong and Thailand.

Joint letter from civil society organisations to foreign ministers of Freedom Online Coalition member states regarding Snowden’s allegations of the surveillance of human rights organisations.

PEN International and English PEN are extremely concerned by allegations by Edward Snowden that human rights organisations have been specifically targeted by the British and U.S. spy agencies’ mass surveillance programmes.

Anything that stands in the way of a prisoner reading anything is a lunatic act. It costs them more and it costs us more, says Index on Censorship in response to UK Justice Secretary Chris Grayling’s Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme.

“The lack of any real guarantees enshrining press freedom continues to expose journalism in the United Kingdom to great uncertainty, as there is nothing benign in a system that invites even the possibility of tighter restrictions on freedom of expression,” said World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers CEO, Vincent Peyrègne.

The International Federation of Journalists and the National Union of Journalists condemn a judgement by the U.K. Court of Appeal that it was lawful for police to seize material from David Miranda at Heathrow airport last August.

A Bible-based play by acclaimed comedy group The Reduced Shakespeare company has been pulled from the stage after protests from Christian fundamentalists. According to UTV, the company was due to perform The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged), at the Theatre At the Mill in Newtownabbey in Northern Ireland next week at the beginning of a U.K. tour.

The U.K. Independence Party has promised it will ban the teaching of climate change in schools, if elected in May next year. The party’s 2010 manifesto included a pledge to ban Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth from schools.

Privacy International’s partner organisation, Bytes for All, has filed a complaint against the UK Government, decrying the human rights violations inherent in such extensive surveillance and demonstrating how the UK’s mass surveillance operations and its policies have a disproportionate impact on those who live outside the country.

Carol-singers, buskers, canvassers, clay pigeon shooters, nudists: All would be affected because they would all be guilty of behaviour which could “reasonably be expected to cause” annoyance, under a proposal to broaden the scope of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders.

ARTICLE 19 and leading civil liberties campaigners in the U.K. have written to the Home Affairs Committee to highlight concerns about press freedom in the country. The joint letter came ahead of the Committee’s counter-terrorism evidence session on 3 December 2013, at which The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger gave evidence.

An open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron comes in response to a series of events in the wake of the Guardian newspaper’s reporting of the Edward Snowden disclosures, revealing mass surveillance of digital communications by the UK security agency, GCHQ.

Curator Danah Abdullah was told that the work of artist Ghada Wali was too politicised and did not fit in with the rest of her exhibition at P21 Gallery in London. When Abdullah kept pushing the issue, it was suggested she alter the posters to remove text that could be perceived as controversial.

A group of leading global press freedom and media organisations have written an open letter to Queen Elizabeth II asking her to reject a proposed Royal Charter that would impose repressive statutory controls on the British press

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has encouraged a House of Commons select committee to review whether The Guardian newspaper has damaged national security by publishing material leaked by Edward Snowden.

The international market in communications surveillance, monitoring and interception technology is dangerously under-regulated. There is very little at the moment stopping companies on show at the DSEI arms fair in the UK from selling surveillance equipment to repressive regimes.