Flowers
and tributes for the murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia
(pictured) and Slovak journalists Jan Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina
Kusnirova, who were found shot dead at their home near Bratislava.
Galizia, 53, was an anti-corruption blogger and was killed by a car bomb
on October 16, 2017. Photo by Dan Kitwood / Getty Images for the Daphne
Project.
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
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 Freedom 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
Moreno 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 Moreno 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.