Late last year, WikiLeaks began lobbying the Icelandic parliament to consider a series of bills, which if passed would transform Iceland into a journalistic haven.

The new laws would be modeled on the kind of shady tax laws that tax havens offer the rich. Under the WikiLeaks’ proposal, Iceland would offer sources and journalists a strong package of legal protections thereby establishing itself as a sanctuary for free speech.

Wikileaks’ proposed laws are based on a pick-a-mix approach to the freedom of speech laws around the world: “So we could just say we’re taking the source protection laws from Sweden … the First Amendment from the United States, (and) Belgium’s protection laws for journalists,” said WikiLeaks’ Daniel Schmitt at the Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) that took place last week in Berlin.

If Iceland passes Wikileaks’ laws they will be setting a precedent for press freedom in a time of tumultuous debates about the rights of bloggers and the role of the internet in journalism. They will also further legitimise WikiLeaks’ position within that debate, and guarantee them a prominent place within the future of journalists.

2009 has seen many countries step up their efforts to censor the internet. The Internet has been the driving force for pro-democracy campaigns in Iran, China and elsewhere, sparking desire in authoritarian governments to severely punish Internet users.

2009s top “Internet Enemies” according to Reporters without Boarders are:
Burma
China
Cuba
Egypt
Iran
North Korea
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Tunisia
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Vietnam

And one step down, Reporters without Boarders ‘countries under surveillance’:
South Korea
Australia
Bahrain
Belarus
Eritrea
Malaysia
Sri Lanka
Thailand
UAE
Yeman
Zimbabwe

China continued to be the leading Internet censor of 2009. Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan have also resorted to frequent blocking of websites and blogs and surveillance of online expression. The Turkmen Internet remains under total state control.

A few notable cases of 2009:

Two Azerbaijani bloggers were sentenced to two years in prison for making a film mocking the political elite.

South Korea, a blogger was wrongfully detained for commenting on the country’s disastrous economic situation.

Around six bloggers in Thailand were arrested or harassed just for making a connection between the king’s health and a fall in the Bangkok stock exchange.

The media in Dubai had their reports on the country’s debt repayment problems censored.

Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is coming to the end of his second on three years in jail for his blog posts that were considered to be anti-religious and insulting to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Burmese comedian Zarganar, whose name translates to “tweezers”, still has 34 years of his prison sentence to serve. Zarganar was arrested on 4 June 2008 for speaking to foreign media about the situation of millions of people left homeless after a cyclone devastated the Irrawaddy delta. In November 2008, he was sentenced to 59 years in prison, convicted of “public order offenses”, much more than the anticipated maximum of two years. His sentence was then reduced.

Perhaps most worryingly is how close behind many so-called democratic countries are. Several European countries are working on new steps to control the Internet in the name of the battle against child porn and illegal downloads. Germany’s former family minister (now labour minister) Ursula von der Leyen launched a pre-election champaign to introduce an internet block site to counter child pornography. Her battle against the internet was based on misplaced concern and a lack of understanding of the internet, and if it had succeeded it would have actually only pushed users and producers of child pornography further underground.

Earlier this year, the controversial whistleblowing website Wikileaks embarrassed the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, when it published his government’s list of banned websites, which incriminated 2,602 sites – including that of a Queensland dentist.

Turkey’s courts have increased the number of websites, including YouTube, that are blocked for criticising the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

“The number of countries affected by online censorship has doubled from one year to the next – a disturbing tendency that shows an increase in control over new media as millions of netizens get active online,” said Lucie Morillon, head of the Internet and Freedoms Desk. “That is why Reporters Without Borders will launch a new campaign against the Enemies of the Internet on 12 March.”

See full Reporters without Boarders report

As Canada changes its libel laws to focus on ‘responsible journalism’ (see previous post) over on the other side of the Atlantic a different argument about the responsibility of journalists is raging.

Two cousins of Akmal Shaikh, the British man executed by the Chinese on 29 December for smuggling heroin, have accused the British media of failing their cousin. Amina and Ridwan Shaikh wrote a letter to The Guardian stating that the “sporadic media attention” that his case received during his two years in prison contributed to his execution.

They stated:

We were shocked that, apart from Sky News, his case received only sporadic media attention during his two years in prison. Only when news was released of his imminent execution did it get the coverage it deserved. Wouldn’t more media attention at an earlier stage have applied more pressure to the Chinese authorities? Wasn’t this lack of coverage an injustice in itself?

But is Shaikh’s eventual death the responsibility of the media? And, as Amy Stillman wrote in her blog post, Did the media fail Akmal Shaikh?, “should the press function as an international pressure cooker” for cases such as Shaikh’s?

The Shaikh’s are confusing the role of advocacy groups, such as Reprieve, and the media. For the media to maintain its integrity, and by extension its role within any functioning democracy, it cannot start agenda bashing. The responsibility of journalists needs to be maintaining this integrity, not championing causes. The one would destroy the other.

The Supreme Court in Canada has overhauled the country’s libel laws and ruled that a journalist cannot be sued for libel if they can prove that they have taken every step to check the veracity of their story. The ruling has placed an emphasis on responsible journalism.

In a statement, the court said that free expression does not “confer a licence to ruin reputation,” but argued society is best served by fearless commentary and investigative journalism.

The new law also covers bloggers and citizen journalists.

Back in August Israel attacked Sweden’s Aftonbladet newspaper over an article that claimed that Israeli doctors had harvested the organs of dead Palestinians during Operation ‘Cast Iron’. Israel branded the article as “anti-semetic hate porn” and urged the Swedish government to intervene. The Swedish government stood its ground on the basis on press freedom, and relations between the two nations became strained.

Yesterday, Israel opened a hearing on “the theft of human organs from Palestinians, Israelis and foreign workers without their relatives’ permission”.

While Israel has admitted that illegal harvesting of human organs possibly did occur at Tel Aviv’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, they are still intervening in the press. On Tuesday, Israel forced The Guardian newspaper to change a headline about the incident claiming that the headline did not accurately reflect the story: The headline initially read “Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs” and was changed to “Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent“.

The Guardian told their readers that they had changed the headline because of accuracy:

• This article was amended on 21 December 2009. The headline was changed as it did not reflect accurately the contents of the story. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s name was misspelled as Nancy Sheppard-Hughes in the original text.

The Jerusalem Post described the Israeli government’s intervention as “thus averting [...] yet another reported instance of malicious Israeli handling of dead Palestinians, to a somewhat mundane instance of medical malpractice.”

While The Guardian’s first headline did not tell the whole story, allegedly organs were taken from Israelis and foreign workers as well, it was also not inaccurate.

When the story first broke in August it focused on the theft of Palestinian organs. The Guardian’s decision to highlight that in its headline on Monday can be explained in terms of continuity and context. Not anti-semitism.

Israel’s habit of intervening in the press, on the grounds of anti-semitism or otherwise, is a serious challenge to press freedom. And the likes of The Guardian should not back down so easily. The only way to combat this silencing is complete transparency on the part of the press.

The host of a popular Lebanese TV show has been sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia. The charge? Sorcery.

Ali Hussain Sibat hosts a call-in show that is broadcast across the Middle East from Beirut. In May 2008, Sibat traveled to Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina where he was arrested by the religious police and charged with sorcery.

He was told by the religious police that if he admitted that he “had done something against religion”, he would be released.

Sibat confessed to Saudi authorities that he consulted spirits to predict the future. But this wasn’t enough for the authorities who then brought him to a TV studio and told him to confess again. The conversation was broadcast on a Saudi program about religion.

“How do you rate yourself among magicians?” an interviewer asked Sibat.

“What?” said Sibat, clearly nervous. “I have failed. I confess in front of God.”

Sibat was then tried in court, and the confession was used against him. He was sentenced to death on Nov. 9.

Unfortunately, this case is not an isolated incident. Across the world public figure, like journalists and TV personalities are frequently used as an examples and tried for trust up charges.

See Amnesty International Champaign for Ali Hussain Sibat:
http://www.isavelives.be/en/node/4554

The OSCE (The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Representative on Freedom of the Media, Miklos Haraszti, yesterday called for journalistic ‘offenses’ be handed in civil rather than criminal courts.

In a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Haraszti called for an end to the continuing persecution of independent journalism in Russia and demanded that “media-hostile judicial practices” be halted.

“Independent journalism in Russia is confronted with a wide array of repressive tools ranging from dubious charges to criminal libel lawsuits. This is a matter of grave concern,” Haraszti said in the letter.

On 26 November 2009, a court in Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, sentenced journalist Irek Murtazin to nearly two years in a Gulag on charges of defaming Mintimer Shaimiyev, the Republic’s president. The combined charges emerged after Murtazin published an investigative book, newspaper articles and various blog posts that criticized leadership of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia.

In his letter to Lavrov, Haraszti also mentioned the sentencing of 24-year-old journalist Aygul Makhmutova.
Makhmutova, the chief editor of a small Moscow community newspaper that reported on controversial development plans by local businesses, was indicted with fraud, extortion and assault of officials. In two separate trials, a Moscow district court sentenced her to a total of five-and-a-half years.

The verdict of the second trial was annulled in early December due to legal flaws, but, Makhmutova remains in custody to serve her first sentence.

Many of the pirates operating off the coast of Somalia were given special forces-style training from Western firms, a special report by Al Jazeera has found.

Some security firms currently protecting shipping from the pirates had been engaged to train them a decade ago.

One company, Hart Group, coached trainees to be the “coastguard” of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region – providing protection from illegal fishing in the region.

In this exclusive report, Al Jazeera’s Dan Nolan found that Western companies, involved at all levels of the business, can now expect to make up to half a million dollars from the avergage $2m “ransom and release” contracts they are awarded to solve.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/09/20099894242623358.html

A very interesting mini documentary. What makes it even more interesting is how kind it is to Hart Group..?

Imagine a world where you can be sued for what you say on your blog. We are one step closer to that world today after a landmark ruling in New York that has forced Google to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who called the 37 year-old Canadian model Liskula Cohen a ‘skank’.

Cohen sought legal action against Google after a torrent of abusive comments were made on the Skanks in NYC blog. Cohen now plans to launch a libel case against the no longer anonymous blogger.

This is a worrying new development in the on-going war for online privacy. At a time when many in the supposed developed world are critical of the likes of Iran, China and Egypt for suppressing bloggers and access to social networking sites such as twitter, I think that what is happening quietly under our noses is of equal, if not greater, concern.

The Motion: “Governments at war are winning the battle of controlling the international media”

For the motion: Andrew Gilligan, Evening Standard columnist, and James Shea, Director of Policy Planning in the Private Office of the Secretary General NATO

Against the Motion- Jeremy Dear, National Union of Journalists, and Alan Fisher, Al-Jazeera London correspondent

Chair: William Horsley – Association of European Journalists

and added opinions from- Sharif Nashashibi, of Arab Media Watch, and Norbert Mbu-Mputu, a former UN worker in DRC, writer and journalist.

And check out, at the beginning of the video, me collecting my UNESCO student journalist prize!