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Mexicans celebrate indigenous cuisine with an online healthy food challenge · Global Voices
J. Tadeo

Tlacoyo, a pre-Hispanic dish that is making a comeback in contemporary Mexican cuisine. Photo: Padaguan/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
A new online challenge in Mexico is encouraging people to eat healthy by returning to the nation's indigenous roots.
Under the hashtag #RetoTlacoyo, people share photos of tlacoyo, a nutritious pre-Hispanic snack consisting of corn tortilla filled with beans, lima beans and curd cheese (but ingredients tend to vary a lot).
The challenge was launched by Alianza por la Salud Alimentaria (Alliance for Health Nutrition), a civil society organization, as a way to encourage people to choose nutritious Mexican cuisine over junk food.
Reporte Indigo describes tlacoyo this way:
Según algunos registros, los españoles probaron los tlacoyos por primera vez en el tianguis de Tlatelolco y les gustó tanto, que incluyeron este alimento en su dieta, no sin antes agregarle productos derivados de la res y lácteos.
La composición básica de un tlacoyo es un pequeña empanada de maíz azul nixtamalizado rellena de frijoles, habas, alberjón, chicharrón o requesón. Se sirven cubiertos, a manera de complemento, con una mezcla de ingredientes como crema, queso, salsa, nopales, cebolla y cilantro.
According to some reports, the Spanish tried tlacoyos for the first time in the markets of Tlatelolco and they liked it so much that they included this dish in their diet, adding beef and dairy products to it.
The basic composition of the tlacoyo is a small, nixtamalized blue corn pie filled with beans, lima beans, grass peas, pork skins or curd cheese. As a complement, it is served covered with a mixture of ingredients such as cream, cheese, sauce, cactus, onion and coriander.
Obesity is a serious public health concern in Mexico, which consumes more ultra-processed foods than most Latin American countries.
Alianza por la Salud Alimentaria argues that the transition from the traditional Mexican diet to an industrialized one has contributed to the population's weight gain.
The promoters of #RetoTacloyo are sharing contributions on their official Twitter account:
¡Al #RetoTlacoyo también se suman más allá de los límites territoriales nacionales! ?
??
Foto de @jlo517 ¡gracias! pic.twitter.com/usSrIa6uhT
— Actúa por la salud (@actuaporlasalud) 20 de septiembre de 2018
Photo: Join the Tlacoyo Challenge. Value our cooking. WORLD HERITAGE. A highly-nutritious, non-expensive popular dish that contains some of the most important ingredients found in our diet. Embedded tweet: Tlacoyos from abroad…why should a Mexican lose the tradition of a good and healthy diet. Tlacoyos filled with lima beans and Mexican-style cactus salad.
The #RetoTlacoyo has spread beyond our national borders! ?
??
Photo from @jlo517 Thanks! pic.twitter.com/usSrIa6uhT
#retotlacoyo estaban buenísimos pic.twitter.com/B4WujHLRNH
— rob (@robcornejo0801) 22 de septiembre de 2018
#retotlacoyo were delicious pic.twitter.com/B4WujHLRNH
#RetoTlacoyo de frijolito con nopales y salsita de cacahuate pic.twitter.com/qfpHi0ejGO
— Nats (@_IsNat) 22 de septiembre de 2018
#RetoTlacoyo with beans, cactus and peanut sauce pic.twitter.com/qfpHi0ejGO
On Instagram, users nutricionycocinamx and djchrisolive also joined the challenge and shared their photos:
A post shared by Nutrición y Cocina MX (@nutricionycocinamx) on
A post shared by Cristian Oliver Uribe (@djchrisoliver) on

author: J. Tadeo


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Osaka cuts sister city ties with San Francisco over “comfort women” statue · Global Voices
Nevin Thompson

San Francisco Comfort Women Memorial unveiling on September 22, 2017. Screencap from KPIX official YouTube channel.
The city of Osaka officially ended its sister city relationship with San Francisco in the United States after the latter permitted a monument memorializing “comfort women” to remain on a city-owned property.
The monument was commissioned by the “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition, a civil society group dedicated to raising awareness about women who had been conscripted from across Asia and enslaved by the Japanese forces during the World War II. It features four statues representing Korean, Chinese and Filipina women, as well as a deceased woman bearing witness from beyond the grave to their experience.
The statue provoked strong reactions in Japan when it was first unveiled in September 2017, and municipal, prefectural and central governments raised official protests against San Francisco a month later when, as part of an unrelated transaction, the American city bought the property. The mayor of Osaka Yoshimura Hirofumi then threatened to sever sister city ties if the monument was not removed from the property, or if the captions were not amended.
He finally carried out that threat on October 2, 2018, circulating in the process a 10-page, 3,800-word letter in English addressed to San Francisco mayor London Breed, listing — often in bolded, underlined text — a litany of reasons for the breakup.
He complains, for example, that inscriptions on the monument presented “uncertain and one-sided claims as historical facts”, and says that there are disagreements among historians about the total number of “comfort women” conscripted and the degree to which the former Japanese Army was involved.
While Yoshimura acknowledged the regrettable treatment of women in war, he argued Japan was being unfairly “singled out”:
[…] This issue should not be treated as an issue specific solely to the Japanese military. As long as widespread sexual problems on the battlefields by countries other than Japan are not openly recognized, past offenses, which the whole world must face, will go uncorrected, and those violations in other parts of the world will not be resolved.
While she did not respond directly to the letter, San Francisco mayor London Breed issued a statement about Osaka's decision to sever ties, saying:
One Mayor cannot unilaterally end a relationship that exists between the people of our two cities, especially one that has existed for over sixty years. In our eyes, the Sister City relationship between San Francisco and Osaka continues today through the connection of our people, and San Francisco looks forward to strengthening the bonds that tie our two great cities together.
San Francisco Comfort Women Memorial, as of February 2018. By: Ka-cw2018/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
Women conscripted and enslaved by the Japanese military were euphemistically called ianfu (comfort women) in Japanese, and have long been a source of political controversy.
In World War II, at least 200,000 women from more than ten countries across Asia were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army (the United States, during its occupation of Japan from 1944 to 1952, operated a similar network of brothels).
Osaka itself is home to a large number of ethnic Korean residents, and Yoshimura‘s predecessor, the populist nationalist Hashimoto Toru, was known for sparking a variety of controversies, including stating in 2013 that comfort women were a “military necessity” during World War II. Yoshimura, a 41-year-old former lawyer, has in turn also been involved in the populist political movement at the local and national level since 2011.
An agreement between the governments of Japan and South Korea in late 2015 was intended to “finally and irreversibly” resolve the issue of “comfort women”, but ended up provoking widespread protests in South Korea.
Then, Park Geun-hye, the South Korean president who signed the agreement, was impeached, forced to resign and eventually imprisoned on unrelated corruption charges. Park's successor, President Moon Jae-in, has stated that Japan has yet to sincerely apologize and acknowledge that “comfort women” were systemically enslaved and exploited during the war.
The monument in San Francisco is not alone in provoking controversy. Activists unsuccessfully fought a three-year battle to remove a similar memorial erected in Glendale, California, and a statue in Manila was removed supposedly to make way for infrastructure improvements, although the removal came after official protests by the Japanese government. The Japanese government has also protested a “statue of peace” that was erected across the street from the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea.
This article incorporates some research by Eric Johnston.

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Nevin Thompson


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Despite proven flaws, India’s biometric ID scheme was upheld by the Supreme Court. Now what? · Global Voices
Rohith Jyothish

A biometric data collection camp of the ‘Aadhaar’ project, in Salt Lake, Kolkata, India. 2015. Image by Biswarup Ganguly via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0
On Wednesday, 26 September, the Supreme Court of India upheld the controversial Unique Identity scheme or Aadhaar.
Following the second-longest hearing in the history of the Indian judiciary, the five-judge bench delivered a 1,448 page judgment more than seven years after the first legal challenge was issued against the scheme.
First read of the majority #AadharVerdict is scary. The end of mandatory linking to bank accounts & mobile phones, sure. But no remedy for possible wilful exclusions from welfare. Worse, the "surveillance state" issue is only addressed by saying "make a stronger law against it".
— VISHAL DADLANI (@VishalDadlani) September 26, 2018
The system was also cited in an earlier constitutional challenge on privacy grounds. In July 2017, a nine-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the right to privacy of Indian citizens, but the ruling did not implicate Aadhaar.
First launched in 2009, the Aadhaar system gives each person a unique ID number associated with multiple pieces of that person’s demographic and biometric information and stores it in a centralized database. In theory, it helps people authenticate their identity so that they may access a host of social and federal services.
But the program has suffered from data mismanagement and machine errors, resulting in people being denied state-guaranteed welfare benefits, the leaking of citizens’ data and accusations of enabling surveillance.
Another shocking example of Aadhaar's failures came in 2017, with the starvation death of an 11-year-old girl who was denied her legally entitled food subsidies for the lack of the Aadhaar number. The case revealed that numerous ration shops were denying citizens their food subsidies, in an attempt to comply with the Aadhaar system.
Aadhaar has led to large scale exclusion of the poorest and most marginalised from state welfare programs. 11 yr old Santoshi died of starvation in Jharkhand exactly one year ago when her ration was stopped because her ration card was not linked to #Aadhaar. 4/4 #BhookhKiBaat pic.twitter.com/CiXuUXnLjc
— Anjali Bhardwaj (@AnjaliB_) September 28, 2018
In the ruling, the Supreme Court upheld sections of the Aadhaar Act of 2016 that allow biometric authentication to be used for government subsidies and welfare schemes. But the judgment removes some of the previously implicit requirements of the system, stating that “no one can be denied benefits for want of an Aadhaar card.”
The court also ruled to limit the use of Aadhaar by private banks and telecom providers, but did not retroactively punish private companies for violating the Act, including collecting citizen's data in the absence of legislation between 2009 and 2016.
While the judgment has been debated upon by experts, political groups and citizens alike regarding the individual privacy and linkages to financial inclusion, there exists a confusion about the verdict.
Rahul Mattan wrote in Mint:
The Supreme Court had held that allowing the private sector to access biometric and demographic information was tantamount to enabling their commercial exploitation of this information. So, the court ruled, that portion of Section 57 that enables bodies corporate and individuals to seek authentication, was unconstitutional. There is considerable confusion as to what this statement really means. Does it imply that no private entities whatsoever can use the authentication infrastructure? If so, how does that interpretation square with the rest of the judgment that unequivocally upholds the use of Aadhaar for the purposes of dispensing subsidies and other government benefits?
A report in Business Standard highlights how companies such as India's Reliance Jio acquired customers due to the e-KYC module aided by Aadhaar and the future recourse:
“Though the verdict is not affecting us, we believe that this will be a regressive move for FinTech companies as they will eventually move to the traditional mode of verifying individuals and thereby the turnaround time for processing the loan will increase to a considerable extent,” said Bhavin Patel, co-founder and CEO of LenDenClub, a peer-to-peer lender.
An editorial in The Hindu explains how the recent judgment restores the Aadhaar bill to its original form, by eliminating loopholes in the public distribution system for society's poorest segments:
In upholding the constitutional validity of Aadhaar and clarifying areas in which it cannot be made mandatory, the Supreme Court has restored the original intent of the programme: to plug leakages in subsidy schemes and to have better targeting of welfare benefits. Over the years, Aadhaar came to mean much more than this in the lives of ordinary people, acquiring the shape of a basic identity document that was required to access more and more services, such as birth and death certificates, SIM cards, school admissions, property registrations and vehicle purchases.
Over the next few years, many legal scholars and social scientists are likely to pore over this significant judgment for its far-reaching impact on civil liberties and socio-economic issues.
The majority judgment struck down sections of the legislation that allowed the use of Aadhaar by private companies and also curtailed its use by the state under arbitrary “national security exceptions”. However, in spite of agreeing that profiling undermines civil liberties and surveillance is unconstitutional, the judges reach the conclusion that neither is possible in the Aadhaar system.
Aadhaar was always meant to be a mechanism by which subsidies and other welfare services of the government could be transferred to the people more easily. It was not intended to be a socio-economic right in itself. However, judicial approval for the scheme cripples individual privacy for perceived common good. In spite of acknowledging its flaws, the judges don't find the reasons adequate to declare the scheme unconstitutional.
While four out of the five judges upheld the constitutionality of the Aadhaar project, Justice Chandrachud's lone dissent raised important concerns.
He argued that the scheme is a “fraud on the constitution” and “wholly illegal”:
While the dissenting judge's voice is not law, it opens the possibility of future challenges to the judgment.

author: Rohith Jyothish


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Hong Kong rejects visa of Financial Times editor who hosted pro-independence talk · Global Voices
Hong Kong Free Press

The Civil Human Rights Front led a protest against visa denial decision at the Immigration Tower in Wan Chai on October 6. Photo taken by Tom Grundy from HKFP.
This post is a roundup of reports published between 5-6 October 2018 on Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP). The republication is based on a partnership agreement.
Hong Kong has refused to renew the visa for the foreign press club’s vice president, Victor Mallet, who is also the Financial Times’ Asia news editor. A spokesperson for the Financial Times told HKFP.
This is the first time we have encountered this situation in Hong Kong, and we have not been given a reason for the rejection.
Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China with more economic and personal freedoms than the mainland, a set-up known as “One Country, Two Systems.” In recent years, Beijing has pressured Hong Kong to pass new laws that strengthen the “One Country” part of the principle.
Mallet chaired a talk by pro-independence activist Andy Chan at the FCC in August, which the office of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong had tried to block.
Former chief executive Leung Chun-ying compared the event to giving terrorists a platform. He slammed the FCC for crossing a so-called “red line” and said that many would want the club to explain why the government should not allow others to bid for its premises in Central.
The event came after the police suggested banning the Hong Kong National Party which was eventually banned late last month by the government.
The FCC added that it is deeply concerned about the government’s decision. It called upon the authorities to rescind their decision saying it lacked any reasonable explanation. It said in a statement:
The FCC is expecting a full explanation from the Hong Kong authorities for this extraordinary move, which is extremely rare, if not unprecedented.
New York Times’ spokeswoman Eileen Murphy pointed out that any politicization of the territory’s visa process “would be very worrying.”
We’re troubled that the government in Hong Kong may be preparing to expel a respected colleague at The Financial Times whose application for a routine visa renewal has been rejected without explanation, and we are seeking clarification from the authorities…Hong Kong’s commitment to freedom of speech and rule of law has long attracted international businesses and news organizations to the city, including The New York Times.
‘Beijing-style persecution’
A UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesperson said it was “concerned” by the rejection of Mallet’s visa renewal:
We have asked the Hong Kong Government for an urgent explanation. Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and its press freedoms are central to its way of life, and must be fully respected.
A US Consulate General spokesperson told HKFP:
The rejection of a renewal of a work visa for Financial Times correspondent and Foreign Correspondent’s Club Vice President Victor Mallet is deeply troubling…This decision is especially disturbing because it mirrors problems faced by international journalists in the Mainland and appears inconsistent with the principles enshrined in the Basic Law.
A number of international and local NGOs have spoken out against the government decision. On Saturday, October 6, NGO coalition Hong Kong Civic Human Rights Front protested outside the Immigration Department against the visa decision.
Maya Wang, China researcher at NGO Human Rights Watch, described the move as shocking and unprecedented:
The Hong Kong authorities’ visa renewal rejection—without explanation—of a journalist who’s done nothing more than his job smacks of Beijing-style persecution of critics… it indicates a quickening downward spiral for human rights in Hong Kong: that the Hong Kong government is now following Beijing’s leads in acting aggressively towards those whose views the authorities dislike.
The Hong Kong Journalists Association said it was shocked and angered by the incident: “It makes people wonder whether it was retaliation.” It added that the visa rejection will severely harm Hong Kong’s status as a global city:
Freedom of speech and press freedom are the foundations of Hong Kong’s success. The denial of [Mallet’s] visa will further harm press freedom and freedom of speech, and it will severely harm Hong Kong’s status as an international city.
Press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) urged the authorities to reverse their decision:
This is clearly a form of retaliation for his involvement in the public talk organized in August by FCCHK, which angered Beijing by featuring a pro-Hong Kong independence activist. Such action is yet another proof that the Chinese authorities are extending their policy of intimidating foreign journalists to the territory of Hong Kong.
Representatives from the Hong Kong UPR Coalition – consisting of 45 NGOs – will travel to Geneva next week to speak at the upcoming United Nations Universal Periodic Review pre-session, and discuss the incident with representatives from other member states. Demosisto, a member of the Coalition said in a statement:
The Beijing authorities need to respond now more than ever to its decision to suppress press freedom in Hong Kong, as its state of human rights is being evaluated on by other Member States in the upcoming session, as is its duty as a member of the United Nations.

author: Hong Kong Free Press


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I, Xenophobe: Chronicle of a migratory displacement · Global Voices
Mélanie Pérez Arias

Venezuelan street vendors in Lima. Photograph by LLs, published under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
The following is an edited version of the article “Yo, xenófoba: Crónica de un desplazamiento migratorio” [I, xenophobe: Report of a migration], written by Mélanie Pérez Arias and originally published by the Venezuelan media site Prodavinci. The text has been reduced and adapted for Global Voices with the author's permission. The original version contains more detail and figures regarding the Venezuelan exodus, as well as reflections on personal encounters and “otherness”.
My great-grandmother used to say: “dead bodies and guests both start to stink after three days.” I'm Venezuelan. I've been living in Peru for a year and a half, and in recent months I've started to notice the smell. My smell.
After Colombia, Peru has the greatest number of Venezuelan migrants in Latin America. To date, there are 408,000 of us “Venecos” (the informal and somewhat pejorative name they have for us) in the land of the Incas. Peru and Venezuela are two shores of an infinite river called migration. A river I set sail in, not two years ago when I sold all I had to move there, but five, when I fell in love with a Peruvian man in Venezuela.
The economic crisis arrived like a wave we'd long been warned about. And engulfed us.
I remember clearly the day my husband Luis proposed we emigrate because there was no bread in the country. That day he'd been to five bakeries and returned empty-handed.
Luis was born in El Callao, Lima. When he was seven his family emigrated to Venezuela due to the economic crisis of the 80s and 90s. He was brought up in a Peruvian home in the centre of Caracas where they revered bread with butter and jam, rice, and the Alianza Lima football team. On our wedding day his mother served the Peruvian dish causa de pollo. A friend gave us an alpaca-shaped piñata in honour of Peruvianness and to celebrate our having found each other.
The migrant's life is solitary in the extreme. Your friends live on WhatsApp, you do nothing but work and, in our case, watch the crisis unfold from afar. When we arrived in Lima there was a general climate of openness and solidarity towards Venezuelans. The migration of Venezuelans was viewed favourably due to the high number of professionals and our famous cool Caribbean attitude.
A year and a half later, things are quite different.
Permits allowing Venezuelans to work and access basic public services triggered the arrival of many of my compatriots, especially in the conos urbanos: sectors of the city which, despite booming economically, have problems with security and public services. This is where what some call the “invasion of the Venecos” has taken up residence. There are now enough of us to be a problem.
In addition, some media have behaved irresponsibly in their reporting of the Venezuelan migrant issue. Add to this the openly anti-Venezuelan position of some politicians and you can see what a cocktail we have.
I had my first experience of xenophobia 15 years ago in Caracas. My family and I were driving through one of the areas in the east of the city where Ecuadorian and Peruvian communities had settled. Suddenly one of my cousins asked my dad what he'd do if I married a “cotorro”, as we called the Andean immigrants back then. My dad, at the wheel, looked at me in the rearview mirror as if giving me permission to reply. I gave the following answer, which many years later would actually come true: “I'd definitely marry a cotorro. Just like that, girl!”.
I meant it as a provocation and my audience laughed at what seemed like an absurdity. But why? Why was it so difficult to believe that someone like me, whose only class privilege was being a better than average salsa dancer, could fall in love with a migrant from those countries of the south. My sixteen-year-old xenophobic self couldn't yet see that in this rejection, the subtle violence living inside the mockery, was the germ of a more serious illness. Fortunately, it was an illness I treated in time.
Travel cures xenophobia. Reading cures xenophobia. Falling in love with a foreigner cures xenophobia. Loving “difference” cures xenophobia. Informing oneself too: according to the United Nations there are over 200 million migrants in the world. Migrants make up 3.3% of the global population, but contribute 9% of global GDP. That's nearly 7 trillion US dollars worth of production per year. In fact, remittances only account for 15% of the migrant's income; the other 85% stays in the country.
This trivial anecdote from my adolescence barely scratches the surface of what the migration phenomenon meant for us. We Venezuelans were the cocaine-addicted millionaire cousins in a continent devastated by violence. Indeed, we received thousands of immigrants from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Central America. Whole families like that of my husband came and made their home in a country where everything smelt new.
The emotional benefits of this migration are palpable, at least in the families whose stories I know first hand. Just listening to my mother-in-law talk about Venezuela makes my heart swell. Her stories of nearly 40 years in the country where she was able to bring up two sons as professionals and see her granddaughters being born make me proud of my country. However, I don't believe that solidarity is a bargaining chip. We help others because it's the right thing to do. That's all.
It is said that fear is natural. But you need to know what to do with it, where to put it, who to entrust it to, to know when it really is useful because it keeps you safe or when it is an excuse not to change. There is no formula; everyone must find their own way to fight their own demons. But in recent months instances of xenophobia in Peru have emerged in a way that, although I don't have the data to prove it, does not seem typical of Peruvians.
I've spent too long this week reading anti-Venezuelan comments on social media, trying to keep my eyes unclouded by feelings of chauvinism and victimisation. Then I compared them with the demonstrations of support I've received from strangers. My conclusion is that, in reality, in the streets, Peruvians are writing a very different story.
Meanwhile, we Venezuelans are becoming aware of our otherness—that smell—as we face a set of circumstances unprecedented in our history: leaving to seek a living far from all we call mine: My country. My home. My parents. My dead. This demands from us skills of adaptation that must be learnt along the way.
We still have, however, some involuntary possessions: My accent. My features. My language. My pain.
May we choose these possessions to help us build bridges, not open up rifts.

author: Mélanie Pérez Arias


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Journalists across India share their testimony on the deteriorating state of media — and vow to fight back · Global Voices
Shraddha Kakade

A panel of speakers at the National Convention Against Assault on Journalists held in New Delhi on September 22, 2018. Screenshot from YouTube by user Media Vigil.
Abuse, intimidation, and attacks on journalists and media organizations are nothing new in India.
In June 2018, veteran journalist and editor-in-chief of Rising Kashmir Shujaat Bukhari was shot dead (along with two police officials assigned for his protection) by gunmen in Srinagar, the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir in India.
While the killing evoked public outrage, it failed to change the ground reality for journalists.
Bukhari became the fourth Indian journalist killed this year in connection with his journalistic work, and many more continue to face threats from both state and non-state actors.
In their 2018 country report for India, Reporters Without Borders notes that the right-wing Hindu nationalism promoted by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, poses a deadly threat to press freedom in India. The report states that there is growing self-censorship among the mainstream Indian media “with Hindu nationalists trying to purge all manifestations of ‘anti-national’ thought from the national debate.”
The National Convention Against Assault on Journalists was organized by the Committee Against Assault on Journalists (CAAJ) in New Delhi last month and a number of notable Indian journalists were present.
Speaking to the audience at the convention, NDTV journalist Ravish Kumar criticized PM Modi for fostering a political culture that encourages much hatred against media and that has turned India into a “republic of abuse.”
Ravish kumar speaking in National Convention #AgainstAssault on Journalists with @nehadixit123 @waglenikhil @CPJAsia @caajindia pic.twitter.com/H0F4bwiMB9
— Abhishek Srivastava (@abhishekgroo) September 22, 2018
After Modi's election in 2014, critics of the government were labeled as “Anti-Modi,” later as “Anti-India,” and then as “Anti-National,” Kumar observed. This type of rhetoric appears to have turned a significant sector of society against a few journalists, in turn, isolating them and silencing them into self-censorship.
In May this year, Kumar reported an increase in abusive calls and death threats from fanatic right-wing nationalists. “It is well-organized and has a political sanction,” Kumar said in an interview with The Hindu.
Making his experience a case in point, Kumar emphasized that freelance journalists, women, and those working in rural areas were far more vulnerable to intimidation and obstruction of work, and lacked the support system that journalists in the capital and large cities enjoyed.
First convention of @caajindia threw light on horrible plight of journalists working in remote areas. From Bastar to Kashmir to North east media persons face harassment by criminals and police in connivance with politicians.Let us unite and support our colleagues. #PressFreedom.
— nikhil wagle (@waglenikhil) September 24, 2018
“The onus does not lie on us, it lies on the state to provide a constitutional mechanism to address these kinds of trolling and threats everybody is facing,” said Neha Dixit, an independent investigative journalist, in her remarks at the convention.
Dixit described a political atmosphere that discourages journalists from talking about the rights of the marginalized. The trafficking and indoctrination of the tribal girls of Assam by right-wing Hindu outfit affiliated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the phenomenon of working-class Muslims being killed in fake encounters on flimsy charges or the misuse of the National Security Act (NSA), are two examples of issues that larger media houses appear unwilling to cover.
Delving further into the broader problems within the press in India, Dixit lamented that there was no single press body in the country dedicated to addressing the challenges faced by journalists – be it intimidation, false court cases, workplace sexual harassment, or matters pertaining to pay and benefits.
Speaking of the challenges faced by journalists in Jammu and Kashmir for the last 30 years, Jalil Rathor, a well-known journalist who works in the northern state said,
“In a conflict zone journalist finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place, and is accused of taking sides by both state, as well as non-state actors.”
Rathor stressed that curtailment of government advertisements [the main source of revenues for newspapers in Jammu and Kashmir], banning internet services, and summoning journalists for questioning by state police or at the National Investigating Agency (NAI) in New Delhi, were some of the common ways the government and its agencies continued to intimidate local journalists.
“There is also an attempt to control the narrative [about Kashmir in news] both in traditional media and social media,” Rathor said.
Kashmiri women shout anti-India slogans during a funeral procession of a local militant killed during an encounter with government forces in south Kashmir. Image from Instagram by Ieshan Wani.
Patricia Mukhim, the editor of Shillong Times, an English daily in the northeastern state of Meghalaya and a survivor of a petrol bomb attack in April 2018, echoed the same anguish as Rathore, about journalists reporting from conflict zones.
Mukhim suggested that for some minority groups, particularly in northeastern India, indigenous identities or sub-identities are stronger than their national identity. She lamented that this kind of ethnic politics, though different from the political culture propagated by the present government in the capital, was equally constricting for freedom of the press.
“If you take a stand for or against something, then one or other group will seek your head,” Mukhim expressed.
Seema Azad, editor of Dastak Patrika and secretary of People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) Uttar Pradesh, sharply criticized India's Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), a law increasingly used to gag journalists along with activists. The 1967 law is intended to combat terrorism and has been made more and more stringent in recent years. Multiple lawyers and activists have argued that it has significant potential for misuse, especially for silencing dissent.
"When UAPA, the draconian law, was being used against activists, journalists in this country did not speak up. Now it is being used against the journalists.", says Seema Azad, editor of Dastak Patrika.#NoMoreAssault #PressFreedom pic.twitter.com/U0Y5dzRGmO
— Committee Against Assault on Journalists (CAAJ) (@caajindia) September 23, 2018
Azad urged that there was the need to widen democratic space to include discourse about various people’s movements in India and reporting on issues the government has strongly discouraged, such as the conflict in Kashmir. Reporting about the human costs of the conflict is often characterized by the Modi government as “anti-National.”
Speaking of the impact of crony capitalism, Azad noted, that as the corporate control in India over the years increased — from media houses to natural resources — such attacks have grown.
Lalit Surjan, the Editor-in-Chief of Deshbandhu and a speaker at the convention said, “Journalism in the past, and even in the present times has been a risky undertaking, so be brave.”

author: Shraddha Kakade


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Portuguese PM drew criticism over clothing choice during visit to Angola · Global Voices
Simão Hossi

Portugal's Prime Minister António Costa in conversation with Angola’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. Screenshot from euronews (em português) on YouTube.
The casual attire donned by Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa during an official visit to Angola has lead to an online debate about decorum, and the potential message his clothing choice might mean as the two countries deal with existing tensions.
On 17 September, Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa arrived in Luanda and met with Angolan Minister for Foreign Affairs Manuel Augusto. As photos began to circulate of the pair, the contrast between the two men became more apparent. While Costa chose to wear jeans and casual shoes, Augusto can be seen wearing a formal suit and tie.
Although Costa appeared wearing a suit during a later meeting with Angolan President João Lourenço, many people could not help but question Prime Minister Costa's original choice of casual attire and compare it to his formal dress during a state visit to Mozambique earlier this year.
António Costa traveled to Angola following months of diplomatic tensions between the two governments, so the visit logically drew the attention of many Angolans and Portuguese alike.
Angolan-Portuguese relations reached a low point as the result of a court case involving Angola’s former vice president, Manuel Vicente, who was accused of having bribed the Portuguese prosecutor with 750,000 euros in order to shelve two inquiries into alleged corruption cases. One of these is the Portmill case, related to the acquisition of a luxury property in the Portuguese town of Estoril.
The case, known as “Fizz”, was originally brought to court by Portugal but moved to Luanda after insistent requests by the Angolan government. The case’s transferral to Angola met various criticisms, such as that of Eurodeputy Ana Gomes who thought the move to be a “tremendous abdication” of Portugal’s justice system, employing hypocritical arguments.
Commenters took different positions on the topic. For example, Folha 8 journalist Pedrowsk Teca questioned the Portuguese Prime Minister’s clothing choice in a Facebook post:
Vestindo-se de calça jeans ? em uma visita oficial tão aguardada, qual é a mensagem que Portugal está a transmitir à Angola?
Wearing jeans on an official, long-awaited visit, what is the message that Portugal is sending to Angola?
Adding to this, Ilídio Manuel, a journalist and a theatre professional, questioned if Costa would have dressed the same way on an official visit to another country:
O primeiro-ministro português, António Costa, chegou a Luanda para uma visita OFICIAL vestido de forma informal (calças Jeans e sem gravata). Teria vestido da mesma forma caso visitasse à Alemanha, EUA, Japão, ou outro país do 1.º mundo? Se fosse o inverso, um governante angolano que visitasse Portugal vestido da mesma forma?
The Portuguese prime minister, António Costa, came to Luanda for an OFFICIAL visit dressed informally (jeans and no tie). Would he have dressed the same if he visited Germany, USA, Japan, or another first world country? If it was the other way round, an Angolan leader who visited Portugal dressed in the same way?
When faced with the wave of comments and opinions coming from Luanda, Maria Antónia Palla, the Portuguese prime minister’s mother, came out in defense of her son:
O meu filho, António Costa, é bem-educado. Em Angola há protocolo a mais e coisas importantes a menos – a democracia.
My son, António Costa, is polite. In Angola there is too much protocol and too little of important things – democracy
However, amidst the back and forth about etiquette and respect, Assistant Professor Constatino Marengula pointed, instead, to the impracticality of wearing a suit:
Ha pessoas zangadas porque António Costa chegou a Angola sem facto e nem gravata. Nunca entendi essa de padroes de beleza, responsabilidade e profissionalismo definidos pelas embalagens, representados por factos e gravatas, numa zona tropical, com calor e humidade. Quando vi isto, recordei me duma entrevista para emprego, num certo Banco muito grande nos anos 90. Mesmo com calor, os homens perguntaram me se tinha algum problema em vestir factos e gravatas…! Ao que disse que nao e dei a minha justificaçao! Nao sei se foi por isso, mas nao fui o feliz contemplado! Depois de ver muitos malandros engravatados, ainda ando curioso em saber o que se procura nos factos e gravatas, com calor e humidade!
There are people annoyed because António Costa came to Angola without a suit or tie. I never understood these standards of beauty, responsibility and professionalism defined by the packaging, represented by suits and ties, in a tropical area, with heat and humidity. When I saw this, it reminded me of a job interview, in a certain very large bank in the 1990s. Even in the heat, the men asked me if I had any problem with wearing suits and ties…! So I said no and gave my reasons! I don’t know if it was because of this, but I was not the lucky candidate! After seeing many suited crooks, I am still curious to know what you look for in suits and ties, with the heat and humidity!

author: Simão Hossi


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Japanese television program turns migrant raids and deportations into entertainment · Global Voices
Nevin Thompson

Captions: (Top) “Full Coverage: Immigration Bureau G-Men: Tracking down a Vietnamese illegal alien over the course of one month” (Bottom) “ILLEGAL OVERSTAYER” “FORCED DEPORTATION”
Screenshot from the television show “At the Very Moment They Were Deported” (タイキョの瞬間) on YouTube.
As Japan predicts a rise in the number of immigrants and foreign tourists in the coming years, a new television show has turned migrant deportations into entertainment. The program provoked some outraged viewer reactions and insights about the plight faced by visa overstayers and undocumented migrants in Japan.
Taikyo no Shunkan (タイキョの瞬間) (English translation: “At the Very Moment They Were Deported”) premiered on Fuji Television in a Saturday evening prime time slot on October 6, 2018.
Using a typical reality show format, the two-hour program follows a group of so-called “G-Men”, or immigration officers, employed by the Tokyo regional office of the National Immigration Bureau as they hunt down visa overstayers and so-called “illegal aliens” (fuhotaizaisha, 不法滞在者) and squatters (fuhosenshu, 不法占有) on camera.
In one segment, the immigration officers stake out the apartment of a Vietnamese man suspected of violating the conditions of his trainee visa. He and two others are arrested and interrogated on camera before being deported 24 hours later.
In another segment, the immigration officers storm a factory and detain a group of Indians suspected of being undocumented workers — the owners of the factory never appear on camera.
A final segment investigates the problem of Chinese “squatters” who have set up a vegetable patch on public land on an isolated stretch of riverbank in Kyoto.
For now, a fan upload of the video of the entire program can be viewed on DailyMotion.
The content and tone of Taikyo no Shunkan was widely criticized, with Japanese anti-racism group Counter-Racist Action Collective (C.R.A.C.) noting that Japan's  Immigration Bureau, which employs the featured “G-Men”, actively promoted the program:
This program is officially backed up by Tokyo Immigration Bureau, which makes the least refugee approvals in the world and daily abuses immigrants and refugee applicants, sometimes to death. https://t.co/HLuMOZf72e
— C.R.A.C. (@cracjp) October 6, 2018
[Translation of attached Tokyo Immigration Bureau tweet]
An announcement from the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau:
Tokyo Keizai Shimbun has published an overview of the Taikyo no Shunkan program on Saturday night [that features the immigration bureau.] Please be sure to read this before you watch the program!!! Read the Tokyo Keizai story here: https://t.co/3fDFDaQKhV
The television program appears as Japan plans to beef up its immigration services — the government seeks to recruit at least 500,000 foreign workers to help deal with a perceived labor shortage (Japanese women still participate less in the labor market, leading to worker shortages).
Many of the potential 500,000 foreign workers are expected to work as temporary labor with low wages and precarious employment, providing plenty of incentives for workers to seek better-paying but undocumented work once they arrive.
A Buzzfeed Japan article by Kota Hatachi about Taikyo No Shunkan collected online comments about the program and insights about the life of foreign workers in Japan. One noted that while the undocumented workers were presented as a threat to Japan, in reality, it's the workers themselves who are stalked, interrogated and subsequently deported, clearly facing the most risk.
Hatachi points out that at least 13 people have died in immigration detention in Japan since 2009, a statistic that was never acknowledged by the Taikyo No Shunkan program.
Mogi Kenichiro, a media personality and neuroscientist, also criticized the vapidity of a television program that treated immigration raids as entertainment:
フジテレビ「タイキョの瞬間」は、今の日本の地上波テレビの、何事も深く考えず、批判的思考のかけらもなく、表面的なちゃらちゃらしたエンタメにしてしまうという愚劣さが、最悪のかたちで表れた番組だと思います。国際的な恥です。
こんな地上波テレビなんて、一秒たりとも見なくていい。
— 茂木健一郎 (@kenichiromogi) October 8, 2018
With no deep insights, without even a shred of critical analysis and the stupidity of superficial entertainment, Fuji TV's Taikyo no Shunkan is the worst television program on Japanese television today. It's an international embarrassment.
Following the program's broadcast, Japanese activists mobilized to let apprehended undocumented workers incarcerated in a regional detention center and others know that they are not alone:
フジテレビ #タイキョの瞬間 に抗議する渋谷街宣の写真を牛久入管の被収容者に郵送しました。今週、面会してきます。#FREEUSHIKU#密着ガサ入れ pic.twitter.com/8UIx1RgVbr
— ARAKI, yuichi (@ark_yz) October 8, 2018
We have mailed these photographs of people protesting Fuji Television's Taikyo no Shukan in Shibuya (in Tokyo) to deportees at Ushiku (Higashi Nihon Immigration Center). We'll go and visit them this week. #FreeUshiku #TelevisedHouseHoldSearches
Television programs that exploit immigration enforcement as entertainment with the support and help of government border security agencies are not limited to Japan.
Media in the United Kingdom and Australia have long broadcast programs in which travelers and undocumented migrants are ambushed, interrogated, detained and sometimes deported on camera.
A similar Canadian program, produced with the direct cooperation of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), was canceled in 2016 due to personal privacy violations. The program is still broadcast in reruns.


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‘Gabbie’ chatbot helps victims of sexual harassment in the Philippines · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Gabbie Facebook page
Meet Gabbie, a Facebook messenger chatbot that helps Filipinos report incidents of sexual assault and harassment. Gabbie is a project of Gabriela, a Philippines-based women's group.
Over 10,000 women from age 15 to 49 have experienced various forms of physical and sexual abuse in the year 2012. Police recorded over 23,000 cases of women sustaining physical injuries and 1,897 cases of rape in the same period. All data is from a 2013 survey conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority.
Through Gabbie, Gabriela hopes to educate victims and encourage them to report the violence they suffered to authorities.
Here's how Gabbie works: when a person sends a message to Gabbie, he or she will be asked if he or she was a victim of assault or harassment or simply wants to know more about sexual violence. Gabbie is coded with information about Philippines’ laws about violence against women.
If the user wants to file a complaint against his or her harasser, Gabbie will ask several questions about the incident and the answers will be compiled into a form that the user can download and submit to lawyers, human resource departments or government agencies. There is also an option to forward the complaint to Gabriela.
Facebook user Lovely Ramos tested the tool and found it to be educational and convenient to use. Below are some screenshots she took when she sent a message to Gabbie.
After a user identified what type of harassment he or she encountered, Gabbie will provide basic information, including related laws about it. Screenshots from Facebook page of Lovely Ramos
In my email conversation with Joms Salvador of Gabriela, she described how Gabbie is helping them in their campaign to provide services to sexual harassment victims:
Gabbie provided an additional platform for victims of sexual harassment to reach out to GABRIELA and for us to respond to specific situations where for example….Facebook is more accessible or convenient to them compared to phone or face-to-face counseling. Gabbie also served to complement our direct services to a growing number of victims even as we are faced with limited institutional staffing and volunteers.
Salvador added that Gabbie is also intended to reach out to students and other young Internet users:
Gabbie is almost a year old but she still has a lot of potential in further expanding our services to victims of sexual harassment and in educating the public about women’s rights. We are hopeful that through Gabbie, we can reach out more to young women, who are statistically the segment of the female population more vulnerable to sexual harassment, and who are more exposed to digital media.
Since its launch in November 2017, Gabbie has been featured in several news reports and has been promoted in schools, town halls, and train stations.
Gabriela also intends to make Gabbie more multilingual — as of now, it can only converse in English. Gabriela also plans to promote Gabbie among overseas Filipino workers:
If we could improve on Gabbie’s program, she also has the potential further reach out to a growing number of overseas Filipino workers who may also be experiencing sexual harassment and are searching for information.
There are an estimated 12 million Filipinos living and working outside the Philippines.
Although this tool clearly makes information about sexual harassment and assault easier for Filipinos to find online, it also raises concerns about privacy and safety. Gabbie was designed to comply with the country’s Data Privacy Act and makes every effort to protect all the information provided by its users. But the protection of Gabbie users’ data still depends on the digital infrastructure of the Facebook Messenger app, and Facebook's overall data storage and management practices.
Facebook has been accused on multiple occasions of compromising the data of its users. As recently as late September 2018, the company disclosed that at least 50 million accounts were left vulnerable to a technical bug that allowed attackers to access all of a user's information, potentially including private chats like the ones that Gabbie offers. In April 2018, the personal information of at least 1.8 million Filipinos may have been compromised as part of the Cambridge Analytica data abuse scandal. In fact, the Philippines’ National Privacy Commission wrote a letter to Facebook shortly thereafter, demanding transparency and cooperation in probing the unauthorized sharing of the personal data of Filipino Facebook users.
Nevertheless, Facebook remains the most popular messaging app in the Philippines, making Gabbie an effective if imperfect approach to spreading knowledge about how to contend with sexual harassment and assault. As Gabbie turns one year old next month, Gabriela should also seek stronger and more secure ways on how best to protect the privacy of its users while maximizing its popularity and reach.

author: Mong Palatino


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The 19th century best-selling author excluded by the Brazilian Academy of Letters · Global Voices
Fabíola Hauch

Júlia Lopes de Almeida was a founding member in the creation of the Brazilian Academy of Letters but was left out because she was a woman. | Image: National Library Foundation. Public Archives.
Júlia Lopes de Almeida, a successful 19th-century writer from Brazil, was a rare phenomenon. Married to the Portuguese poet Filinto de Almeida, she was one of Brazil's first novelists. As a best-selling author and intellectual who defended abolitionism and feminism, she helped create the Brazilian Academy of Letters—only to be excluded by the institution for being a woman.
A 2005 study unveiled the Brazilian Academy of Letters’ greatest story of gender-based exclusion in the last 121 years. While working on her doctorate in Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo (USP), Michele Fanini found 12 writings by Lopes de Almeida that were long forgotten in an archive. Fanini says that while the author's name was listed among founding members of the Academy, it was eventually erased:
Júlia Lopes de Almeida foi o primeiro e mais emblemático vazio institucional produzido pela barreira de gênero.
Júlia Lopes de Almeida was the first and most emblematic example of institutional vacuum caused by gender barrier.
Yet, Lopes de Almeida's writing was extraordinary. In a dissertation about Spanish translations of her work, Ecuadorian journalist Sabrina Duque highlights the author's use of mixed “words of African origin, French vocabulary, traditions of Rio [de Janeiro] society at the time, casually mentioned names of locations, and folk song lyrics”:
Júlia Valentina da Silveira Lopes de Almeida [1862-1934] foi uma mulher pouco comum no seu tempo. Trata-se de uma das raras literatas brasileiras do século XIX e esteve entre os escritores, de qualquer gênero, mais conhecidos e lidos de sua época, tanto no Brasil quanto em Portugal.
Júlia Valentina de Silveira Lopes de Almeida [1862-1934] was no ordinary woman. She is one of the few Brazilian literary authors of the nineteenth century and was among the most read and well-known authors of any gender in both Brazil and Portugal in her time.
By the time the Brazilian Academy of Letters was created, Lopes de Almeida was already a “renowned author who collected good reviews and had the support of her readers,” according to Duque. However, she only had the support of four members as a member of the Academy.
Os demais homens de letras opuseram-se à ideia, pois aceitar Júlia Lopes de Almeida seria abrir as portas da Academia para as mulheres, consideradas o ‘segundo sexo’, seres inferiores aos homens, em uma época em que o papel feminino restringia-se ao estereótipo da mãe abnegada e da boa dona de casa.
The rest of the male scholars was opposed to the idea, believing that by letting Júlia Lopes de Almeida in they would be opening the Academy to other women, who were regarded as the ‘inferior gender’ in relation to men at a time when the female role was narrowed to the selfless, stay-at-home mother stereotype.
Júlia Lopes de Almeida, unknown date | Image: National Archives/Public Domain
Lopes de Almeida was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1862, the same year Brazil suspended diplomatic relations with Britain in a case known as the Christie Affair. Tensions were rising at the time as Brazil insisted on participating in slave traffic trade from Africa.
According to author Luiz Ruffato, Lopes de Almeida—daughter of Portuguese immigrants—enjoyed an elite liberal education, contrary to other women of her time. Her father was a physician who was later named Viscount of Saint Valentine (a nobleman).
Thanks to her father's encouragement, she published her first crônicas (Portuguese to English “chronicles”) in a newspaper in Campinas (a city nearby São Paulo) when she was around 20 years old.
She met her husband when her family moved to Lisbon in 1886 and continued to write and publish in newspapers and almanacs, finishing her first book—Traços e iluminuras (Traces and lightings), a short story collection, published the same year.
A few years later, she moved to Rio de Janeiro and turned her house into a meeting place for “artists, intellectuals, and journalists.” In another text, Ruffato says:
Tivesse Júlia Lopes de Almeida se limitado a colaborar em jornais e revistas, sempre defendendo a importância da educação das crianças e a valorização do papel da mulher na sociedade, já lhe caberia o honroso lugar de uma das mais importantes vozes feministas brasileiras. Mas Júlia fez mais: escreveu romances refinados, onde descreve com elegância e precisão as encruzilhadas da mulher na sociedade de fins do Século 19 e princípios do século 20, não se esquivando de enfrentar temas complexos e polêmicos para a época.
Even if Júlia Lopes de Almeida had only written for newspapers and magazines, defending the importance of early childhood education and the recognition of the female role in society, she would already be among the most influential Brazilian women, but she didn't stop there. Júlia wrote sophisticated novels, where she describes the troubles of the late-nineteenth century and early twentieth century women with grace and precision without avoiding complex and scandalous themes.
Her novel The Bankruptcy (A Falência, published circa 1919) is considered by many as her most important work, but she is also known for Memórias de Marta (Marta's Memoirs), “the first Brazilian novel to take place in an urban tenement”.
Júlia died in Rio of malaria at the age of 72. Before the diagnosis, however, she traveled across the world to Europe, southern Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina and parts of Africa.
Lopes de Almeida's story—and that of other female authors—repeated itself on August 30, 2018, when Conceição Evaristo, the woman to become the Academy's first black female author, was also neglected. Evaristo only received one vote despite the unprecedented popularity of her campaign.
By contrast, the Academy elected filmmaker Cacá Diegues with 22 votes followed by Pedro Corrêa do Lago in second place with 11 votes.
Founded on July 20, 1897, the Brazilian Academy of Letters took eight decades before allowing a woman to join their institution.
In 1977, author Rachel de Queiroz became the first Brazilian female to join the Academy as an “Immortal” with a lifetime membership. In the following decades, just seven women joined the Academy in this order: Dinah Silveira de Queiroz (1980), Lygia Fagundes Telles (1985), Nélida Piñon (1989), Zélia Gattai (2001), Ana Maria Machado (2003), Cleonice Berardinelli (2009), and Rosiska Darcy (2013).
Júlia Lopes de Almeida's literary significance made an enormous impact on Brazillian letters — even if the Academy she helped found failed her. She should be on this list.
Some of Lopes de Almeida's works are available on Domínio Público and the site Literatura Digital, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (known as UFSC).

author: Fabíola Hauch


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Why are African governments criminalising online speech? Because they fear its power. · Global Voices
Nwachukwu Egbunike

Students at Haromaya University in Ethiopia displaying a quasi-official anti-government gesture. Photo shared widely on social media.
Africa’s landscape of online free speech and dissent is gradually, but consistently, being tightened. In legal and economic terms, the cost of speaking out is rapidly rising across the continent.
While most governments are considered democratic in that they hold elections with multi-party candidates and profess participatory ideals, in practice, many operate much closer dictatorships — and they appear to be asserting more control over digital space with each passing day.
Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Benin have in the recent past witnessed internet shutdowns, the imposition of taxes on blogging and social media use, and the arrest of journalists. Media workers and citizens have been jailed on charges ranging from publishing “false information” to exposing state secrets to terrorism.
At the recent Forum of Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFA) held in Accra, Ghana, a group of panelists from various African countries all said they feared African governments were interested in controlling digital space to keep citizens in check.
Many countries have statutes and laws which guarantee the right to free expression. In Nigeria, for example, the Freedom of Information Act grants citizens the right to demand information from any government agency. Section 22 of the 1999 Constitution provides for freedom of the press and Section 39 maintains that “every person shall be entitled to freedom of expression, including the freedom to hold and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference…”
Yet, Nigeria has issued other laws that authorities use to deny these aforementioned rights.
Section 24 of Nigeria’s Cybercrime Act criminalises “anyone who spreads messages he knows to be false, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety to another or causes such a message to be sent.”
Making laws with ambiguous and subjective terms like “inconvenience” or “insult” calls for concern. Governments and their agents often use this as a cover to suppress freedom of expression.
Who determines the definition of an insult? Should public officials expect to develop a thick skin? In many parts of the world, citizens have the right to criticise public officials. Why don't Africans have the right to offend as an essential part of free expression?
In 2017 and 2016, Nigerian online journalists and bloggers Abubakar Sidiq Usman and Kemi Olunloyo were each booked on spurious charges of cyber-stalking in connection with journalistic investigations on the basis of the Cybercrime Act.
The very existence of these legal challenges tells citizens that their voices matter. From Tanzania’s prohibition on spreading “false, deceptive, misleading or inaccurate” information online to Uganda’s tax on social media that is intended to curb “gossip”, the noise made on digital platforms scares oppressive regimes. In some cases, it may even lead them to rescind their actions.
The experience of the Zone9 bloggers of Ethiopia provides a powerful example.
In 2014, nine Ethiopian writers were jailed and tortured over a collective blogging project in which they wrote about human rights violations by Ethiopia’s former government, daring to speak truth to power. The state labeled the group “terrorists” for their online activity and incarcerated them for almost 18 months.
Zone9 members Mahlet (left) and Zelalem (right) rejoiced at the release of Befeqadu Hailu (second from left, in scarf) in October 2015. Photo shared on Twitter by Zelalem Kiberet.
Six members of the now liberated group made their premier international engagement in Ghana during FIFA conference: Atnaf Berhane, Befeqadu Hailu Techane, Zelalem Kibret, Natnael Feleke Aberra, and Abel Wabella were all in attendance. Jomanex Kasaye, who had worked with the group prior to the arrests (but was not arrested) also attended.
Several members had collaborated with Global Voices to write and translate stories into the Amharic. As members of the community, Global Voices campaigned and mobilised the global human rights community to speak out about their case from the very first night they were arrested.
After months of writing stories and promoting their case on Twitter, international condemnation of their arrest and imprisonment began to flow from governments and prominent human rights leaders, alongside hundreds of thousands of online supporters. From the four-compass points of the world, a mighty cry arose demanding the Ethiopian government to free the Zone9 bloggers.
In their remarks at FIFA, the bloggers said that their membership in the Global Voices community was key to visibility during their time in prison. In their panel session, they credited Global Voices’ campaign for keeping them alive.
Berhan Taye, the panel moderator, asked the group to recount their prison experiences. As they spoke, the lights on the stage dimmed. Their voices filled the room with a quiet power.
Abel Wabella, who ran Global Voices’ Amharic site, lost hearing in one ear due to the torture he endured after refusing to sign a false confession.
Atnaf Berhane recalled that one of his torture sessions lasted until 2 a.m. and then continued after he had a few hours of sleep.
One of the security agents who arrested Zelalem Kibret had once been Kibret's student at the university where he taught.
Jomanex Kasaye recounted the mental agony of leaving Ethiopia before his friends were arrested — the anguish of powerlessness — the unending suspense and fear that his friends would not make it out alive.
Zone9 bloggers together in Addis Ababa, 2012. From left: Endalk, Soleyana, Natnael, Abel, Befeqadu, Mahlet, Zelalem, Atnaf, Jomanex. Photo courtesy of Endalk Chala.
With modesty, the Zone9 bloggers said: “We are not strong or courageous people…we are only glad we inspired others.”
Yet, the Zone9 bloggers redefined patriotism with both their words and actions. It takes immense courage to love one's country even after suffering at its hands for speaking out.
Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo, also in attendance at FIFA, shared an Igbo proverb popularised by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe which says:
Since the hunter has learned to shoot without missing, Eneke the bird has also learnt to fly without perching.
In essence, he meant that in order to keep digital spaces free and safe, those involved in this struggle must devise new methods.
Activists on the front lines of free speech in sub-Saharan Africa and across the globe cannot afford to work in silos or go silent in frustration and defeat. With our strength and unity, online spaces will remain free to deepen democracy through vibrant dissent.

author: Nwachukwu Egbunike


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Mozambicans react: decriminalisation of marijuana in South Africa · Global Voices
Dércio Tsandzana

March for the legalisation of marijuana in Cape Town | (South Africa, 2017) | Wikimedia Commons CC
On September 18, South Africa's highest court ruled that consumption of marijuana in private spaces, as well as its cultivation for personal use, aren't criminal offences.
The case was brought by several parties who had faced arrest for marijuana consumption. The court ruled that their criminal prosecution interfered with section 14 of the South African Constitution, which enshrines citizens’ right to privacy.
“The right to privacy is not confined to a home or private dwelling. It will not be a criminal offence for an adult person to use or be in possession of cannabis in private space,” Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo said.
The government now has 24 months to officially write the verdict into law. When delivering the decision, Zondo stated that it'll be left to the ANC-ruled Parliament to specify the quantity of cannabis a person can grow or possess for personal use, adding that the police officer should “consider all circumstances” when determining whether there is an intention to deal.
Such ambiguity mirrors the language of Brazil's 2006 Drug Law, which decriminalizes use without offering clear definitions of what differentiates it from “trafficking”. Many Brazilian experts argue the law ends up reinforcing authorities’ biases against race, gender, and social class, and that the framework has dramatically contributed to the increase of Brazil's incarceration rate in the past decade.
South Africa's landmark verdict was received with mixed reactions at home and its neighbors, including Mozambique. South Africa is a major destination for young Mozambicans for jobs and studies, and many were left wondering how the ruling will affect them.
Maússe, a Mozambican law student, says legalizing marijuana in South Africa could incur Mozambique in greater costs in border patrol.
Ademais, com esta legalização a possibilidade de se estabelecer um mercado de venda de cannabis sativa junto da fronteiras acima referidas por cidadãos sul-africanos, moçambicanos e doutras nacionalidades é maior, pelo que o trabalho de inspecção, revista ou fiscalização de viaturas, sacolas ou pastas de pessoas, e elas mesmas, em trânsito no sentido RSA – Moçambique, deverá “quadruplicar” por parte das autoridades moçambicanas.
Assim, não há dúvidas que esta legalização na RSA poderá acarretar custos elevados para Moçambique e outros países da região com muitos cidadãos naquele país. Aliás, muitos estudantes nacionais a estudarem naquele país e trabalhadores ainda não consumidores da cannabis, com a liberalização de seu consumo em espaços privados que não obsta que poderá ser também em locais públicos, correm o risco de, por influência directa ou indirecta, também entrar no mundo de seu consumo.
In addition, with this legalisation, the possibility of a market for cannabis sativa to establish itself near the South Africa border, run by South Africans, Mozambicans and citizens of other countries, is greater. It'll inccur in “quadruple” costs for Mozambique in regards to inspection, search and oversight of cars, bags, files and people who are in trasit between the two countries.
Thus, there is no doubt that this legalisation in RSA can turn out to be expensive for Mozambique and the other nations in the region that have a significant number of citizens living there. Moreover, many Mozambican students and workers in RSA who are not yet marijuana users, with the liberalization of the consumption in private areas, might also be influenced, directly or indirectly, to use marijuana.
The same publication had many comments, especially Maria Manjate, who was worried about the decision:
Estou muito triste. Na minha familia, existem jovens dependentes dessa erva. Estao totalmente destruídos, desnorteados, sem presente e muito menos futuro. Julgo k com a legalizaçao de soruma na vizinha SA, as coisas vao piorar.
I am very sad. In my family, there are young people dependent on this herb. They are utterly destroyed, confused, without a present, let alone a future. I think that, with the legalisation of marijuana in the SA, things will get worse.
However, Cal Barroso, another young internet user, argues that the idea of legalizing cannabis in South Africa is not at all bad:
É preciso antes de tudo perceber porquê da ERVA ser proibida em muitos países do mundo. Vivemos no mundo onde as mentes deixaram de funcionar. Deixamos de pensar. Algumas leituras cuidadas podem nos libertar de muitos “tabus” que temos sobre muitas coisas incluindo do tabu sobre a “cannabis”.
A cannabis faz mal? Sim, mas o álcool faz pior. O cigarro idem, mas posso comprar na esquina mais próxima. Quando forem a ler perceberão que não há razões palpáveis para a proibição da consumo da cannabis, tanto é que muitos países que tem gente que “pensa” estão a rever suas leis.
It is necessary first of all to understand why marijuana is banned in many countries. We live in the world where minds have stopped working. We have stopped thinking. Some careful readings can help us free ourselves from many taboos, including the taboo around cannabis.
Does cannabis cause harm? Yes, but alcohol does too. Cigarettes do too, but I can still buy them at the nearest corner. When you read about it, you will realize that there are no tangible reasons to the use of cannabis, and that's why many countries that have people who “think” are reviewing their laws.
Juma Aiuba, journalist and activist, used the moment to mock a group of local academic commentators who, since 2013, frequently participate in radio and television shows to discuss political issues, but always in defense of the ruling party Frelimo:
No que diz respeito à legalização do consumo da maconha, há que reconhecer que nós estamos muito mais adiantados do que os nossos vizinhos e arquicunhados sul-africanos. Nós legalizamos o consumo da cannabis nos idos anos 2012-2014, quando decidimos criar e instituir o famigerado Gê-40. Graças à essa erva que os nossos académicos sabiamente fumam ou fazem chá (legalmente), de lá à esta parte, temos dado passos gigantescos rumo à putrefação do conhecimento científico.
Sem dúvida, o gê-quarentismo tem sido o maior e o mais bem sucedido festival de maconheiros de fato e gravata exibido legalmente em rede nacional. Um autêntico desfile de lunáticos. Uma verdadeira sinfonia de paulados.
Há programas de televisão que você se apercebe (sem esforço algum) que os painelistas tiveram uma paragem ali na Colômbia da capital. Parece que esse grupo de sábios tem autorização para bater um baseado antes de entrar num estúdio de televisão/rádio ou antes de entrar numa redação de jornal ou mesmo antes de teclar no Facebook.
When it comes to legalisation of marijuana, we must recognize that we are much more advanced than our neighbors and distant relatives, the South Africans. We legalized cannabis around 2012/2014, when we decided to create the notorious “Gê-40″. Thanks to this herb, with which our academics (legally) smoke or make tea, we have made giant steps towards the putrefaction of scientific knowledge.
Undoubtedly, ge-quarentism has been the largest and most successful festival of suit-and-tie stoners that is legally broadcasted in national television. An authentic parade of lunatics. A true symphony of puls.
There are television programs in which you realize (without any effort) that the panelists had a stop there in our capital's Colombia. It seems that this group of sages has authorization to smoke a spliff before entering a television/radio studio, or before even before typing on Facebook.
In recent years, several countries have decriminalized the use or possession of marijuana or abolished prison sentences for that offence.
Uruguay was the first country in the world to legalize the production, distribution, and use of marijuana (in 2014). In Canada, as well as in eight states in the United States, sale for recreational use is also now legal.
In Europe, the Netherlands allows the sale of marijuana in coffee shops since 1976. A 2012 law restricting sale to residents only was recently repealed.
In Spain, the law allows private use and cultivation of the plant, while in the Czech Republic it is not a crime to carry up to 15 grams of marijuana or to grow up to five plants at home.
Fines are been gradually abolished across Europe. Countries such as Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Finland, Italy, Greece, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Portugal, Poland, and Macedonia have legalized the herb's production and sale for therapeutic use.
In France, a committee was set up to “assess the relevance of the development” of the therapeutic use of cannabis — currently, two cannabis-based herbal medicines are legally sold in the country.

author: Dércio Tsandzana


text:
Will fake news carry Brazil’s favored far-right candidate to victory? · Global Voices
Taisa Sganzerla

Jair Bolsonaro. Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 Brazil)
Latin America's largest democracy may be on the verge of electing a president whose campaign has been propelled by violence, vicious rumors of fraud and a cascade of online news and information that has proven to be false.
Far-right PSL party candidate Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has served in Brazil's National Congress since 1991, will head to the October 28 run-off vote with a wide lead amid an ever-rising tide of fake news that appears to have benefited his candidacy.
Despite having purchased only eight seconds of TV time — in a country where television ads have historically decided the winner — Bolsonaro finished the first round of voting in first place with 46 percent of the total valid votes, against 29 percent for his leftist rival, Worker's Party candidate Fernando Haddad. He is leading the latest polls with the support of 58% of Brazilians.
In his ascent from the fringes of Brazil's legislature to the doorway to the presidency, Bolsonaro has built a platform upon distinct sentiments of Brazil's collective psyche, leveraging a fear of communism that traces back to the Cold War-era and Brazil's US-backed military government. His divisive, emotionally-driven campaign promises to protect national politics from corruption and city streets from criminals, as part of a return to Brazil's allegedly placid past.
Bolsonaro openly expresses misogynistic and homophobic views. He openly praises the torturers of Brazil's military dictatorship. He has called for his political opponents to be shot. He recently vowed to “put an end to all activism in Brazil“. And he has declared he will not accept the elections results if he loses.
Facebook's products have figured prominently in the groundswell of support for Bolsonaro. Alongside ample coverage by regional and national media outlets, reflecting a range of perspectives on Bolsonaro and the other candidates, Facebook and WhatsApp have seen a flurry of false and misleading posts promoting the far-right candidate.
Although his campaign season has been anything but typical — Bolsonaro has barely been seen in public since September 6, when he was stabbed and critically wounded at a rally by an opposition supporter — his message appears to have reached millions of Brazilians that rely on Facebook and WhatsApp as their primary venue for reading the news. He has also taken to Facebook on his own terms, broadcasting brief messages via Facebook live.
Agência Lupa, a highly-regarded fact-checking agency that partnered with Facebook earlier this year, assessed the veracity of hundreds of articles about the election that were shared on Facebook. In August 2018, the 10 most popular articles that Agência Lupa found to be false or intentionally misleading were all to the benefit of Bolsonaro. Amassing a combined total of 865,000 shares, these posts included everything from videos shared out of their original context to digitally-altered images.
Bolsonaro himself even shared one of these most popular viral posts with his 1.74 million followers on Twitter: the post featured a photo of heavily armed men behind a placard bearing a death threat to Bolsonaro. Agência Lupa traced the image back to a 2016 photo that shows the armed men, but no placard. Bolsonaro later deleted the tweet.
A VICE Brazil documentary from August 2018 interviewed an administrator of several pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups who said on the record that most of the comments they share come directly from Bolsonaro's offices. While it is impossible to confirm that content shared in these groups is deliberately misleading or deceitful, an overwhelming majority of information debunked by fact-checkers during these elections circulated primarily on the closed messaging platform.
In July 2018, Facebook banned 196 pages and 87 profiles, several of which were associated with the conservative group Movimento Brasil Livre (Free Brazil Movement, or MBL) and, according to Facebook, acted as a single network of distribution. MBL has played a pivotal role in the rise of online conservatism in Brazil, having led the demonstrations in favor of the impeachment of ex-president Dilma Rousseff in 2015. Several leaders of the group have officially declared support for Bolsonaro's candidacy.
All this has happened despite a pledge by Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) to take concrete measures to curb the spread of false information online in anticipation of elections.
In December 2017, the court announced plans to establish a Consultative Council on Internet and Elections, under the auspices of the court. The Council would oversee the design of a tool, most likely a mobile app, for users to report suspicious content, and propose legal mechanisms to suppress the spread of fake news.
But these measures hardly came to fruition. The Council has met only twice since its inception — once in June, before the campaign period began in August, and a second time on October 10, after the first-round vote had concluded. The plenary court never approved any directives to guide new regulations around false information and no app or other digital tool was released to the public.
Members of the Council seem to have conflicting views about why these efforts failed. Council coordinator and general-secretary of the court's presidency Estêvão Waterloo told news website UOL that the impact of fake news on this election was not as bad as expected. He said: “Even though people say the landscape is [worrying], back then we anticipated it would be infinitely worse”.
But another Council member, who spoke off the record with O Estado de S. Paulo, thought the opposite, telling the newspaper that the Court had underestimated the impact of fake news and was now “lagging behind”.
These statements suggest there may be disagreement within the Council, possibly around the balance between censorship and freedom of expression. In that June meeting, Brazil's Intelligence Agency, which has a seat on the Council, proposed “preventive” monitoring of internet users, an idea that met fierce opposition by other Council members.
The fact that three different justices have presided over the court since December 2017 might have played a role too. The court's current president, Rosa Weber, said at an October 7 press conference that the electoral justices are still “trying to learn what is a fake news [story]”.
Her comment speaks to the rapid pace at which false reporting and falsified multimedia content have overwhelmed online communication spaces, leaving the courts — and many members of the public — struggling to keep up.
After the meeting on October 10, the Council announced it will be launching the promised app for reporting dubious news, as well as a website where users can report content to the Electoral Court. But with less than three weeks remaining until the second round vote, it is unlikely that such last-minute measures will produce any substantial effects.

author: Taisa Sganzerla


text:
For these Iranian twin-sister artists, collaboration is “like one person working with her other self” · Global Voices
Omid Memarian

The artists Bahareh and Farzaneh Safarani. Photo by Justin Aversano, courtesy the Safarani sisters.
Does art imitate life or the other way around? “Reincarnation”, the Iranian-born artists Bahareh and Farzaneh Safarani’s first independent show in New York City combines painting, video and performance. The work is also part of the twin sisters’ personal journey to explore and discover new things in their own lives.
“The whole idea of this exhibition,” Farzaneh Safarani told me in a recent interview, “is about capturing the moments of one day in a woman’s life, from the moment she wakes up—and ‘wake up’ is meant literally and metaphorically.”
Born in Tehran in 1990, the sisters have been painting together since the age of 13, and now live and work in Boston, Massachusetts. After studying painting at the University of Tehran, they moved to the United States to study Studio Art at Northeastern University, where their intensely collaborative work came to full fruition. They have exhibited in many countries, including the U.S. and Iran, and their work has been acquired by both museums and private collectors across the globe.
Safarani Sisters, Title: After 12 pm. Oil on Canvas and Video Projection
The current exhibition, which features 14 of the twins’ paintings overlaid with video projections, is curated by Roya Khadjavi, a New York-based independent, cultural producer who is largely focused on the work of young Iranian artists, working both in Iran and beyond its borders. Explaining her interest in the Safarani sisters, Khadjavi said that in addition to supporting the work, she seeks to facilitate cultural dialogue. “The increasing tension between my country of birth, Iran, and my adopted country, the U.S., where I have resided most of my life, demands more and more attention to such cultural dialogues. ‘Reincarnation’ explores the self [and reflects] the female form — her beauty, strength and confidence.”
But perhaps it's best to have the sisters talk about it themselves.
Omid Memarian (OM): You two have been painting together since you were children. Take us through your thought processes when jointly pursuing an idea. What makes this collaboration possible?
Farzaneh Safarani (FS): We studied painting at the University of Tehran, where we were trained traditionally. We were also active in theatre, performance and music. As artists, we always want to explore and discover new things and we always want to speak to the world with our art. So we decided to travel and come to the U.S. in 2014. In our study at Northeastern University, we learned to combine the skills we had acquired in Iran with new concepts, integrating video, performances and installation art into our work.
We get inspired by the most simple to the most complex experiences in our lives, and the ideas for our works are driven from those experiences. We have been living together so closely for so many years and sharing so many experiences, that we have come to many of the same ideas for our paintings. We used to work separately and in fact, never consciously decided to work together—our collaboration happened organically when we realized how our minds work together, and how we complete each other's thoughts and ideas. And we saw that it worked: our first series of collaborative paintings was very successful. Gradually, our work became increasingly knitted together and now it is like one person working with her other self. When one of us is behind the camera and the other one is performing or posing, we do not need to communicate a word, we both exactly know and feel what we both want.
Safarani Sisters, Title: Reveal. Oil on canvas and video projection. 2017
OM: What are the major similarities and differences between the art schools in Iran and the one you studied at in Boston?
FS: Graduating from the University of Tehran means that you know how to paint and have learned all the necessary skills to bring a 3D image into 2D. We learned all the traditional aesthetic techniques and theories. We were taught not to critique someone's art without being well versed and experienced in the field ourselves. We learned to work with new media, but only after we demonstrated knowledge of all the basics in our field. Collaboration and teamwork were not encouraged.
Here in the U.S., people at university are supposed to collaborate. As an art student in the U.S., you are not required to be a good drawer or painter to be successful; if you want to learn such techniques, you can go and learn them by yourself, elsewhere. We were not required to take specific classes, and could choose what we wanted to do. Here, you learn how to push yourself to be as brave as you can be, to bring out all your hidden abilities and use them in the best way you can.
Bahareh Safarani (BS): Whatever we know in terms of skills we learned in Iran, and we also self-taught. Here, we learned that art is all about approach and communication and as an artist, it really does not matter what you do — what matters is how you present your subject and concept. Galleries, collectors, art dealers and society play an essential role in the career and success of an artist; it is [critical] to have their support in order to flourish — and they have a very delicate job, because they are shaping societal tastes and if they do this poorly, they can do lasting harm.
OM: Why did you decide to try media other than painting?
BS: Different mediums communicate artists’ ideas in very different ways, and give artists different tools to communicate their message. For example, music is the most abstract art, while literature can be narrative. We know that if we have an idea that we want to depict in a painting, viewers may not get the meaning from the painting that we intended—this is simply a fact about painting. That is why we care about the aesthetic of a painting more than anything else. Video projection can bring the element of time into a still image, and it has brought a mystical and surreal aspect to our paintings. It opens up a new world for audiences, and encourages them to imagine. We sometimes integrate performance art as well, because we are aware of the impact of the form. Performances usually include music and are time- and place-specific; in other words, after it is done it is gone, as it was what we wanted for that specific concept.
OM: Tell us about “Reincarnation”, and its paintings overlaid with video projections. How do these works reflect your artistic journeys and personal identities?
FS: One of the major paintings in the exhibition is titled ‘Awake’, and the rest of the paintings follow chronologically — from her 5:00 a.m. waking until twilight, with each painting depicting different moments of her day. For example, in the painting ‘Her 5:00 a.m. View’, there are two elements in the painting that represent femininity and masculinity — the two attitudes she must have in order to survive. In the next painting, ‘5:30 a.m. in the Basement’, she is cleaning away blood. The blood is a symbol of inimical memories and thoughts. Each painting reflects a moment in the daily process, and the decisions and changes she makes in the process of daily self-renewal and strengthening.
BS: One can find differences between this series and our other works. For example, the color palette has changed — we are using lighter colors, such as bluish and greenish grays. The compositions are also simpler — we are using the empty spaces to expand upon the subject. The figure is not in every painting; she only appears in some, or just in the videos. Overall, changes in our art come from all the changes around us. We want to clear our minds of pessimism. We want to nourish our hopes with the light. We want to observe the beauty and try to define it, and we want to believe that people can be united, at least in simple facts.
OM: As two artists who are primarily painters, what have video and performance art added to your work?
FS: The communication between video and the still image is very interesting to us. Video adds time to the still image — but when one watches the video over and over, it becomes a still image. The videos we make for the paintings are very subtle; they give life to the painting, like a breath or heartbeat. Their beauty is that they do not overpower the paintings; they are not narrative and are very abstract, meant only to elicit the imaginative power to visualize different occurrences in the painting that are based on the viewer’s own perceptions and experiences.
OM: What does your show say about your progression as artists?
BS: ‘Reincarnation’ implies a new life. If we can make the audience wake up and realize the world around them and see the beauty in it, it is a huge success.
OM: In what ways have your works changed since your departure from Iran? How do you connect to the sources of inspiration you had in Iran, in your new home?
FS: Our works are about our lives — that is where we draw our inspiration, conceptually and formally. All the interiors we have painted are actual places we have lived — so for example, many of the paintings we did in the U.S. have elements of New England architecture. The use of greens and blues in our recent work flows from the beautiful nature around the house where we have been living, so there are many different things that appear in our paintings that come from the environment [in which] we live. Conceptually, the source of our inspiration is ourselves, so even as we change and grow, we never get disconnected from this source of inspiration, no matter where we are.
“Reincarnation” opens on October 18, 2018, at the Elga Wimmer Gallery in New York City and runs until October 31.

author: Omid Memarian


text:
Pashtun human rights activist detained at Islamabad airport, released after social media pressure · Global Voices
Qurratulain (Annie) Zaman

Gulalai Ismail speaking at TEDxExeter 2017 at the Exeter Northcott Theatre in Exeter, UK on Friday 21st April, 2017. Image from Flickr taken by Matt Round of Matt Round Photography. CC BY NC ND 2.0
Pashtun human rights activist and founder of Seeds of Peace network Gulalai Ismail was arrested at Islamabad Airport on October 12, when she arrived on a flight from London.
Upon her arrival, she was arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and interrogated for eight hours. She was informed that her name is on the Exit Control List which restricts her to travel abroad.
She was released on the same day, following immense social media pressure by progressive parties, feminist collectives, and other groups.
The Pashtuns are an ethnic minority group who mostly live in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Discrimination and violence are constant threats for Pashtuns, half a million of whom have been internally displaced due to the conflict between the army and the Taliban militant group. In 2016, Pashtuns were given official clearance to return to their home in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but landmines planted there prevent many from making a safe return.
The Pashtun Tahafuz (Protection) Movement, known as PTM for short, has become a rallying point for thousands to speak up about these injustices. Gulalai is an active member of the movement.
Read more: The Pashtun Long March Asks for Justice After Years of Ethnic Targeting
Gulalai was one of 19 people named in a police complaint report for organizing and speaking at a PTM rally in the northwest town of Swabi, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan on 12 August. The charges against PTM activists include “unlawful assembly”, “punishment for rioting” and “punishment for wrongful restraint”.
Rafiullah Kakar, Pashtun public policy consultant tweeted:
While Gulalai has been released, 9 activists are still under arrest for helping organise a PTM gathering in Swabi.
One of them is Faiz Mohd Kaka. He is 85 years old nd one of the few living members of Khudai Khidmatgar Tehreek. Shame!
ڈرتے ہیں بندوق والے ایک 85 سالہ شخص سے pic.twitter.com/bVgL6hPdRd
— R Kakar (@rafiullahkakar) October 12, 2018
[Note: Khudai Khidmatgar Tehreek literally means “servants of God” movement. It was was a Pashtun non-violent movement against the British Empire by the Pashtun people of the North-West Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) of British India (now in Pakistan).]
Gulalai issued an audio statement via WhatsApp stating that she was arrested for “raising a voice for civil rights and peace-building” and “participating in the PTM Jalsa (gathering) in Swabi (her hometown)”.
In her statement she said:
This is an example of how the state is shrinking space for civil society organizations. Space is shrinking and closing out spaces for civic voices, voices who are raising for peace. We are speaking for peace-building…This is not an attack on Gulalai Ismail or PTM. This is an attack on civic freedoms. This is an attack on our liberty to speak out. This is an attack on our freedom of speech.”
The news of Gulalai's arrest spread like wildfire on social media. There were tweets and messages of solidarity with her by progressive groups within the country and abroad.
@Gulalai_Ismail released after investigation by FIA for around 8 hours. Aftr her release talking to @24NewsHD. #ReleaseGulalaiIsmail @gabeeno @GulBukhari @marvisirmed @mjdawar pic.twitter.com/a2nZ4EoAtp
— Gohar Mehsud (@tribaljournlist) October 12, 2018
Our friends and colleagues from Women Democratic Front, Awami Workers Party and PTM had a campaign for my release on social media. Because it was brutal to confiscate a citizen's passport for raising her voice for rights. But today is the day that shows it's a day of people's power — the youth and workers built pressure…that the (authorities) can't detain their workers… they built it through social media and also by coming to the FIA office.
Tooba Syed, lecturer of gender studies and Information Secretary of Women Democratic Front tweeted:
Gulalai ismail has been released. Congratulations everyone! pic.twitter.com/c3g3kUKHNc
— Tooba Syed (@Tooba_Sd) October 12, 2018
While she was still being held at the airport, Amnesty international issued a statement saying that Pakistan must immediately and unconditionally release Gulalai Ismail.
"Instead of trying to silence human rights defenders, the new government must work to create a safe and enabling environment for those who raise their voices for justice,” said Rabia Mehmood, South Asia Researcher at Amnesty International. @Rabail26 #PTM #Pakistan #ReleaseGulalai
— Amnesty International South Asia (@amnestysasia) October 12, 2018
Women Democratic Forum, a Pakistani based leftist feminist political collective of women also issued a message of solidarity with Gulalai.
We strongly condemn the detention of @Gulalai_Ismail a member of WDF KP & known feminist activist by FIA. We have information that she’s being handed over to Swabi police in the Swabi PTM jalsa FIR. We demand immediate release of Gulalai #ReleaseGulalaiIsmail #DaSangaAzadiDa
— Women Democratic Front (@wdf_pk) October 12, 2018
Bushra Gohar, former Member of National Assembly and vice president of Awami national party tweeted:
Shocked to hear #Gulalai_Ismail has been arrested by the #PuppetGovernment for raising a voice for #Pashtun rights.  Strongly condemn the cowardly act & demand an immediate release.  #HumanRights activists face serious threats in #Pakistan #ReleaseGulalaeIsmail
— Bushra Gohar (@BushraGohar) October 12, 2018
Following Gulalai's release, Amnesty International's South Asia researcher Rabia Mehmood tweeted:
Relieved to know that @Gulalai_Ismail is released on her own recognizance in #PTM Swabi Jalsa case. But her name is still on Exit Control List & passport confiscated by FIA. Pak authorities must end this continuous intimidation of #humanrighstdefenders. https://t.co/rrYV8s5cF0
— Rabia Mehmood – رابعہ (@Rabail26) October 12, 2018
Gulalai says she will petition to the high court to have her name removed from the Exit Control List and to reclaim her travel documents.

author: Qurratulain (Annie) Zaman