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Monday, September 28
Global Free Speech

Evin Prison, Iran. Photo: Ehsan Iran/CC BY-SA 2.0 The renewed bombing of Iran has done a darn good job of diverting attention away from the Iranian government’s own utterly disturbing record when it comes to freedom of expression. So brutal is the regime there that it can sometimes feel like if you blink, you’ll miss another atrocity, like the execution of a protester this week. Mohammad Amini Dehaghani was accused of setting fire to a governor’s office in Isfahan, alongside distributing anti-government propaganda. For this he was hanged. I only found out about his death after it happened, though I did hear of some 12 more prisoners who are at imminent risk of execution following Iran’s Supreme Court upholding their death sentences.  The country has a playbook. The deaths of four members of the paramilitary during January’s protests have been pinned on these 12 people, and others too. The evidence is typically flimsy, the proceedings opaque, independent legal representation denied, and convictions rest on confessions that have apparently been extracted under torture. Perhaps the people were involved in killings, if these killings even happened, perhaps not. In Iran the truth doesn’t matter. It isn’t about justice (which frankly should never be meted out through capital punishment anyway). It’s about making the cost of speaking up so great that no one does.   The total disregard for any due process has defined the case of British husband and wife Lindsay and Craig Foreman too. In February the couple, who were arrested while travelling in the country, were each sentenced to 10 years in jail on accusations of espionage. They’ve denied these charges. This week Craig had two years added to his sentence, according to family members, all because he spoke to the media. Like others in Iran, Craig has been denied a lawyer, a translator and any opportunity to defend himself.  Index has not done anything on the case of the Foremans to date because it wasn’t about freedom of expression. The couple were not arrested because of what they said, but instead because of where they were. They are not dissidents. Those facts remain. Still, Craig being punished for talking to the press is a speech issue. The authorities either don’t want him speaking out, or the media reporting on the case, or both. All of which is outrageous.  A crackdown is also happening across Tehran’s campuses. Students are being summoned for disciplinary hearings, they’re receiving threatening phone calls, they’re having access blocked to academic portals and in more extreme cases they’re being expelled from universities. According to a report released on the Telegram channel Al-Zahra Twitter at the weekend, a large number of the actions against students relate to more everyday grievances that students are protesting, not big political demands. All of which highlights how perilous it is to confront the powerful in Iran. READ MORE

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Evin Prison, Iran. Photo: Ehsan Iran/CC BY-SA 2.0 The renewed bombing of Iran has done a darn good job of diverting attention away from the Iranian government’s own utterly disturbing record when it comes to freedom of expression. So brutal is the regime there that it can sometimes feel like if you blink, you’ll miss another atrocity, like the execution of a protester this week. Mohammad Amini Dehaghani was accused of setting fire to a governor’s office in Isfahan, alongside distributing anti-government propaganda. For this he was hanged. I only found out about his death after it happened, though I did hear of some 12 more prisoners who are at imminent risk of execution following Iran’s Supreme Court upholding their death sentences.  The country has a playbook. The deaths of four members of the paramilitary during January’s protests have been pinned on these 12 people, and others too. The evidence is typically flimsy, the proceedings opaque, independent legal representation denied, and convictions rest on confessions that have apparently been extracted under torture. Perhaps the people were involved in killings, if these killings even happened, perhaps not. In Iran the truth doesn’t matter. It isn’t about justice (which frankly should never be meted out through capital punishment anyway). It’s about making the cost of speaking up so great that no one does.   The total disregard for any due process has defined the case of British husband and wife Lindsay and Craig Foreman too. In February the couple, who were arrested while travelling in the country, were each sentenced to 10 years in jail on accusations of espionage. They’ve denied these charges. This week Craig had two years added to his sentence, according to family members, all because he spoke to the media. Like others in Iran, Craig has been denied a lawyer, a translator and any opportunity to defend himself.  Index has not done anything on the case of the Foremans to date because it wasn’t about freedom of expression. The couple were not arrested because of what they said, but instead because of where they were. They are not dissidents. Those facts remain. Still, Craig being punished for talking to the press is a speech issue. The authorities either don’t want him speaking out, or the media reporting on the case, or both. All of which is outrageous.  A crackdown is also happening across Tehran’s campuses. Students are being summoned for disciplinary hearings, they’re receiving threatening phone calls, they’re having access blocked to academic portals and in more extreme cases they’re being expelled from universities. According to a report released on the Telegram channel Al-Zahra Twitter at the weekend, a large number of the actions against students relate to more everyday grievances that students are protesting, not big political demands. All of which highlights how perilous it is to confront the powerful in Iran. READ MORE

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The renewed bombing of Iran has done a darn good job of diverting attention away from the Iranian government’s own utterly disturbing record when it comes to freedom of expression. So brutal is the regime there that it can sometimes feel like if you blink, you’ll miss another atrocity, like the execution of a protester this week. Mohammad Amini Dehaghani was accused of setting fire to a governor’s office in Isfahan, alongside distributing anti-government propaganda. For this he was hanged. I only found out about his death after it happened, though I did hear of some 12 more prisoners who are at imminent risk of execution following Iran’s Supreme Court upholding their death sentences. 

The country has a playbook. The deaths of four members of the paramilitary during January’s protests have been pinned on these 12 people, and others too. The evidence is typically flimsy, the proceedings opaque, independent legal representation denied, and convictions rest on confessions that have apparently been extracted under torture. Perhaps the people were involved in killings, if these killings even happened, perhaps not. In Iran the truth doesn’t matter. It isn’t about justice (which frankly should never be meted out through capital punishment anyway). It’s about making the cost of speaking up so great that no one does.  

The total disregard for any due process has defined the case of British husband and wife Lindsay and Craig Foreman too. In February the couple, who were arrested while travelling in the country, were each sentenced to 10 years in jail on accusations of espionage. They’ve denied these charges. This week Craig had two years added to his sentence, according to family members, all because he spoke to the media. Like others in Iran, Craig has been denied a lawyer, a translator and any opportunity to defend himself. 

Index has not done anything on the case of the Foremans to date because it wasn’t about freedom of expression. The couple were not arrested because of what they said, but instead because of where they were. They are not dissidents. Those facts remain. Still, Craig being punished for talking to the press is a speech issue. The authorities either don’t want him speaking out, or the media reporting on the case, or both. All of which is outrageous. 

A crackdown is also happening across Tehran’s campuses. Students are being summoned for disciplinary hearings, they’re receiving threatening phone calls, they’re having access blocked to academic portals and in more extreme cases they’re being expelled from universities. According to a report released on the Telegram channel Al-Zahra Twitter at the weekend, a large number of the actions against students relate to more everyday grievances that students are protesting, not big political demands. All of which highlights how perilous it is to confront the powerful in Iran.

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Global Free Speech

The BBC clearly sees the value of television series That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marking the 20th anniversary of its original screening, the Beeb has re-released the series on iPlayer. But – and there is very often a “but” with these things – they’ve removed around 11 sketches from the BAFTA award-winning show. The official word is that these sketches don’t “work today”, which is polite speak for “they may cause offence”. The episodes singled out include scenes featuring a battle reenactment with characters in blackface, a contestant on a show wearing a burka and a lost tribe” in a garden centre. These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them; but 20 years on, this distinction seems to have been lost along the way. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. I find it infantilising, to say the least. Can’t we trust audiences to make up their own minds, to switch off if they find the sketches in question unpalatable? Does the BBC think that we are just passive consumers, unable to disaggregate the mocking of racism from racism itself? These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them This act of censorship is distorting – of the shows, whose narratives and rhythms were built to include these sketches, and more broadly too. Conversations we were having 20 years ago have been erased, as if to suggest that they never happened. But they did! And with this erasure, the opportunity for thoughtful engagement and learning from our past is gone. “Let’s just pretend we were all lovely 20 years ago. It’s better that way” seems to be the message. Speaking as a minority myself, I find that knowing the nasty stuff that people said before – and indeed, still say today – is much more useful than pretending it never happened. This approach, I think, is also inconsistent. What it reveals is a cherry-picking (intended or not) of the groups that we can mock, and those that we can’t. Let’s face it, gender stereotypes are rarely deemed to have aged beyond the pale – if that were the case, we would have to wave goodbye to half the television made before the mid-2010s. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists, namely that what they’re creating today may hold less value tomorrow. Or, even worse, that future audiences may deem them bigots – that Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of any creative paying attention to the discourse of the moment. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists The BBC’s decision reaffirms a broader trend. In 2020, Little Britain was removed from the iPlayer platform for similar reasons. It has since been reinstated – minus some sketches. Meanwhile, the UK’s arts space more broadly is seeing a retreat to the land of “safe”, as Index recently revealed in a year-long investigation into self-censorship in UK theatre. The BBC, it must be said, does remarkable stuff. The ongoing podcast investigation into the disappearance of US journalist Austin Tice is just one example. But this does not mean, however, that they don’t sometimes get it wrong. Chopping at That Mitchell and Webb Look is one example. Sure, the removal of the material isn’t the life-or-death story that Index often works on. Sure, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the faces of persecuted artists – they have huge platforms and agreed to the changes themselves. Still, one can’t help but think that the decision came from a place of conservatism, perhaps even fear. This is weak and dispiriting, indeed the very opposite of what enables creativity in the arts. We shouldn’t be encouraging this cultural timidity. Rather, we should harness culture and creativity as the starting points of a conversation about our here and now. That’s what the arts are for, after all. READ MORE

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