World Press Freedom Day

Nusrat Ghani Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice in order to support the new hybrid arrangements. Members participating physically and virtually must arrive for the start of Westminster Hall debates and are expected to remain for the entire debate. I also remind Members participating virtually that they are visible at all times, both to each other and to us in the Boothroyd Room. If Members attending virtually have any technical problems, they should email the Westminster Hall Clerks at their email address, which is [e-mail]. Members attending physically should clean their spaces before they use them and as they leave the room. I also remind Members who are here with me physically that Mr Speaker has stated that masks should be worn in Westminster Hall debates, unless the Member is contributing.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered World Press Freedom Day 2021.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani. World Press Freedom Day, which falls on 3 May, is a reminder to Governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom; a day of reflection among media professionals about issues of press freedom and professional ethics; and a day of support for media workers who are targets for the restraint or abolition of press freedom. It is also a day of remembrance for those journalists who lost their lives in the pursuit of a story.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for having granted time for this debate today, which has been the first opportunity to hold it since the start of the new parliamentary Session. I also declare my interest as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on media freedom, which is supported by Reporters Without Borders.

This debate comes in the wake of last Sunday’s hijacking of a civilian aircraft by the Belarusian Government in order to kidnap the journalist Roman Protasevich, an outspoken critic of President Lukashenko’s illegitimate and oppressive regime. This is one of the most audacious attacks on press freedom we have seen, but it is just another example of the increasingly brazen way in which Governments seek to oppress legitimate journalism with increasing impunity.

In 2018, we saw the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi Arabian Government in the grounds of their own consulate in Istanbul. In 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a campaigning journalist who investigated corruption and organised crime and delved into visa-for-sale schemes, energy deals and Caribbean offshore companies set up for Maltese politicians, was assassinated by a car bomb planted by a professional hitman.

According to Reporters Without Borders, 50 journalists were killed around the world last year, and a further 13 have already been killed in 2021. These include Sadida Sadat and Shahnaz Roufi in Afghanistan, who worked for Enikass TV’s dubbing service and were gunned down in an alley in Jalalabad as they were walking home at around 4.30 pm. Their colleague Mursal Waheedi was shot in the rickshaw she had taken to go home. All three women were aged 20 or 21. Furthermore, in 2020, 387 journalists and media workers were held in detention: 117 of those were in China, and 34 were in the next highest country, Saudi Arabia. In the Philippines, in the five years since President Rodrigo Duterte came to power, 16 journalists have been killed in connection with their work, the latest of whom was beaten to death in May 2020.

Media freedom is being threatened not just by violent physical attack, but by the use of dubious legal procedures to intimidate or close down journalists. In the Philippines, Maria Ressa, a journalist and the chief executive of the digital news service Rappler, has been under repeated legal attack since the election of Duterte. Rappler has tirelessly investigated human rights violations and the country’s increasingly authoritarian Government, and Ressa, whom I am proud to serve alongside on the Real Facebook Oversight Board, currently faces 10 open charges against her, relating to nine separate cases. Some of those have been brought retrospectively through new laws created since the alleged offences occurred.

In this country, too, our legal system is being used to intimidate legitimate journalism through lawfare—the misuse of legal systems and principles against an opponent by seeking to damage or delegitimise them, wasting their time and money—and what is known as SLAPP, a strategic lawsuit against public participation. Such actions are intended to censor, intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of legal defence until they abandon their criticism of the opponent. The initiator of such a lawsuit does not usually expect to win, but to wear down the defendant until they succumb to fear, intimidation and mounting legal costs or exhaustion, and cease their otherwise legitimate criticism. A current example is the journalist Catherine Belton, author of “Putin’s People”, which was published last year by HarperCollins, who is facing lawsuits, along with her publisher, filed in London by four Russian businessmen, including Roman Abramovich.

Mr Abramovich has also recently forced apologies from British newspapers—The Times and The Daily Mail—for stating that he gave a yacht, Le Grand Bleu, to Eugene Shvidler, a Russian-American oil billionaire, despite the fact that Mr Shvidler had stated this himself in English court proceedings on 14 November, 2011, during the hearing of the Berezovsky v. Abramovich case. I also understand that in 2019, Mr Abramovich’s lawyers were also successful in preventing the broadcast of a BBC “Panorama” investigation. It is interesting that Mr Abramovich, who is not a resident of the UK, has not visited the country since 2018 and has not been granted a new UK visa, can nevertheless retain the services of the London law firm Harbottle & Lewis and has full access to the English courts.

Data protection legislation is also being routinely abused to make multiple requests against investigative journalists and corporate research and intelligence companies, for any information that they hold on any individual or organisation. In Australia, the Protection of Public Participation Act 2008 seeks to

“protect public participation, and discourage certain civil proceedings that a reasonable person would consider interfere with engagement in public participation.”

In the USA, high-profile public figures are also limited in their access to the courts to pursue such cases. It is time we looked at whether such reforms are required in the UK, and also to review the GDPR legislation to prevent it from being used to intimidate those engaged in legitimate investigations acting in the public interest.

We also have to consider the commercial pressures faced by the news industry today, which pose perhaps one of the greatest threats to the freedom of the press. In 2019, the Cairncross review, commissioned by the Government, highlighted that the sales of both national and locally printed papers have plunged. They fell by roughly half between 2007 and 2017, and are still dropping. In addition, print advertising revenues, which used to carry much of the cost of producing news, have fallen even faster, declining in that decade by 69%. To cut costs there have been mergers, as well as heavy cuts in staffing numbers of frontline journalists in the UK, and in that period those numbers have dropped from 23,000 to 17,000, and the numbers are still falling.

These pressures came to light recently in Australia, where an investigation by its competition authority has highlighted that for every $100 of online advertising spend, $53 goes to Google, $28 to Facebook, and $19 to everybody else. This creates enormous pressure on other organisations, particularly news companies and publishers that have in the past relied on advertising revenue to pay their journalists and investigations. The decline in ad revenue for publishers is a direct challenge to the news industry itself, which has already led to the closures of a great number of publications, and many of those that have survived have had to make significant cuts and reductions.

In order to preserve the future of public interest journalism, the Australian Government presented the news media bargaining code to oblige companies such as Facebook and Google to enter into commercial arrangements with the news industry to ensure fair renumeration for their content. It was only because they legislated to require this, and to give a regulator the power to mediate and set the term of renumeration if no deal was done, that Google and Facebook eventually did move. We have to consider what the role of journalism is in the digital age, where people increasingly use the internet as their primary source of news and information. The most recent Ofcom “Media Nations” survey, published last summer, showed that around 35% of people now regularly get their news from Facebook.

News media and the freedom of the press face a constant assault every day. Direct challenges are issued, through social media, against “the mainstream media”, which is used as a derogatory term, seeking to persuade the public that they should not believe the so-called mainstream media on anything they write, whether critical or praiseworthy, and putting people in a position where they simply do not know what they should believe anymore. In the world of social media, where algorithms of engagement drive content through those platforms, often it is the misleading or the downright lies and conspiracy theories that gain a bigger audience, are more interesting and are actively promoted by those platforms. When Parliament considers the online safety Bill later this year—it is currently in draft form—we must take into account the impact of harmful disinformation, spread through and sometimes amplified by social media, which is undermining news and, through that, democracy itself.

We need to protect journalism and the freedom of the press if we are to remain an open and democratic society. We need to recognise that those values are increasingly under attack from authoritarian Governments around the world who actively and deliberately target journalists, sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally, sometimes economically, but always with intent to suppress their necessary work. We need to ensure that our modern media landscape, driven by social media platforms and their engagement, still works to provide fair remuneration for journalists creating content, because if journalists cannot be paid for what they do, few will do it. The people who will win in that situation will be those who fear legitimate investigation and questioning.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind) [V]]

I compliment the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) for securing the debate and on the way in which he introduced the subject. It is absolutely crucial and essential to all our lives that we think seriously about what press freedom actually means. In any free society, the right to know, the right to speak and the right to assemble are important and precious, and indeed are encapsulated in the 1948 universal declaration of human rights.

In considering press freedom, we should also look at media ownership and control, and the concentration of media ownership into a small number of global companies that impose news values on their outlets, which are not necessarily very open and which are often not interested in many of the poorest parts of the world but only in celebrity and the goings on in the wealthiest parts of the world. It is important that we recognise the importance of the right to know, and therefore the importance of diversity of ownership and diversity of access to the media.

As the hon. Gentleman quite correctly pointed out, many people now get most of their information from online sources, through social media and associated outlets. Many people simply do not buy newspapers and do not access newspaper websites or anything else. They rely completely on news that they believe they select themselves from various websites around the world, but they are often unaware of the complex, complicated and very efficient algorithms used to drive people in certain directions on certain stories and news issues.

We must look not only at the freedom of journalists and the importance of independent ownership of all media outlets, but at making social media accessible to everyone. Social media companies have shown themselves to be very happy to operate with authoritarian and oppressive regimes and close down access altogether to certain individuals. For example, in the middle of their strike action in Delhi, Indian farmers suddenly found that they had no access whatsoever to social media, which was a crucial outlet for them. Social media is restricted in a number of countries, and Google and others are quite happy to do deals with national Governments in order to restrict access to information. These things have to be looked at seriously and carefully. We need international agreement on this, which I will come on to in a moment.

I have in front of me the “White Paper on Global Journalism”, produced by the International Federation of Journalists, of which I am a member, in the sense that I am a member of the National Union of Journalists in Britain. This report makes for chilling reading. Since 1990, as the hon. Gentleman has pointed out, 2,650 journalists have been killed around the world. Those are the ones we know of—there may well be more. A good friend of mine, Anabel Hernández, a Mexican journalist, launched a book called “The Sorrows of Mexico” with Lydia Cacho and others at the Edinburgh international book festival three years ago. I was there. She described what she had gone through in preparing the book and in writing about the power of drug cartels, corrupt police forces and the role of the military. She described the threats made to her:

“Ever since, I have lived with 24 hour protection, if you can call that living.”

The threat never goes away. On 21 December 2014, a dozen men, armed with AK47 rifles and handguns, closed off the street where Hernández lived, and started asking her neighbours in which house the journalist lived. They deactivated the security cameras in the immediate area, including those installed in her house. She was lucky that day, because she was not at home; she was away. That is the kind of life that she and other very brave journalists live in Mexico, in Colombia, in Egypt and in other countries where journalists are consistently under threat.

We mourn those who have been killed, but there are many others in jail and the threat of jailing journalists is a form of censorship. Many of the world’s Governments know that by consistently threatening journalists, they will either tone down their reporting or simply not report what is going on where corruption, drug cartels and so on are involved. There is a kind of league table of journalists who are in prison. Globally, there are 235 of them in prison—those are the ones we know of —including 67 in Turkey, 21 in Egypt and 20 in China. They are all people who have been imprisoned because they were trying to report the truth.

The hon. Gentleman quite rightly pointed out what happened to Roman Protasevich. Obviously, it is appalling that the plane was effectively hijacked and he was taken to Belarus because he had been writing stories that were critical of its regime. Obviously, action should be taken. I am a member of the Council of Europe and my fellow members and I will make our views very well known at subsequent meetings. Unfortunately, Belarus is not a member of the Council of Europe; it is the only European country that is not a member.

Our complaints and objections about the way in which Roman Protasevich is being treated would be far more credible if the London Stock Exchange was not at the same time hosting financial servicing arrangements and opportunities to raise cash for the Belarussian Government. If we are serious about press freedom and freedoms in general, we must think very carefully about what financial institutions and others are doing.

The terrible events in Gaza and the west bank over the last few weeks and the loss of life of people both in Israel and in Palestine are obviously shocking and appalling. It is also very clear that the bombing was very effectively and efficiently targeted in Gaza. Two towers were taken out completely; they were demolished by targeted bombing. They included the offices of al-Jazeera and a number of other journalistic outlets in the region, so they could no longer effectively report what was happening in Gaza. Some brave journalists managed to use satellite phones and so on to keep in communication, but they were reporting while under fire from Israel that was quite clearly targeting those places where journalists were trying to report the reality of what is going on. And Yousef Abu Hussein, a young journalist, was killed during that whole process.

In this debate I hope that we can reflect on the bravery of journalists around the world—those who seek to speak truth to power and who try to tell us the truth about what is happening around the world. We all love newspapers; we all love news and information. However, we need to make sure that those who collect and gather that information—irritating as they often are to politicians; that is the world in which we live—are a crucial part of any democratic society.

The work done by the International Federation of Journalists and others in trying to get global agreement on the protection of journalists is very important. It is also important that the United Nations Human Rights Council continues its work on protecting journalists, and that we have an effective protection mechanism for journalists all around the world. Too many have died, too many are in prison and too many are frightened to report the news they ought to be reporting, because they are scared of what will happen to them if they do so.

We should not be complacent about our own society, either, because often in Parliament we have this sense of complacency that bad things—

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

May I ask the right hon. Member for Islington North to bring his speech to a conclusion, please? Thank you.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I apologise, Ms Ghani. I was not aware that there was a time limit. I will briefly say this. In our complacency, let us not forget brave people who have blown the whistle on the truth around the world. I think of Julian Assange and the work he has done in exposing what has happened around the world in preparation for war and other things. In some countries, he would be called a hero for being a whistleblower; here, he is called something very different. We should think of what news values and freedom of speech values are actually all about. Thank you for the opportunity to speak, Ms Ghani.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (Alba)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) for securing this debate. It is appropriate that we celebrate World Press Freedom Day, because press freedom is fundamental to our democracy. It is a basic right. We all know that knowledge is power and that, equally, its absence endangers us. Press freedom allows us to expose totalitarianism, often in the face of danger, as other Members have said.

I was privileged to know James Pringle, who returned to my old constituency to vote in the Scottish referendum back in 2014. He regaled me with tales about, first, having served in the Dominican coup and then having been the first western journalist into Cambodia under Pol Pot, after the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. I pay tribute to his courage.

Press freedom is vital to democracy. I remember reading Professor Henry Milner’s book, “Civic Literacy”. It is a study of what motivates turnout in elections. A critical factor is not whether it is as easy to vote as to buy a tin of beans in a supermarket; what matters in particular is understanding, and a quality media is fundamental to that. If people do not understand the issues, they will not participate and vote. That factor is normally shown in this country in turnouts being higher in referendums, when there is a clear understanding of the issues, than in wider elections, where turnout can be significantly lower.

As other Members have said, there are obviously ongoing issues—in Saudi Arabia and Belarus, and indeed closer to home, with Julian Assange. I sympathise and agree with the points made by others across the political divide that these people require protection.

I listened with interest to the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe, who was correct to point out the changes that have happened in the media. I have been writing for the Scottish media for several years now. The decline is significant. There are actions we have to take to address that and to protect the valuable newspapers that are undermined by other platforms. We should also remember that in many instances now, social media is just as important as the mainstream media.

We have looked in this country at what happened in the Arab spring. It was not the mainstream media that was the outlet letting people know, both within the countries that were part of the Arab spring, and in the wider world. It was not the papers, held by the regimes. It was social media bloggers and just people tweeting, or writing on their Facebook pages or whatever else. The hon. Gentleman was right to warn about dangerous disinformation and the challenges that we face as a society to protect our democracy. Equally, we also have to remember that it is important that we support that.

That brings me to my own situation within my own jurisdiction of Scotland. It is many years since I first studied law. I have had 20 years practising as a lawyer and seven and a half years as Justice Secretary. I never thought I would face a situation where I was condemnatory of actions that have been happening against the press in my own country.

Since the days of learning about the Gordon Airs case, HM Advocate v. Airs, I always assumed that those who were seeking to put forward information that was appropriate and fair would be protected. Yet in Scotland, in the fallout from the Alex Salmond affair, we have seen Mark Hirst, a journalist, prosecuted. The case, in which he was supported by the NUJ, was rightly rejected by the presiding sheriff in the borders. We have seen Craig Murray, a blogger and former British senior civil servant, now facing a prison sentence of eight months. That is not only shocking, but drives a coach and horses through a position brought in by the Scottish Government that there be a presumption against a sentence of imprisonment for less than a year. Their absence of criticism and their failure to comment has been quite shocking.

It is not simply cases brought by the Crown. It is the cases that have been pursued by the police, where people so much as tweeting anything that might be seen as possibly identifying a witness have faced a knock on the door from the police. That is fundamentally damaging to Scottish democracy. It is not what I expect and it has not come about by happenchance. It has been deliberate. It has been targeted. It is being driven by the Crown Office. If we are to have a free press, there has to be free reporting. That has to apply to bloggers as much as it applies to the mainstream press.

That people have been charged in Scottish courts and have faced possible terms of imprisonment for simply doing exactly the same as the mainstream press has done but not faced prosecution is simply unacceptable. There is also a reason that I am required to raise it here: it is that the position of the Lord Advocate of Scotland is no longer tenable. There has to be a separation of powers of having one individual who is both a legal adviser to the Scottish Government and also the head of the prosecution service in Scotland. That is no longer appropriate and I am disappointed that the First Minister did not seek to make it faster. It is something that has to come back to this Chamber because as a result of the Scotland Act 1998, the Lord Advocate is enshrined in statute by this Parliament. Action must be taken here as well as in Holyrood.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

I must remind Members not to comment on any live cases.