Jailed journalist Peter Greste writes about annus horribilis (via SMH)

  Grim news: Australian Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste hears the verdict from inside the defendents' cage.  Via: Sydney Morning Herald.
Grim news: Australian Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste hears the verdict from inside the defendents’ cage. Via: Sydney Morning Herald.

Article via: Sydney Morning Herald

“As jailed journalist Peter Greste describes it, 2014 was his annus horribilus.

But in a New Year message the Al Jazeera correspondent wrote to NSW MP Shaoquette Moselmane, he said although it had been a tough year, he and his colleagues had found “extraordinary support from unexpected quarters” and wanted to thank the NSW Parliament for passing a motion expressing support for the freedom of the press, human rights and the rule of law.

“This experience has, of course, been extraordinarily difficult for the three of us Al Jazeera journalists and our families, but we also understand that our case has come to stand for so much more than our freedom alone,” he wrote from his cell in Mazraa Prison.

Greste was jailed for seven years in June when an Egyptian court found he and his Al Jazeera colleagues guilty of spreading false news to support the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Greste was writing to Mr Moselmane after learning that Egypt’s Court of Cassation (equivalent to the Australian High Court) had ordered a retrial.

“This is a significant step towards the vindication that we seek, and that we know must come if a credible judicial system is involved,” Greste said in the letter.

“Although we will probably never be able to draw a direct line between the actions of our supporters and the authorities’ handling of our case here, I’m convinced that steps like your motion send a very clear message that the world is paying attention.”

Mr Moselmane told Fairfax Media the Australian government needed to step up its representations to Egypt about bringing Greste back home.

Greste’s family have formally applied for the Al Jazeera journalist’s deportation under new Egyptian laws brought in late last year that grant the president the power to deport foreign defendants convicted or accused of crimes.

Lawyer Rick Mitry, speaking on behalf of the family, said nothing seemed to have moved in recent weeks and it appeared that Greste would face a retrial rather than being deported.”

Press Freedom vs Political Power

 PEN Melbourne Committee members Regina Hill and Cece Ojany. Courtesy: Wheeler Centre.
PEN Melbourne Committee members Regina Hill and Cece Ojany. Courtesy: Wheeler Centre.

PEN Melbourne, the Wheeler Centre and the nonfictionLab at RMIT University host a panel of journalists, advocates and academics to discuss the implications of the Peter Greste and Alan Morison cases – and what we should do about them.

Hear from Mark Baker (Chief Executive Officer of the Melbourne Press Club), Cece Ojany (Writers-In-Prison Officer with PEN Melbourne) and Alexandra Wake (Lecturer in Journalism at RMIT University). Moderated by Regina Hill.


Peter Greste and Alan Morison are both Australian journalists who, with their colleagues, are subject to judicial action that challenges not only their own freedom but the fundamental principle of freedom of the press itself.


  Award-winning Australian foreign correspondent Peter Greste was   found guilty in June 2014 by an Egyptian court of spreading false news and supporting the blacklisted Muslim brotherhood.
Award-winning Australian foreign correspondent Peter Greste was  found guilty in June 2014 by an Egyptian court of spreading false news and supporting the blacklisted Muslim brotherhood.
  Australian journalist Alan Morison and colleague Chutima Sidasathian are facing lengthy jail-terms in Thailand for reprinting part of a controversial but award winning article on the country's people-smuggling trade.
Australian journalist Alan Morison and colleague Chutima Sidasathian are facing lengthy jail-terms in Thailand for reprinting part of a controversial but award winning article on the country’s people-smuggling trade.

Our world is becoming more and more subject to political propaganda and spin; influenced by short media cycles and social media. A free and critical media is arguably more important now than ever. What do the Peter Greste and Alan Morison cases tell us about the state of our media, the value that we place on freedom of the press – and the role that we each have in defending those fundamental rights?

Click here to watch a video of the event (external site).


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PEN Melbourne – Free Al Jazeera staff detained in Egypt #FreeAJStaff

PEN Melbourne is appalled by the terrible news that Australian journalist Peter Greste has been sentenced to seven years in an Egyptian prison after being found guilty by an Egyptian court of spreading ‘false news’ and supporting the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood. We join with many other human rights organisations around the world to condemn this decision, which appears to have been made in the absence of credible evidence that would support the charges made against Greste and his Al Jazeera colleagues, Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed.

PEN Melbourne calls for the reversal of this cruel decision on behalf of our fellow writers, journalists who have already been punished by being imprisoned unjustly for over six months for the peaceful exercise of their profession as reporters, and their right to free expression. We call upon the Egyptian authorities to release the three journalists immediately and unconditionally. PEN Melbourne is one of 145 PEN centres around the world; PEN centres are voices for literature and freedom of expression in their respective countries, supported by PEN International.

 

Please also see below, an open letter that Peter Greste sent from Tora Prison in February:

 

I am nervous as I write this. I am in my cold prison cell after my first official exercise session – four glorious hours in the grass yard behind our block and I don’t want that right to be snatched away.

I’ve been locked in my cell 24 hours a day for the past 10 days, allowed out only for visits to the prosecutor for questioning, so the chance for a walk in the weak winter sunshine is precious.

So too are the books on history, Arabic and fiction that my neighbours have passed to me, and the pad and pen I now write with.

I want to cling to these tiny joys and avoid anything that might move the prison authorities to punitively withdraw them. I want to protect them almost as much as I want my freedom back.

That is why I have sought, until now, to fight my imprisonment quietly from within, to make the authorities understand that this is all a terrible mistake, that I’ve been caught in the middle of a political struggle that is not my own. But after two weeks in prison it is now clear that this is a dangerous decision. It validates an attack not just on me and my two colleagues but on freedom of speech across Egypt.

All of a sudden, my books seem rather petty. I had been in Cairo only two weeks before interior ministry agents burst through the door of my hotel room, that of my colleague and producer Mohamed Fahmy, and into the home of Al Jazeera’s second producer Baher Mohamed.

Accuracy, fairness, and balance

We had been doing exactly as any responsible, professional journalist would – recording and trying to make sense of the unfolding events with all the accuracy, fairness and balance that our imperfect trade demands.

Most of the time, it is not a difficult path to walk. But when the Egyptian government declared the Muslim Brotherhood to be “terrorist organisation”, it knocked the middle ground out of the discourse. When the other side, political or otherwise, is a “terrorist”, there is no neutral way. As George W. Bush loved to point out after 9/11, you are either with the government or with the terrorists. So, even talking to them becomes an act of treason, let alone broadcasting their news however benign.

The following day, the government fleshed out its definition of the term. Anyone caught handing out Muslim Brotherhood leaflets, or simply participating in protest marches against the government could be arrested and imprisoned for “spreading terrorist ideology”.

The Muslim Brotherhood has lost much of the support and credibility once had when its political leader Mohamed Morsi became Egypt’s first democratically elected president just over a year and a half ago. And many here hold it responsible for a growing wave of islamist violence, but it remains the single largest and best organised social and political force in Egypt. What then for a journalist striving for “balance, fairness and accuracy?” How do you accurately and fairly report on Egypt’s ongoing political struggle without talking to everyone involved?

I worried about this at the time with Mohamed Fahmy, but we decided that the choice was obvious – as obvious as the price we are now paying for making it.

The three of us have been accused of collaborating with a terrorist organisation [the Muslim Brotherhood], of hosting Muslim Brotherhood meetings in our hotel rooms, of using unlicensed equipments to deliberately broadcast false information to further their aims and defame and discredit the Egyptian state.

The state has presented no evidence to support the allegations, and we have not been formally charged with any crime. But the prosecutor general has just extended our initial 15-day detention by another 15 days to give investigators more time to find something. He can do this indefinitely – one of my prison mates has been behind bars for 6 months without a single charge.

“The prisons are overflowing”

I am in Tora prison – a sprawling complex in the south of the city where the authorities routinely violate legally enshrined prisoners’ rights, denying visits from lawyers, keeping cells locked for 20 hours a day (and 24 hours on public holidays) and so on. But even that is relatively benign compared to the conditions my colleagues are being held in.

Fahmy and Baher have been accused of being Muslim Brotherhood members, So they are being held in the far more draconian “Scorpion prison” built for convicted terrorists. Fahmy has been denied the hospital treatment he badly needs for a shoulder injury he sustained shortly before our arrest. Both men spend 24 hours a day in their mosquito-infested cells, sleeping on the floor with no books or writing materials to break the soul- destroying tedium. Remember we have not been formally charged, much less convicted of any crime. But this is not just about three Al Jazeera journalists. Our arrest and continued detention sends a clear and unequivocal message to all journalists covering Egypt, both foreign and local.

The state will not tolerate hearing from the Muslim Brotherhood or any other critical voices. The prisons are overflowing with anyone who opposes or challenges the government. Secular activists are sentenced to three years with hard labour for violating protest laws after declining an invitation to openly support the government; campaigners putting up “No” banners ahead of the constitutional referendum are summarily detained.

Anyone, in short, who refuses to applaud the institution. So our arrest is not a mistake, and as a journalist this IS my battle. I can no longer pretend it’ll go away by keeping quiet and crossing my fingers. I have no particular fight with the Egyptian government, just as I have no interest in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood or any other group here. But as a journalist I am committed to defending a fundamental freedom of the press that no one in my profession can credibly work without. One that is deemed vital to the proper functioning of any open democracy, including Egypt’s with its new constitution.

Of course we will continue to fight this from inside prison and through the judicial system here. But our freedom, and more importantly the freedom of the press here, will not come without loud sustained pressure from human rights and civil society groups, individuals and governments who understand that Egypt stability depends as much as on its ability to hold open honest conversations among its people and the world, as it does on its ability to crush violence.

We know it is already happening, and all of us are both moved and strengthened by the extraordinary support we have already had, but it needs to continue.

Peter Greste
Tora prison

TAKE ACTION

You can voice your protest at the jailing of Peter Greste and his colleagues by writing to:

The Hon. Ambassador Mr Khaled Rizk
Consul General of the Arab Republic of Egypt
Level 6, 50 Market Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000

Egypt: Al-Jazeera journalists must be released (PEN International)

 Al-Jazeera correspondents Peter Greste, Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohammad.
Al-Jazeera correspondents Peter Greste, Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohammad.

Harsh prison sentences handed down today to three Al-Jazeera (English) journalists must be overturned and the journalists freed immediately, PEN International said today.

Correspondent Peter Greste, and producers Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohammed were sentenced to seven, seven and ten years respectively on charges of having links to a “terrorist organisation” and “spreading false news”.

PEN International believes that their arrest and imprisonment is part of an escalating crackdown on dissent in Egypt, in which journalists, writers, civil rights activists, and independent or critical voices are amongst those targeted for their reporting or peaceful activism.

These sentences signal a death knell for freedom of expression and the independence of the judiciary in Egypt” said Marian Botsford Fraser, Chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee.

The international community must respond swiftly, not only on behalf of foreign journalists, but on behalf of the citizens of Egypt, for whom democracy is in grave danger.”

Al Jazeera correspondent Peter Greste, an Australian national, Mohammed Fahmy, who has dual Canadian and Egyptian nationality, and Egyptian national Baher Mohamed were arrested on 29 December 2013 following Interior Ministry accusations of illegally broadcasting from a hotel suite.

Peter Greste, who has worked for the BBC, is accused of collaborating with “terrorists” by talking to Muslim Brotherhood members. Al-Jazeera Cairo bureau chief Mohammed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohamed are accused of the more serious offence of membership of the Brotherhood.

Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV channel, has said the men were merely reporting the situation in Egypt. Since 25 December 2013 the Egyptian authorities have labelled the Muslim Brotherhood – the political group that the Al-Jazeera journalists are accused of supporting- as a terrorist group.

According to diplomats and rights campaigners who observed the trial, no credible evidence was put forward to support the verdict. The three journalists are planning to appeal their convictions.

PEN calls on Egypt’s interim government to immediately and unconditionally release all those held solely for the peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of expression, in accordance with the international treaties to which it is bound.