Siden det er tusen andre som gjør sånt (og gjør det bedre) har jeg vært noe tilbakeholden med å blogge saker som angår ytringsfrihet. Men siden det er kampanjedag i dag, noe jeg kom på nok en gang etter dagens besøk hos Sigrun, så tenkte jeg å gi et lite besyv med.

Nå har Sigrun omtalt og lenket til de ulike sakene Amnesty fokuserer på – om de fire fengslede netttskribentene (Mohammed Abbou, Truong Quoc Huy, Hu Jia og Karim Amer) så les dem der. Jeg tenkte istedet å nevne noen andre saker knyttet til mer konvensjonell publisering og dertil liggende problemer.

Den første saken er mordet på Hrant Dink, en tyrkisk-armensk journalist og menneskerettighetsforkjemper som tok opp det tyrkiske folkemordet på armenere – dog i høfligere benevnelse enn jeg ser noen grunn til å bruke. Siden tyrkiske myndigheter og nasjonalistisk ideologi er tuftet på en institusjonalisert benektelse, er ikke den slags populært. Og den 19.januar 2007 ble Dink drept (mest sannsynlig) av en ung nasjonalist – som ikke akkurat handlet alene:

Twenty suspects accused of planning and carrying out the murder have been brought to trial. One of those on trial in connection with his death had also acted as a police informer and had repeatedly told police of the plan to assassinate Hrant Dink in the months leading up to his death.

In a separate investigation, eight members of the Gendarmerie face charges of “dereliction of duty” after failing to act on warnings that Hrant Dink was being targeted for assassination.

One of the eight, Trabzon District Gendarmerie Commander, Ali Öz, is accused of failing to pass on information of the plot against Hrant Dink and of preventing evidence being revealed after the murder.

Så langt er ingen dømt for drapet.

Den andre historien omhandler, nok et drap, denne gang på redaktøren Lasantha Wickramatunga, som var en krass kritiker av regimet på Sri Lanka. Grunnen til at jeg i det hele tatt snublet over saken i sin tid, er at Wickramatunga skrev sin egen nekrolog i forkant. Jeg skal bare sitere litt fra den her:

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader’s 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day.

Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it?

Les hele gravtalen “And then they came for me” for å minnes på hva ytringsfrihet betyr, og hva den er verdt.

Så kan du roe følelsene ned noe avslutningsvis med Johann Haris forsvar for en artikkel som resulterte i “riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who published the article”:

Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.

I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists – of all stripes – have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths. They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead, they must be “respected” – by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of “adulterous” women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these are “religious” issues, and it is “offensive” to talk about them.

Jeg er langt fra sikker på hvor presis og korrekt beskrivelsen hans er. Artikkelen er et prinsipielt forsvar for både egen og andre frihet til å ytre seg, skrevet av en mann som selv nok løper mindre risiki enn de to ovennevnte. Og det inngir kanskje et visst ubehag med prinsipielle forsvar for kostnader som påløper andre, når ytringen i seg selv nok ikke var all verdens. Det er ikke desto mindre betraktninger man kan (og bør) reflektere over, i lys også av de to sakene over.

Forøvrig vil vi altså si: ”Støtt forfulgte nettaktivister: ytringsfrihet.amnesty.no“.

(Og lover å holde oss til andre tema fremover.)