- Film the Police? Not in Spain. Spain's Ley Mordaza - or "Gag Law" went into effect July 1st 2015 severely limiting the rights of citizens to openly protest and to film police officers.
- To Protect or Punish: New Anti-Terrorism Law Proposed in Brazil Could Curb Right To Protest A proposed anti-terrorism law in Brazil could criminalize the actions of social movements and public protests.
- Ignored by Brazilian Government, Activists Take Police Violence to Inter-American Commission The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights hosts a public hearing on police violence used by Brazilian authorities during popular protests ongoing in the country since June 2013.
- WITNESS Ally Among 200 Arrested Protesters in Rio de Janeiro: Please Take Action From the start of the protests in Rio, video has played a pivotal role in helping expose abuse against protestors. Now the videographers are being targeted.
- Cambodian Government Attempts to Silence Work on Forced Evictions International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have written to 35 foreign ministries to review donor aid if the Government of Cambodia passes a law severely restricting the activities of NGOs in the country.
- Google unmuzzles itself in China Google has received brickbats a-plenty for its stance in China, where, in order to be permitted to operate by the Chinese government, the search company agreed to censor particular "sensitive" search results - Tiananmen, Dalai Lama, democracy, human rights, and so on.
- Writers share videos from the Hub at PEN World Voices Festival We’re very pleased to be a part of 3 events at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, held annually in New York City. I’ll be moderating the first event on Apr 30 and is for high school students (details here) and includes authors Uzodinma Iweala, Amanda Michalopoulou, Patricia McCormick, Kashmira Sheth, and […]
- What really happened in the Burma internet “shut off”? [via John Palfrey] Next Monday, December 10, is International Human Rights Day, and it seems a good moment do our bit to make sure we don’t forget Burma. COHRE (the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions) has posted two reports – one on Displacement and Dispossession: Forced Displacement and Land Rights in Burma (pdf) and the other naming […]
- Egypt videos back up at the Hub As I mentioned in my last post, a number of the Egypt police brutality videos at the Hub had been embedded from Wael Abbas’ YouTube account. When his account was suspended, these videos on the Hub (and everywhere else they were embedded) stopped playing. We’ve now managed to restore some of the key videos, and […]
- Wael Abbas’ YouTube channel suspended [UPDATED – 29 Nov 07] News just in from Hossam El-Hamalawy…: I’ve just received the following message from blogger and friend Wael Abbas… disaster: youtube disables my account claiming there were complaints about my police torture videos!!! This is un-bloody-believable. YouTube has just disabled probably the most important channel for the Egyptian blogosphere. Wael’s videos have been central in the […]
- Free To Speak (on BBC World Service) [Slight changes below, after a second look at the project…] For me, the 2002 series I Have A Right To… still represents a good benchmark for how the BBC’s World Service can knit together human rights resources of real and lasting value – and that others can use and build on. Now, the World Service […]
- China Making Sure That User Generated Content Is Officially Registered Content First Another good post from unmediated originally from techdirt: China has a long history of being a bureaucratic society — and it seems they’re really learned how to apply that bureaucracy to the internet. They have tens of thousands of people monitoring the internet, for example. However, they’re really going to ridiculous extremes in trying to […]