Cairo 3 show us rights and freedoms matter
This is why you should care about three men you have never met, writes Press editor Joanna Norris.
You will probably never meet Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed or Peter Greste, but you may like to consider the fear that must sit in the pit of their stomachs this week.
The three men are famously behind bars in the squalid Tora prison in South Cairo after being found guilty of reporting false news by an Egyptian court.
Their sentence last week and convictions have been decried internationally and rightly so, for they are the visible tip of the iceberg of vicious oppression of dissenting views that is too easily the inclination of regimes with a fragile or illegitimate grasp on power.
Brutal and systematic oppression is regularly meted out across parts of the Middle East, Africa, Asia and indeed parts of the Western world.
Each year more than 50 journalists are killed in the course of their work. Since 1992, 704 working journalists have been murdered, according to the USbased non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists.
Fahmy, Mohamed and Greste may be comparatively lucky, but are facing up to a decade in prison for simply doing their jobs. They worked for Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera when they were accused by Egyptian prosecutors of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, considered a terrorist organisation by the current Egyptian regime. No credible evidence of their crimes was presented at their trial and the prosecutions and sentences are widely considered unjust.
Images of the defendants in the mesh cage that encloses the dock in the rowdy Egyptian court have rightly become a totem for defenders of freedom of the press.
The freedom of the media to report and publish views without fear of prosecution and violence is fundamental to a free and healthy society.
Functioning democracies steadfastly recognise the benefit of these freedoms through legislation that protects the rights of journalists. Freedom of speech, a necessary bedfellow of the freedom to report, is also vigorously protected in states with strong human rights records.
In this country it is protected by the Bill of Rights Act which is clear in its wording and intent: ‘‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.’’
The judiciary in this country are vigorous defenders of the media as the eyes and ears of the public and recognised media organisations also enjoy special powers and freedoms under legislation to protect news gathering.
This is to be celebrated and supported for it is one of the reasons New Zealand is largely free of corruption.
That is not to say that freedoms are not threatened on occasion. The monitoring of the movements of Fairfax Press Gallery journalist Andrea Vance whilst on the parliamentary precinct and the unauthorised release of her emails were two recent and serious breaches of press freedom.
New Zealanders can easily take freedom of the press and freedom of expression for granted. But we should not.
A free press protects all New Zealanders including our most vulnerable from wrongdoing, abuses of power and corruption. The presence of the media seeks to ensure people behave at their best when making decisions that affect others.
I worked as a journalist in the Middle East for two years from 2007 to 2009. Based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, it was an enjoyable and challenging period, but also a reminder of just how valuable our freedoms are.
I observed first-hand the chilling effect of the threat of prosecution in relation to publication.
While there is much to like about the United Arab Emirates, and other Middle Eastern nations, there is a set of local laws that need to be understood and can easily be transgressed.
As a working journalist there was the risk of breaching an unwritten code.
This meant keeping a grip on a somewhat slippery list of topics likely to be considered offensive to the royal family and their government appointees. To offend against local media conventions carried the risk of a loss of publishing licence, or prosecution and jail.
The fear of transgression resulted in some cases in selfcensorship by media organisations. Issues likely to cause offence, cause disorder or cause a moral hazard were often avoided.
This had a deeply insidious effect whereby many social, economic and financial issues were overlooked by Middle Eastern media organisations.
These experiences further underlined for me the value of a free media and a free population able to frankly express and exchange views.
The freedoms of Greste, an Australian who had served as a Radio New Zealand correspondent, and his colleagues Mohamed and Fahmy have been scandalously denied.
In doing so, the Egyptian regime has not only denied their rights, but also exposed itself to the world as a state with little regard to the rights and freedoms of its own people.
We should all care about and support a free press because without it the world is less safe.