Its been a bit quiet on the blog this week. That’s because I’ve been at the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression in Oslo. I’ve been using Twitter to log noteworthy nuggets from the seminars and speeches, and may add some more substantial thoughts later.
In the meantime, here’s a compelling cartoon from the artist Magnus Bard. It features in the International Cartoon Exhibition, currently on show until 26th July at the Oscarsborg fortress in Oslo fjord.
Tag: Human Rights (Page 33 of 41)
I didn’t know that Salman Rushdie and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a birthday:
On this day, my birthday and yours, I always remember your long ordeal and silently applaud your endurance. This year, silence is impossible. It is not any action of yours, but your house arrest, which symbolizes the suppression of Burmese democracy, that is criminal. It is your trial, not your struggle, that is unjust. On this day, on every day, I am with you.
Rushdie’s message launches the Sixty-Four Words for Aung San Suu Kyi project. Citizens of the world are invited to leave a 64 word message for Aung San, in honour of her 64th birthday on 19th June. Alternatively, you can leave a 64 character twitter instead, using the hashtag #assk64.
http://64forsuu.com/
The project is led by the Burma Campaign UK and was created in only six days, which is a remarkable feat. In addition to Salman Rushdie, the site carries messages from Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and George Clooney. Why not add your message, and then let others know that you’ve done so?
Photographed at a press conference in her home, September 1996, after a government crackdown on her party. By flickr user taptaptap
I was at the House of Lords on Monday, listening to peers debate the Coroners & Justice Bill. As previously mentioned, this Bill offers the chance to repeal the laws of criminal defamation and seditious libel.
I have summarized this aspect of the debate over at the Index on Censorship Free Speech blog – another outlet for my furious typing…
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The English PEN evening plenary was a fanastic way to round up the Convention on Modern Liberty. For me, it was the writer and blogger Cory Doctorow’s contribution that really caught the imagination. With his laptop on his knee, he seemed to be pulling snippets and sound-bites from all corners of Teh Intertubes:
Later, the panel were asked what piece of art had inspired them to think about freedoms and liberty:
So here’s what’s really inspired me about our capacity as a society, to enforce (or rather, claim) the rights that are our due – not that the state gives us, but belong to us from the beginning: Its the rise of internet culture, and the rise, for all the bad and all the good, its the rise of a system in which we are all part of a single dialogue, in which we can make any kind of art, and in which any person can communicate with any other person, without any third party intervening, has given rise to a global dialogue that, I think, beggars the imagination of even the most optimistic philosophers of a generation ago.
And I mean that literally – you read the science fiction of the 1960s and the closest they come is they think maybe we would have a really good video on demand service with some video-phone on the side. No-one predicted just how, just, the fantastic Cambrian explosion of genres, of forms, of ideas, and of participation from every corner of the globe, that the Internet has enabled. And that’s for me, why keeping the network free is the first step to keeping us all free.
Its better in video! Billy Bragg, Feargal Sharkey, Paul Gilroy, Henry Porter and English PEN’s President Lisa Appignanesi also answer:
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Activists marked the 12th anniversary of the house arrest of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi by protests outside Chinese embassies worldwide, this one in London. Photo by lewishamdreamer
As any news report worthy of the name will have told you this morning, the Burmese military junta have imprisoned the democracy campaigner and PEN Honorary Member Aung San Suu Kyi. The reason given in an apparent breach of her house arrest conditions, after an American man swam a lake and visited her. As a correspondent at the Burma Campaign UK HQ just put it to me in an e-mail:
It seems Burma is the only country in the world where you can be sent to jail for someone breaking into your house.
Aung San Suu Kyi was nearing the end of her ‘term’ of house arrest.
The Burma Campaign have a handy form that allows you to quickly lobby the UN Secretary General, asking him to send an envoy.