Sunday Times 2
Britain continues to intimidate its media
Where art thou, John Rankin? The last time I had any news of the British high commissioner he was due to return to London at the end of his term.
Whether he has already left or is still here packing his wangediya and miris gala to turn out a delectable mus curry and buth for his compadres back in that bastion of media freedom (as the British never tire of telling the world), it does not really matter.
Here or there, who cares as long as Rankin gets the message. If he has already flown the coop, maybe his deputy dear Laura (Davies), who I missed meeting in London by a whisker, might pass it on to him.
The British police raided the Guardian newspaper office and threatened journalists with legal action for publishing Edward Snowden exposes
After all, this is all too important a matter to let pass without those panjandrums from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office been given an opportunity to curl at the corner their stiff upper lips to make weighty contribution.
That includes the rather obnoxious Hugo Swire whose political intervention during the Commonwealth Business Forum in Sri Lanka last November left many wondering whether the Brits, now a declining power despite all the noise they make, were losing their marbles having earlier lost their colonies.
However much it might rankle Rankin, one must recall his words on World Press Freedom Day last May, for only then would the import of what he tried to hide about the legislative and executive attacks on media freedom in his own country, become clearly evident.
On that occasion Rankin made more than veiled assertions about threats to media freedom and to journalists worldwide to vector in on Sri Lanka. As Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London at the time I left obliged to draw attention to Britain’s own insidious moves to shackle the Fourth Estate thus providing authoritarian states among us the flimsiest of excuses to come down heavily on both the messages and the messengers in the name of protecting national security.
Since I wrote that response to Rankin nearly five months ago and received nary a word from him in defence, it would appear that there is more than one Achilles heel in Britain’s spurious claim to be in the forefront of defending media freedom against political marauders.
But the more one reads about the doings of security agencies and other institutions to throttle the freedom that Britain once stood for, the more one is convinced that Britain is not in the vanguard of defending and protecting that freedom but in the guard’s van at the rear.
Much of the intrusion into the preserve of media freedom and the resultant deleterious action has occurred during the present government of Prime Minister David Cameron whose loquaciousness against nations that refuse to return to colonial subservience is only surpassed by his own attempts to strike against dissenting media or those that expose the unlawful ventures of his government and its agencies.
In my reply to Rankin I mentioned the intimidation of the Guardian newspaper and its journalists by officials who walked into the newspaper office threatening journalists with legal and other action and had the hard drives of the Guardian computer’s destroyed. Why? Because the Guardian published the Edward Snowden exposes of US and British intelligences monitoring even the private communications of their citizens.
Just over a week ago the Bureau of Investigative Journalism asked the European Court of Human Rights to stop the UK Government from spying on journalists and their sources.
The Metropolitan Police had secretly used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to obtain the phone records of “The Sun” Political Editor and calls made to The Sun news desk. This was done to protect the Met Police and its reputation for cooking up a case against Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell which ultimately exposed police perfidy. That in itself a disgraceful story.
Legal experts in media law argue that the use of RIPA to obtain information about journalist’s sources without recourse to a judge is a clear breach of Article 10 (on freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights.
RIPA can only be used to detect or prevent criminality. Neither the political editor nor his alleged sources were found to have violated any law.
But the Met Police used the material unlawfully obtained to find and sack three police officers even though the Criminal Prosecution Service had said they had no case to answer.
While the Bureau of Investigation has gone to court and UK’s Press Gazette has broadcast an urgent SOS (Save Our Sources) a member of the House of Lords and a London Assembly member has fired a question at London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, himself a journalist in a previous avatar.
Jenny Jones has asked Johnson who heads the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and is responsible for the accountability of the Met Police about the police secretly resorting to the use of RIPA.
Having confronted Johnson with her question Jones revealed that in 2013 the Met had made 94,778 authorisations for communication data and asked what oversight the mayor’s office has over such requests.
“The law under the Convention (ECoHR) is quite clear. Covert state surveillance and accessing journalistic information cannot be used to circumvent these important rights,” says Gavin Millar, QC, appearing in the case.
The steady intrusion by state security apparatus to curb media freedoms must surely worry journalists the world over. What such covert operations that blatantly violate international law, do is to provide regimes with authoritarian intent with a pseudo-legal cover to trample on media freedom which the British themselves call a cornerstone of democracy and the Commonwealth.
Such ongoing violations of international law, while preaching to others to respect law and democracy, only serve to undermine elsewhere the very foundations of media freedom that have been won with struggle and sacrifice.
It is scant wonder that Cameron and his cohorts want to pull out of the European Convention. They hate to be found guilty of violating provisions that only help to pull away the last pieces of the fig leaf that cover their pretentions to democratic respectability.