I gave the following speech at the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest today: NGO’s and on-the ground activists: Defending the Voices How can NGOs seeking to advance freedom of expression most effectively work with on-the-ground free speech activists to combat censorship? As a journalist, author and blogger living in Sydney, Australia, the…
Showing all posts tagged Cuba
Challenging Washington’s rules
Fidel’s Heir: The rising influence of Hugo Chávez. A New Yorker essay by Jon Lee Anderson, recent visitor to the Sydney Writer’s Festival.
How we deal with dictators
The essential website Wikileaks releases yet another coup: During the 2007 Presidential election campaigns in Kenya, an international furore developed around the existence of a “secret” Memorandum of Understanding signed by Raila Odinga (now Prime Minister of Kenya) and the National Muslim Leaders’ Forum. A forged version of this Memorandum of Understanding was in email…
Just another innocent man
The troubling case of Adel Hamad, imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for five years without trial: Get involved at projecthamad.org
How we prosecute “terrorists”
The “war on terror” means imprisonment, torture, extraordinary rendition, Western complicity and a travesty of justice. And Britain is involved up to its neck: A British resident who is facing the death penalty in Guantanamo Bay has made a final desperate plea to Gordon Brown to end his six-year ordeal and bring him home today.…
The Left should oppose repression
I’ve spent most of my professional life skewering the unhinged tendencies of the Right (not least debunking its support for Israeli violence). Sadly, some on the Left are equally ideological and blind to their own propaganda. Western support for Cuba remains fairly strong on the Left, despite the vast evidence that Fidel Castro ran a…
How to help our friends
China is a repressive regime. Clearly it now makes sense, in a post 9/11 world where the US engages in torture of its own, to join forces with the Communists: U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to…
How much guilt can one country handle?
Clive Stafford Smith, attorney, Democracy Now!: …According to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world…
Human rights for most
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is asked about his fears of an American invasion: Yes, this is a genuine concern. We have evidence of plans that exist in this sense. Well, you see what has happened in Iraq and many other countries over these years . . .…