Category: censorship

Cybercrime Act extends reach of ‘draconian’, outdated libel laws

By Shaira Panela

It’s a threat to Philippine press freedom.

In no uncertain terms, this is how representatives from local and international media agencies criticized Republic Act No. 10175, or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which was signed into law last September 12.

Online libel as a crime

Of particular concern to observers is the law’s provision on online libel. Chapter 2, Section 7 states that “all crimes defined and penalized by the Revised Penal Code [RPC]… if committed by, through and with the use of information and communications technologies shall be covered by… this Act.”

As defined in the 82-year-old RPC, libel encompassed mostly traditional communications media. Article 355 of the Code specifically spells out penalties for libel “commited by means of writing, printing, lithography, engraving, radio, phonograph, painting, theatrical exhibition, cinematographic exhibition or any similar means.”

However, the Cybercrime Law now extends the scope of libel beyond these traditional means of communication.

Worse, online libel brings with it stiffer punishments: the law states that the penalties for such online crimes “shall be one degree higher than provided for by the [RPC for libel committed in traditional media].”

‘Draconian’, antiquated RPC

Media organizations and legal experts agree that the law’s provision on online libel has thus given more teeth to the already “draconian” RPC.

“Pinalakas ‘yung libel… Inilipat ‘yung problema sa old media papunta sa new media,” said Luis V. Teodoro, deputy director of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) and former dean of the UP Diliman College of Mass Communications.

Teodoro also said that, even prior to the Cybercrime Law, the RPC’s provisions on libel were already being used against government critics. “Madalas nagagamit ito sa pangha-harass ng mga journalist,” he said.

With the Cybercrime Law in place, Teodoro warned that such harassment could now be extended to bloggers, domain owners, webmasters, chatroom moderators, and even just commenters on third-party websites.

On the other hand, Atty. JJ Disini, UP College of Law professor said, “Online libel was already explicitly recognized by the Supreme Court in 2010. The new cybercrime law doesn’t affect it. In fact the SC protected those accused of libel by restricting the ability of victims to choose the place where they will file the case.”

“(The Cybercrime Law) is unecessary. Sa tingin ko, most of what this law penalizes ay nasa batas na natin —tulad ng child pornography,” Teodoro said.

International solidarity

Media organizations in the Philippines and abroad have aired similar concerns over the Cybercrime Law.

In a statement, the CMFR said that the passing of the Act “suggests how restrictive rather than expansive is the mindset of the country’s legislators, and of Mr. Aquino himself when it comes to enshrining in the law those principles—accountability and transparency, press freedom and free expression, etc.—to which he has repeatedly declared he is committed.”

Further, Teodoro told GMA News in a phone interview that the “fundamental problem is that legislators are not committed” to providing laws to promote the freedom of expression, and information.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and the Burgos Media Center shared similar sentiments.

“Compare the haste with which this measure and the Data Privacy Act became law, compared to Congress’ lethargy on a bill that President Benigno Aquino III has repeatedly declared a priority yet never lifted a finger to help shepherd through the legislative mill – the Freedom of Information Act – and it becomes all too apparent that this president never meant anything he said with respect to our rights and our freedoms,” the NUJP pointed out. (See related report.)

“The presence of the decayed idea of libel in the crimes enlisted in the bill may be used to attack not only the cyberpress members but also to the progressive netizens like activists and political bloggers. Through this law, the Trapos can now easily file charges against ‘critics by claiming that cyber journalist have threatened their life and property,” the Burgos Media Center added in a separate statement.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) also said that the new law —particularly its provision on libel – “poses a significant threat to press freedom and limits freedom of expression in the Philippines.”

“The IFJ is greatly concerned that the inclusion of online content in the Act could be used to curtail freedom of expression online. We are further concerned that the government of the Philippines continues to delay the passing of the FOI bill, which clearly stands against their stated commitment to press freedom,” it said.

Decriminalizing libel

Media advocates have long been calling for the decriminalization of libel in the Philippines.

In October 2011, no less than the the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) declared Philippine libel laws “excessive” and in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which the Philippines is a signatory.

The commission made this declaration in response to the 2008 complaint filed by Filipino broadcaster Alexander “Alex” Adonis, who spent almost two years in jail for libel.

NUJP and CMFR also cited this declaration in their statements against the Cybercrime Law.

Currently, Senate Bill No. 3244, filed by Senator Gregorio Honasan, seeks to decriminalize libel. But as of August 6, it is still pending in the Committees on Public Information and Mass Media, and Constitutional Amendments, Revision of Codes and Laws.

However, Teodoro believes that the passing of this bill comes with a price.

“(Parang) may ibibigay ‘yung right hand, but the left hand takes away something,” Teodoro said.

Teodoro said that the proposed bill seeks to make the media organizations register before the Securities and Exchange Commission, “in effect, licensing.”

However, Teodoro said that it is “unlikely” that the congress will pass this bill into law in light of current legislation. — TJD, GMA News

A Restrictive Mindset: First Law Since 2000 Affecting Cyberspace Communication

STATEMENT OF THE CENTER FOR MEDIA FREEDOM & RESPONSIBILITY ON THE PASSAGE OF THE CYBERCRIME PREVENTION ACT OF 2012

The successful passage through the legislative mill and their immediate signing into law by President Benigno S. Aquino III of bills affecting the media and their fundamental task of gathering and disseminating information, among them the Data Privacy Act (Republic Act 10173) last August, and the Cybercrime Prevention Act (RA 10175) this September, suggests how restrictive rather than expansive is the mindset of the country’s legislators, and of Mr. Aquino himself when it comes to enshrining in the law those principles—accountability and transparency, press freedom and free expression, etc.—to which he has repeatedly declared he is committed.

RA 10173 and 10175 breezed through both houses of Congress within months after they had been introduced in 2011, and apparently were in no danger of being vetoed once they reached Mr. Aquino’s desk.

The Data Privacy Act, among other provisions, penalizes those in government who release information of a personal nature, which seems a reasonable enough restriction in behalf of the right to privacy—until one recalls that information on the personal lives of government officials often has a bearing on their performance as public servants accountable to the citizenry, and is therefore among the legitimate concerns of the news media.

The Cybercrime Prevention Act, meanwhile, incorporates the 82-year old libel law in the Revised Penal Code (RPC) in including libel among the crimes that may be committed through the use of computers. Under the provisions of the RPC on libel, the penalty for violators is imprisonment of six months for every count of libel committed. Libel as a criminal offense has been used by past administrations as well as local officials today to harass and intimidate journalists. The outstanding example of its use against journalists was the filing by Jose Miguel “Mike” Arroyo of 11 libel suits against 46 journalists during the disputed presidency of his wife Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. And yet Congress has through the decades ignored the demand from journalists and human rights groups for the decriminalization of libel.

Compare the speed with which RA 10173 and RA 10175 were passed—in both instances with only perfunctory public hearings—with the difficulties Congress is having with passing a Freedom of Information Act (FOI), and with Mr. Aquino’s by now obvious aversion to it.

And yet certain honorable members of Congress have not been miserly with their lip service to the alleged need for an FOI. As for Mr. Aquino, since he became President he has stopped talking about the need for one, after pledging during the 2010 campaign for the Presidency that he was all for it in behalf of transparency and as a means of insuring government accountability. The bottom line, apparently, is that neither Congress nor Mr. Aquino want an FOI act passed, period.

The passage of the Cybercrime Prevention Act also suggests among other possibilities that both Congress and Mr. Aquino have chosen to ignore the 2011 declaration of the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) that the Philippine libel law is excessive because it penalizes violators with imprisonment, contrary to the human rights protocols to which the Philippines is a signatory, and therefore must at least be reviewed towards decriminalizing libel. Either that, or the authors of the bills, and Mr. Aquino himself, are unfamiliar with both the UNHRC declaration, as well as with the long-standing demand to decriminalize libel in order to put an end to the use of the libel law to intimidate and silence journalists. Apparently there is little hope that libel will ever be decriminalized, RA 10175 having in effect further strengthened it by widening its application.

Finally, a word of caution. RA 10175 is the first law affecting communication through cyberspace that has been passed in this country since the eCommerce Act of 2000. Prior to its passage, the Philippines had been distinguished among its Asian neighbors for the absence of regulatory legislation affecting the Internet. It can signal the opening of the floodgates of Internet regulation that will affect Filipino netizens, given the restrictive mindset of the country’s leaders. It is a distinct possibility to which journalists and bloggers, ordinary citizen and anyone committed to free expression through whatever medium, should be alert, and must be prepared to combat.

inquirer, blasphemy, sodomy

i leave it to radikalchick to respond to the world-class self-centered bigoted douchebag (in the words of carlos celdran) and his ilk who insist on their narrow shallow fallow takes on mideo’s art and censorship and the ccp.  but this letter to the editor from ernie lapuz of sto. tomas, batangas, calling out the inquirer on its “tunnel vision” and disconnect with reality, deserves to be shared and taken to heart (and mind).

WHEN ART SERVES AS A MIRROR FOR NATION TO SEE ITS REALITY

A fictitious literary character, Dorian Gray, kept a special portrait of himself. Dorian never aged a day and remained handsome through time. His portrait aged instead of him, and with every detestable sin he committed his portrait became more and more hideous.

“Poleteismo,” by Mideo M. Cruz, is a hideous portrait or artwork. It is so hideous and disgusting that it is being bashed over TV, radio, newspapers, and in the streets. And it’s quite understandable why people are angry, but this anger may have given even the Inquirer a bit of tunnel vision when its editorial on the artwork said, “If all this does not constitute sacrilege, blasphemy, or attack on religion, we don’t know what does.” Come on, surely the Inquirer knows of worse things than “Poleteismo” that constitute blasphemy and sacrilege. The paper writes about it every day. For instance, it has written about an absurd game show host who promotes mendicancy while idiotizing and exploiting the poor by making them salivate over thousand-peso hand-outs while he earns millions for himself. Doesn’t he make Christ look like Mickey Mouse or a clown every time he makes fun of the poor and declaring “All I want to do is help the poor”?

This paper writes about the abuses of the government and the Church. Can’t it feel in its hearts and guts that to call a cheating and utterly corrupt former president, her “First Plunderer” and their cohorts “devout Catholics” is more disgusting than a diseased male organ stuck on a crucifix? And when “Princes of the Church,” filthy rich “Evangelists,” “Ministers” and “Anointed Sons of God” ask and even demand favors (SUVs, a new superhighway along their vast prime property, special appointments, etc.) from government in exchange for their “constant support” of leaders who “steal from the poor,” they actually prostitute religion. Translate this reality into artwork and we may behold a full cathedral ceiling mural of Jesus Christ being held down by “most reverend” clergymen while being sodomized by hordes of “honorable” political leaders. Such an utterly sacrilegious, blasphemous, disgusting, offensive and hideous cathedral artwork will surely be despised, condemned and vanished.

Now what about the reality that is faithfully reflected in that virtual cathedral artwork? Do we see our reality as perfectly normal, acceptable or even handsome as Dorian, or should I say Juan? What kind of infernal gall have we in condemning people who hold up a mirror to us to show us bluntly the true state and configuration of our nation? “Poleteismo” is a reflection of the reality of Juan de la Cruz. And I thank God for the art that serves as our mirror. We can’t banish our collective ugliness reflected in the mirror by bashing that mirror. Surely, God’s mysterious ways are at work here as He Himself is holding that mirror to us. Art as a mirror reveals that it is us who actually commit the sacrilege. It is the reality of our nation, government, churches and ourselves that we need to reform.

—ERNIE LAPUZ
nitelites@rocketmail.com
Biga, Sto Tomas, Batangas

media & mideo
The real immaturity
The morality police came to town (with a lynching mob)

Iconoclasm in art / failure of nerve

By Elmer Ordonez

Senator Edgardo Angara may well have put the “Kulo” controversy to rest by not recommending sanctions against the CCP board. All possible sides were heard at last Tuesday’s Senate probe presided over by the former UP president. Enlightened and benighted views and questions were entertained. Angara seemed satisfied that the CCP board promised to review their procedures for exhibits.

All’s well that ends well? Here’s my take on the issue:

Weeks of pressure from the Church clergy/ partisans including Palace intervention compelled the CCP board to pull out the entire “Kulo” exhibit, not just the controversial installation “Polytheism” of Mideo Cruz.

CCP chair Emily Abrera said the board did not “cave in” to the pressure but a decision was reached, by referendum, to withdraw the exhibit before its expiry today. Against the closure were Abrera, Florangel Braid, and Carol Espiritu while a majority of six including CCP president Raul Sunico were for closure for reasons of “public safety.”

The exhibit had already been shown at Ateneo and UP Diliman and no problem arose from viewers. The exhibit was to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Rizal by alumni artists of Rizal’s alma mater, the University of Santo Tomas, celebrating its 400th year of its founding. Historically, the UST’s school of fine arts under the late National Artist Victorio Edades was a pioneer in modernist art while the University of the Philippines was still following the classical style with Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino as leading lights. Edades’ 1928 exhibit triggered a running debate between the moderns and the conservatives.

At the about the same time Jose Garcia Villa was suspended from the UP for his “obscene” poem “Man-Songs” by a committee led by traditional poet Dean Jorge Bocobo who must have thought Villa’s modernist work was “bad writing.”

The advent of modern art or “the shock of the new” came rather late in the Philippines. Mideo Cruz’s installation would have been in its element during the time of “Dadaism” in Europe. Edades’ works were modern in style but were they infused with “ideology and politics” like Picasso’s anti-fascist “Guernica?” Edades’ “The Builders” had a proletarian touch; his students were more into depicting Filipino history and identity like the murals of Carlos “Botong” Francisco.

“Dadaism” itself (with Marcel Duchamp as a favorite example with his “Fountain,” a urinal hanging from his installation) was a protest against the senselessness of the First World War and against bourgeois art. He did not expect the public would tolerate his “shock art.” Just as the academe in Loyola and Diliman did not create a big fuss over Cruz’s work. Thanks to a TV camera man who showed shots to the bishops when the trouble began.

“Kulo” or revolutionary ferment was obviously inspired by Rizal’s iconoclasm in the last decades of the 19th century when Rizal and the Propagandists produced incendiary literature that would lead to the 1896-1898 Revolution that ended Spanish colonial/monastic rule. Rizal and Marcelo del Pilar were particularly scathing in their anti-friar writings. The two novels of Rizal to this day are taught in some schools expurgating or sanitizing passages considered offensive to the Church.

Constantino Tejero of Inquirer thinks Cruz’s “Polytheism” is expressive of “racial memory embedded in the subconscious”— a virtual history of church and colonial abuses up to the present. Lito Zulueta also of Inquirer consigns Cruz’s work to iconoclastic art. Iconoclasm has a long history of idol-smashing (literally and figuratively) in religion, politics, culture and art. The Church itself destroyed images and icons carried by its forces deemed responsible for their defeat in battle.

In Rizal’s time the theocratic state responded to his “blasphemous” and “heretical” novels by banning them and ultimately having him shot by firing squad. Today, if some defenders of the faith have their way, they would perhaps have the offending artist burned at stake like Joan of Arc, and those responsible in the CCP for approving the exhibit, charged in court and made to resign.

Those who find Cruz’s work offensive have the right to protest or to picket the exhibit but do they have the right to resort to vandalism or arson? The latter act conjures images of book-burning, and history is replete with examples of this kind of censorship in totalitarian and supposedly democratic societies. The Church provides the faithful with an index of approved books bearing the phrase “nihil obstat” or nothing objectionable. “Prior restraint” cannot be imposed in a pluralistic society.

The UP Arts studies department statement provides the aesthetic and intellectual justification for engaging controversial art works in discussion rather than banning them. It says: “While there are contending interpretations of an image presented by art, the ethical course of action is to process the contentions and that is what art ensures: a process of communicative action. The closure of an exhibition only achieves the closure of democratic, informed and thoughtful engagement.”

The CCP board may still redeem itself by standing their ground against the recrudescence of obscurantism and repression. They will not be alone.

eaordonez2000@yahoo.com