“What’s the red line?” Rezaian said he refused to say the lie that he was a spy, working for a foreign government. “It’s above all a negotiation with yourself,” said Rezaian. Activists are saying ‘how can Raman do this and be so weak?’ I would say go try it yourself.” Rezaian describes “the range of calculations that one is having to do in a confined space and circumstance where you have no access to speak to anyone, probably in solitary confinement, probably being beaten. But lying in public doesn’t come easily to journalists whose professional duty is to tell the truth. Jason Rezaian pointed out in a phone interview with CPJ that the standard advice given during hostile environment training for journalists today is to do whatever your captors want to you to.
Washington Post columnist Jason Rezaian and his journalist wife Yeganeh Rezaian (now an Advocacy Associate at CPJ) both were forced into confessions in Iran while imprisoned there between 20.
That count did not include last year’s cruel broadcast of a forced confession by the journalist Roohollah Zam, who was executed after he was arrested in Baghdad and taken to Tehran. Shortly after Iranian authorities announced Zam’s arrest, state TV aired a video in which Zam, blindfolded in car, apologized and said trusting governments other than Iran is “wrong.” Between 20, Iran broadcast at least 355 forced confessions, according to a 2020 report by the International Federation for Human Rights. In one case, a business reporter who accurately reported on deliberations of the Securities Regulatory Commission apologized on air for reporting “through private inquiring” instead of waiting for the commission’s official line.Īn email sent to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs seeking comment was not answered. They went public during the Cultural Revolution and have since become a televised staple in the humiliation of journalists, as CPJ has documented over the years. Forerunners of the contemporary practice of using confessions as a political tool in China can be traced at least to land reform in the early 1950s, when landlords were dragged in front of the village, and their tenants were invited to hurl abuse-physical and verbal-at them as described in the first-hand account of William Hinton in the book “Fanshen.” Confessions were a key part of instilling party discipline, as documented by the sociologist Martin King Whyte.
0 kommentar(er)
