News Updates for 25 April

Ibrahim Haskologlu

Turkey jails journalist for exposing security breach

Revealing that hackers had successfully breached Turkish government websites and obtained personal information including that of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has put journalist Ibrahim Haskologlu under arrest and in prison pending trial.

Haskologlu had posted partially obscured photos of what he said were the ID cards of President Edogan and Hakan Fidan, head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency, on twitter. He said a group of hackers contacted him in February, informing him about the security breach.

Notwithstanding that most of the information on the cards was concealed, Haskologlu’s lawyer Emrah Karatay said his client was arrested for not notifying prosecutors of the breach and unlawfully obtaining and posting personal information on social media. Haskologlu maintains that he had in fact told authorities of the breach.

“He thought he had to warn people as a journalist and posted these. Now he’s arrested – that’s all,” Karatay said, adding that police had searched Haskologlu’s house when they detained him.

Malta stonewalls EU Prosecutor

The EU's chief prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi questioned the anti-corruption commitment of the Maltese authorities after a visit where she said every agency head she met had denied that detecting financial crime fell into their area of responsibility.

Corruption issues at the highest levels of Malta’s government are well known and those responsible for the 2017 murder of investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia, who did so much to bring this to light, have still not been brought to justice.

Speaking to the Times of Malta, Kövesi described her meetings with Malta’s National Audit Office, the Commissioner of Police, the Attorney General and the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit.

"I had meetings with the national authorities and after two days it was very difficult for me to identify the institution that is responsible to detect the crimes because all of them said: ‘It’s not me, it’s them’.

"And when I visited them they said: ‘it’s not us, it’s them’. So we still have to work on this," Kovesi said of the discussions.

Cyprus revokes EU passports held by Russian investors

In an effort to comply with European Union sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine, Cyprus has revoked residency permits and passports granted to four Russian billionaires, as well as eleven of their family members.

Cyprus operated a ‘golden passport’ scheme until November 2020, allowing the wealthy to effectively buy EU citizenship for themselves and their families. The scheme was ended under pressure from the European Commission due to its ability to be exploited for money laundering and other criminal purposes.

Cyprus has revoked golden passports before – in 2021, 39 foreign national and six family members had their citizenship grants overturned. At that time around another 50 grants were said to be under review.

As in 2021, the individuals now subject to passport removals have not been named by the authorities, but local media reports said they were oligarchs Oleg Deripaska and Igor Kesayev; Grigory Beryozkin, owner of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda and RBK media-holding; and Gulbakhor Ismailova, a sister of Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov.

Four other Russian billionaires - Mikhail Gutseriyev, Aleksandr Ponomarenko, Vadim Moshkovich, and Aleksei Kuzmichyov – are throught to be at risk of similar action.

Cyprus is a popular location for wealthy Russians and nearly 3,000 Russian nationals are thought to have taken advantage of the golden passports program over the decade it was operational.

Belarus detains Novy Chas editor

Belarusian authorities have detained Aksana Kolb, Editor of the weekly newspaper Novy Chas without charge or explanation. Her whereabouts are currently unknown.

Kolb’s colleagues told The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) they suspect she may be in held in the notorious Akrestsina detention center, where other journalists had been taken during President Lukashenko’s long-running crackdown on the independent press.

Lukashenko’s position in Belarus is increasingly precarious. While his rule survived months of massive street protests after a contested Presidential election in 2000, the country’s participation in neighbour Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to have been hampered by widespread sabotage of transportation infrastructure.

The Belarussian authorities’ intolerance for independent journalism was highlighted to the world in May 2021 when, using the false ruse of a bomb threat on board, a commercial flight was forced to divert from Greece to Lithuania to land so that dissident journalist Roman Protasevich could be arrested. Protasevich is still under house arrest.

“[Kolb’s] detention shows life for journalists in Belarus remains extremely worrying, and that authorities are determined to target the country’s few remaining independent outlets,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York.

Amnesty International demands Spain come clean about spyware use

Amnesty International said the European Union has failed to stop the Spanish government’s use of spyware to monitor journalists, activists and other targets including prominent Catalan politicians.

Following media reports about the use of spyware created by Israel’s NSO Group by EU member states, the European Parliament has recently launched an investigation that cites Hungary and Poland specifically within a wider remit.

In an effort to ensure that the full scope of Pegasus use within the EU is examined, Amnesty said research by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto revealed that scores of Catalan politicians, journalists and their families were targeted with intrusive electronic surveillance between 2015 and 2020. Spain has taken a harsh line against pro-independence Catalan politicians since a unilateral independence referendum in 2017. Activists were sentenced to long prison terms and only pardoned with a change of government in 2021.

“The Spanish government needs to come clean over whether or not it is a customer of NSO Group. It must also conduct a thorough, independent investigation into the use of Pegasus spyware against the Catalans identified in this investigation,” said Likhita Banerji, Amnesty's Technology and Human Rights Researcher.

In 2020 the group asked the government, including the Defense Ministry to disclose all contracts with private digital surveillance companies, but was told that the information was classified. NSO maintains that it sells the spyware only to governments to fight crime and terrorism.