Early last year, openDemocracy began tracking how governments around the world were responding to the pandemic. Alarmingly, many of them seized the opportunity to crack down on political opponents and consolidate power.

This rollback of human rights also affected press freedom on several continents, from Hungary to South Africa, Russia and the Philippines. Journalists were completely or partly blocked from doing their work in 73% of the 180 countries monitored by the organisation, Reporters Without Borders.

Attacks on journalists take many forms: in Egypt and Iraq, female journalists have been disproportionately targeted on social media, while in Greece, a corporate media monopoly has led to pliant coverage of the government.

Below, we have collated a few stories of resilience in the face of repression. In Russia, a group of student journalists disillusioned by uncritical state media built their own platform from scratch. And a moving series of portraits of journalists killed in Mexico serves as a testament to the changes that their work brought to their communities.

These cases demonstrate that press freedom is not a right exclusively given to those in the profession, but one that we all share. When our governments are held to account for their decisions, we all benefit.

Lebanon’s corrupt government leads a press backlash

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

A senior Conservative MP has called on the UK government to “abolish”  an ‘Orwellian’ unit accused of interfering with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

Last year, openDemocracy revealed that the ‘Clearing House’ unit within the Cabinet Office instructs Whitehall departments on how to respond to FOI requests and shares personal information about journalists.

Former Brexit secretary David Davis said that the Clearing House’s screening of FOI requests was a “pernicious action” and  that the unit should be abolished, during an openDemocracy live discussion on Tuesday.

Labour MP John McDonnell told the panel that government obfuscation in response to FOI requests had become an “art form” and that “we are in real danger of the water closing over” FOI legislation.

FOI requests are supposed to be ‘applicant blind’, meaning it should not matter who makes the request. But emails obtained by openDemocracy showed that the Cabinet Office is collating lists of journalists with details about their work and intervening when information about “sensitive subjects” is requested. 

The FOI act gives people ‘the right to know’, which means that anyone can ask a public authority – from ministerial departments to parish councils – to disclose the information they hold.

The UK government has granted fewer and rejected more FOI requests than ever before – with standards falling particularly sharply in the most important Whitehall departments, according to a report published by openDemocracy earlier this year.

Davis said that the Freedom of Information Act, which came into force in 2005, has “weakened over time as Whitehall has learnt new tricks”. 

“The avoidance of Freedom of Information has become a political strategy in its own right,” he said.

In February, more than a dozen current and former Fleet Street editors signed an openDemocracy open letter calling for “urgent action” to protect FOI.

This month, the Treasury refused a request to publish text messages the former prime minister David Cameron sent to chancellor Rishi Sunak lobbying on behalf of his employer Greensill Capital, saying they were sent with an “expectation of confidence”.

Lord David Clark, a former Labour minister and chief architect of the Freedom of Information Act, said that he hears “almost daily” about public bodies refusing to abide by the law or failing to meet the 20 working days response deadline. 

“I’m afraid that we can save the day but it’s going to mean a lot of us working very hard over the months and years ahead to get back even [to] where we were ten years ago – let alone to where we want to go,” Clark said at the openDemocracy event.

Davis said that rather than a “presumption to withhold” information among public bodies, there should be  a “duty to disclose”. 

National Union of Journalists general secretary Michelle Stanistreet, who was also on panel, seconded the proposal and added that the current exemption for commercially sensitive information should be rescinded.

John McDonnell said that the regulatory bodies overseeing FOI legislation had “been rendered ineffective in many people’s eyes”.

He said that the Information Commissioner’s Office, which handles complaints about FOIs, should be given adequate resources, and blamed a “political decision based upon this culture of secrecy” for its ineffectiveness.

McDonnell said a “culture of secrecy has developed in government”, which combined with “a decline in the number of independent journalists able to investigate these matters” had created a “maelstrom” for accountability.

He added that parliamentary bodies also needed to be strengthened to hold the government to account.

“The select committee process in Parliament, no matter what prism, is an effective way of opening up debate within Parliament on the basis of solid information. I think there needs to be more resources applied to select committees, so they can then be more exhaustive in their inquiries,” he said.

In response to the openDemocracy’s February letter, Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith said that, “openDemocracy’s characterisation of the government’s approach is tendentious.” 

She added: “The government takes its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act and Data Protection Act seriously, and routinely discloses information beyond the requirements under the Freedom of Information Act.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Since the pandemic started, an emergency exemption to procurement laws has allowed the government to award contracts without having to give different companies a chance to bid for them.

The measure has resulted in numerous COVID contracts being awarded without competition, or with terms being kept secret, or other measures which bypass normal transparency requirements.

Earlier this year, openDemocracy revealed that a healthcare company ultimately controlled by leading Tory donor and former party chairman, Lord Ashcroft, received a £350m contract as part of the government’s COVID-19 vaccination roll-out.

“There are now very serious questions for the government to answer, with more than a fifth of the money spent on purchases in response to the pandemic raising red flags.

“We must now have full accountability for the eye-watering amounts of taxpayers’ money spent on the response,” said Daniel Bruce, chief executive of Transparency International UK.

Labour’s shadow cabinet office minister, Rachel Reeves, said that “the scale of corruption risk to vast amounts of taxpayer money revealed in this report is shocking, as is the evidence of endemic cronyism flowing through the government’s contracting.”

The Cabinet Office said, “During the pandemic our priority has always been to protect the public and save lives, and we have used existing rules to buy life saving equipment and supplies, such as PPE for the NHS front line.

All PPE procurement went through the same assurance process and due diligence is carried out on every contract – ministers have no role in awarding them.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The British government announced in November that it would slash foreign aid spending from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income, cutting £4bn from this year’s budget. The move will deprive hundreds of millions in aid to some of the poorest countries in the world, including conflict zones like Yemen and Syria.

Mitchell said that Boris Johnson’s previous remarks could have encouraged negative public attitudes towards aid. 

“If you have, as you have now, a prime minister, who announces from the despatch box or House of Commons, that the Department for International Development is – and I think I’m quoting him – a huge, great ‘cash machine in the sky’ spewing out taxpayers’ money, you cannot be surprised if people across the country don’t think it’s a good thing to do,” said the MP for Sutton Coldfield.

“If you say that about it, people say well, ‘I’d rather it was spent on my school or hospital. I don’t want to see it being sent overseas’,” said Mitchell. “And that is the view that populist politicians are pandering to. And it’s wrong.”

Mitchell also criticised the belief among ministers that the cuts will appeal to former Labour supporters who voted Conservative in the last election as “extremely patronising”. 

“People in the Red Wall seats are often the first to go and raise money through car boot sales and pub quizzes when there’s a famine, or there’s a flood in a poor part of the world,” he said.

The government is facing growing criticism from some Conservative MPs who have called on the prime minister to let MPs vote on the plans in Parliament.

“I’ve spent the last two months organising colleagues to resist this and I can confirm that [the government] might well lose the vote and therefore they don’t want to vote, which is a bit of a bit of a pity really because we were all told that Brexit was about putting more power into the British Parliament,” said Mitchell.

The foreign secretary Dominic Raab said in November that the government would “bring forward legislation in due course” that would give rebel MPs a chance to vote against the plan, but later backtracked.

The government could face a legal challenge if it proceeds with the cuts before seeking Parliamentary approval. A cross-party group of 28 MPs wrote to Raab on Wednesday claiming that the changes are unlawful because the current level of spending is set by the International Development Act 2015.  

The MPs said that a former director of public prosecutions “was clear that the International Development Act 2015 does not make provision to change the 0.7 per cent target itself, only to miss it.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.