Banned: three NUJ members whose work has upset the state
THREE active NUJ members have been banned from countries where they want to work — and all believe their entry refusals are because of what they have written.
Last June Simon Pirani, a Russian-speaking specialist writer who covers the gas and mineral industries, was stopped as he entered Russia with a valid multi-entry business visa. Border police handed him a “declaration of return” and put him back on the plane.
The Russian embassy in London told him that his exclusion was, in law, “necessary for the purpose of protecting the defence capability and security of the state plus public order and public health”.
He has learned through informal Russian contacts that his name was on a list drawn up by the FSB — successor to the KGB — of foreign citizens who may not be issued visas. He wrote to the Director of the FSB but has had no reply.
Simon Pirani, a union activist for 20 years, is a former chair of the NUJ London Freelance branch and is currently chair of the Appeals Tribunal. He was a leading light in the campaign to help colleagues in Ukraine build their own independent trade union, in which a group of NUJ members visited the country to hold training courses. That campaign grew out of the international fight for justice over the murder of website editor Gyorgy Gongadze by agents of the state in 2000, in which again Simon Pirani has been a leading voice.
He has visited Russia frequently over nearly 20 years to work as a journalist, conduct research and attend academic conferences or business events. He says: “I take my exclusion to be a breach of my right to free speech.
“The most convincing explanation was that last year I interviewed trade unionists and civil society activists who were themselves under surveillance by the law enforcement agencies, but this is conjecture, and I have no official explanation.”
The NUJ is supporting his appeals to be able to carry on his work, as is the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where he is a senior research fellow.
FELLOW FREELANCE Mike Jempson, of Bristol Branch, well known in the union for his work on professional ethics, has been banned from Belarus, where he had been working with the independent Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ), on behalf of the International Federation of Journalists, on a training programme.
Mike Jempson, who is vice-chair of the NUJ Ethics Council and director of the charity Mediawise, wrote an article in the Journalist last April about his adventures dodging the Belarus secret police, still called the KGB, while working on the programme.
He says: “On one occasion a young KGB officer did question me, in the guise of a ‘local journalist’. Who knows whether it was this that shut the door on me.”
He was refused a visa for a further visit and tried to appeal. “I offered to come in for an interview but was told not to bother.”
A FORMER member of the Ethics Council, Anthony McIntyre, who runs a website in Belfast, has been refused a visa for the USA, despite frequent visits in the past. His wife is American and their children have American passports.
“I have dined with the American consul general to Northern Ireland and been a guest at their 4th of July Independence Day parties,” he says, “but, according to the US state department, I am persona non grata — an unforgiven convicted ‘terrorist’ who shouldn’t be allowed to set foot on American soil.”
The ban prevents Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner turned journalist, from visiting to promote his book Good Friday — the Death of Irish Republicanism. The book is critical of Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, which, he believes, is why he cannot get into the US — while, he says, “Adams and McGuinness, both former IRA prisoners like me, are feted as statesmen”.
Anthony McIntyre has written for the Observer, the Sunday Tribune in Dublin and the Los Angeles Times. “I do see the ban as double standards,” he says. “The American public are not informed about all the issues connected to the peace process. I can write an opinion piece in the LA Times, yet I can’t go and explain this in person to American people.”