【焦点】米イラン戦闘「異聞」「エプスタイン戦争」のイラン、コメディー映画『ウワサの真相』と重ねる米国＝橋詰雅博

日本ジャーナリストクラブ（JCJ）
59 minutes 3 seconds ago
　米国とイスラエルによる先制攻撃を受け、抗戦したイラン。戦闘終結に向けた米イランの協議は不調に終わる。先行き情勢は混とんとしたままだが、戦闘を仕掛けられたイラン人は、この有事を「エプスタイン戦争」と呼んでいる。　エプスタインとはご存じの通りあのジェフリー・エプスタインのことで、少女への性的虐待などの罪で起訴され拘留中に死亡した米富豪だ。英アンドリュー王子は深い仲だったエプスタインへの機密漏洩の疑いで今年2月に逮捕されたのは記憶に新しい。その少女買収に関するエプスタインファイル..
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War as a Pretext: Gulf States Are Tightening the Screws on Speech—Again

EFF update
1 hour 29 minutes ago

War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered. 

When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation of conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran, and related spillover attacks in the Gulf, several governments have intensified efforts to silence dissent and restrict the flow of information.

Journalism under pressure

For journalists, the space to operate—already constrained in much of the Gulf—is narrowing further. Across the region, several countries (including the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan) have restricted access to conflict areas, warned of legal consequences for publishing footage, and drawn red lines around wartime reporting. These measures weaken independent coverage, elevate official narratives, and make it harder for the public to get an accurate account of events on the ground.

Reporters Without Borders has documented an intensifying crackdown on journalists across Gulf countries and Jordan, including restrictions on reporting, legal threats, and heightened risks for those who deviate from official narratives. This aligns with the broader warning from the UN that repression of civic space and freedom of expression has significantly deepened across the region during the war.

Criminalizing speech, one post at a time

For ordinary internet users, the restrictions are just as severe. Since February, hundreds of people have reportedly been arrested across the region for social media activity linked to the war. In many Gulf states, the legal infrastructure enabling this is already well-established: expansive cybercrime and media laws criminalize vaguely defined offenses such as “spreading rumors,” “undermining public order,” or “insulting the state”. In wartime, these provisions become catch-all tools: flexible enough to apply to nearly any form of dissent.

In Bahrain, authorities have reportedly cracked down on people who protested or shared footage of the conflict online. The Gulf Centre for Human Rights has reported 168 arrests in the country tied to protests and online expression, with defendants potentially facing serious prison terms if convicted.

In the UAE, authorities have arrested nearly 400 people for recording events related to the conflict and for circulating information they described as misleading or fabricated. Police have claimed this material could stir public anxiety and spread rumors, and state-linked reporting has described the crackdown as part of a broader effort to defend the country from digital misinformation.

Saudi Arabia has also intensified restrictions, issuing a statement on March 2 banning the sharing of rumors or videos of unknown origin, and issuing a campaign discouraging residents from taking or posting photos. The campaign included a hashtag that reads “photography serves the enemy.” Journalists have been prevented from documenting the aftermath of airstrikes on the country. Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan have adopted similar restrictions on wartime imagery and reporting.

Qatar’s Interior Ministry has arrested more than 300 people for filming, circulating, or publishing what the ministry deemed to be misleading information. Taken together, these measures show how quickly wartime speech is being folded into existing legal systems designed to punish dissent.

The regional playbook

What’s striking is how consistent these measures are across different countries. As we recently wrote, governments across the broader region have enacted sweeping cybercrime and media laws over the past fifteen years, which they are now putting to use. Across different countries, the same tools are being used: existing laws, fresh bans on sharing wartime imagery, and tighter restrictions on journalists and reporting. The vocabulary changes slightly from place to place, but the logic is the same: national security, public order, rumors, and social stability are justifications for control.

This is not just a series of isolated incidents. It is a regional playbook for silencing critics and narrowing the public record. Gulf states have long relied on censorship and surveillance; the war has simply made those methods easier to justify and harder to challenge.

From “digital hopes” to digital control

As we’ve documented in our ongoing blog series, digital platforms were once seen—at least in part—as spaces that could expand public discourse in the region. But as we’ve also argued, those early “digital hopes” have given way to systems of regulation and control. 

The current crackdown is a continuation of that trajectory, not a temporary departure from it. States are not just reacting to the war; they are leveraging it to consolidate long-standing ambitions to dominate the digital public sphere.

It may be tempting to see these measures as temporary, but emergency powers—like the one enacted in Egypt following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat that lasted for more than three decades—have a way of sticking around. Legal precedents that are set during wartime often become normalized—or reinvoked during times of crisis, as occurred in 2015, when France brought back a 1955 law related to the Algerian War of Independence amidst the Paris attacks.

And the stakes are high. As we’ve seen in Syria and Ukraine, regulations and platform policies can cause wartime human rights documentation to disappear. When journalists are constrained and eyewitness footage is criminalized, accountability is weakened. And when arrests become widespread, people learn to self-censor.

Protecting freedom of expression in times of conflict is a requirement for accountability, not a concession to disorder. When people can document, report, and share information freely, it becomes harder for abuses to be hidden behind official narratives. Even in wartime, the public interest is best served by defending the space to tell the truth, not by silencing speech.

Jillian C. York

〈高市早苗になるな〉田中優子

週刊金曜日
6 hours 43 minutes ago
　総選挙で自民党圧勝の理由とされているのが、「今までとは違う」「何か新しい」という印象である。自民党はそれを女性首相という存在で仕掛けた。しかし内実は新しいどころか、戦前回帰の軍国主義であり、そこに税金を注ぎ込むという古 […]
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Our staff and trustees

Statewatch
9 hours 12 minutes ago
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Alamara Khwaja Bettum (Executive Director)

Alamara has been with Statewatch since December 2025. She is a qualified immigration lawyer in the UK, specialising in asylum, family reunion, and human rights. Prior to Statewatch, Alamara worked with migrants and refugees for over ten years in both the humanitarian field in Iraqi Kurdistan and the legal sector in the UK. In addition to her legal expertise, she brings experience in policy development, advocacy, capacity building and anti-racism.

Email: alamara [at] statewatch.org

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Romain Lanneau (Consultant Researcher)

Romain Lanneau has been working for Statewatch since 2022. He is a legal researcher, publishing on the topics of migration, asylum, and the use of new technologies for public policies. As an independent consultant, he worked for the European Network Against Racism, Fair Trials International and Data Rights. In addition to leading investigation and producing research, Romain is working as a legal advisory for the NGO, Front-LEX, taking the European Union to Court over its migration policy.

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Frey has been writing and coordinating our outsourcing borders bulletin on EU externalisation since 2025. Prior to Statewatch, Frey covered migration and borders for a decade. During his time as a journalist for the BBC World Service, he reported on the rise of anti-migration policies, Europe's border and surveillance technologies, Mediterranean search and rescue, and the exploitation of individuals by corporate and state powers worldwide. He has also written for openDemocracy, Thomson Reuters, and InfoMigrants. 

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Giacomo is currently with us as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship, and is conducting research into the impact of digital surveillance on communities across Europe. He is an investigative reporter whose has exposed corporate interests and the expansion of state surveillance networks across Europe and West Africa. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Politico, Internazionale, The New Humanitarian, and more. He is the co-founder of the Fada Collective and received a special mention at the European Press Prize (2024).

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Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche is Professor of Law at the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, honorarium member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and fellow of the Institut Convergence Migrations. Her researches focus on the exigencies of the rule of law and their limitations in cases of exceptions: the situations of serious crises which allow the concentration of powers and restriction of rights (e.g. the use of the state of emergency), and the areas of legal confinement which are conducive to abuses of power and rights infringements (e.g. camps and centres where migrants and refugees are detained). She is member of the editorial board of various reviews and is involved in numerous academics networks regarding human rights law. You can find more information about her activities and publications on her personal webpage.

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Jonathan Bloch

Jonathan Bloch studied law at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. He was politically involved in South Africa in the worker and student movement and remains active in human rights circles in the UK. From 2002 until 2014 he chaired the Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust, one of the largest scholarship awarding organisations in South Africa. He was a councillor in the London Borough of Haringey 2002-14. He has co-authored several books on intelligence. He owns and runs a worldwide financial information business across four continents.

Victoria Canning

Victoria Canning is senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. She has spent over a decade working on the rights of women seeking asylum, specifically on support for survivors of sexual violence and torture with NGOs and migrant rights organisations. She recently completed an ESRC Research Leaders Fellowship focussing on harmful practice in asylum systems in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and the gendered implications thereof. Vicky has experience researching in immigration detention in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Denmark’s main deportation centre. She is currently embarking on a study of torture case file datasets with the Danish Institute Against Torture which aims to create a basis from which to better identify and thus respond to sexual torture and sexualised torturous violence with refugee survivors of torture more broadly.

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Nadine was a member of the Statewatch contributors group for a number of years and also previously a trustee. She was a human rights barrister between 1992 and 2015 and an Upper Tribunal Judge from 2015 to 2020. She is now an Honorary Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Bristol and an Associate at Child Circle, a children's rights NGO based in Brussels.

Statewatch

【おすすめ本】小松 由佳＝『シリアの家族』―過酷な日常を生きる一家　自らの苦闘を共に描く高世 仁（ジャーナリスト）

日本ジャーナリストクラブ（JCJ）
15 hours 46 minutes ago
　　開高健ノンフィクション賞を受賞した本書は、一家の運命を通じて、シリア内戦を生きた人々の声を掬い取った、スケールの大きな傑作だ。　写真家の著者が、初めてシリアを訪れたのは2008年。ラクダの放牧で生きる四代70人の大家族の伝統的な暮らしと文化に魅せられ、彼女は繰り返し現地へ通った。　だが2011年、民主化運動とアサド政権による弾圧が、一家の運命を一変させる。政府軍に徴兵された十二男ラドワンは、民衆弾圧を拒んで脱走。民主化運動に加わった兄は、秘密警察に逮捕された。　故郷パルミ..
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