Beating British Censorship
Rankin, Aidan
ON THE LINE Beating British Censorship The Independent Television Commission (ITC), Britain's government-appointed monitor of commercial TV, has decreed that charity is political and cannot be...
...Aidan Rankin (Aidan Rankin works in the campaigns department of Survival International...
...This year...
...The ITC asked British television companies to stop showing an advertisement produced by Survival International, featuring the actor Richard Gere...
...Survival won a breakthrough in July, when the ITC backed down following a concerted media campaign...
...Index on Censorship is awaiting the outcome of its appeal to the High Court, in the hope that the Survival case will help it throw off the muzzle...
...In a one-minute commercial, Gere describes the threats to tribal peoples throughout the world from the "forces of so-called civilization...
...He asks people to help by making donations or becoming members of Survival...
...It was funded without using Survival's money, and met an overwhelming response...
...Despite the British television ban, the ad appeared on TV and in cinemas throughout Europe in one of the biggest cinema charity advertising campaigns ever launched...
...Survival finally demonstrated conclusively that it is a humanitarian organization, and therefore Rule 10 of ITC's draconian code did not apply to the Richard Gere advertisement...
...telephone 71-242-1441...
...e-mail survival@gn...
...Unlike Survival, Amnesty International is not a registered charity...
...Rule 10 has also been invoked by the Radio Authority against Amnesty International and Index on Censorship, Amnesty was less fortunate than Survival—it lost its case at the High Court, but is considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights...
...For more information, contact Survival International, 11-15 Emerald Street, London, England WC1N 3QL...
...As examples, he singles out the Indians of the Amazon Basin, the Buddhist Chakmas of Bangladesh who face genocidal massacres, and the Australian Aborigines...
...apc.org...
...ON THE LINE Beating British Censorship The Independent Television Commission (ITC), Britain's government-appointed monitor of commercial TV, has decreed that charity is political and cannot be seen at home...
...Rule 10 prohibits advertising "by or on behalf of any body whose objects are wholly or mainly of a political nature...
...Survival, the ITC claimed, is a "political" organization because it stands for the rights of tribal people to determine their own future, which sometimes means challenging their governments...
Vol. 59 • September 1995 • No. 9
