Recently, The
Times newspaper published sections of 'Suffering
in Silence', a series of two articles published last year
in Hindu Voice UK, and took a picture of the article's author directly
from our site, without requesting our permission beforehand (view).
As well as totally violating our copyright, they also showed a lack
of courtesy to the article's author, Natasha Jalota, who also was
not contacted beforehand. The following is a response that we have
sent to The Times.
The Times
1 Pennington Street
London E98 1XY
For the attention of: Robert James Thomson, Editor of "The
Times".
cc-ed: Ms Nicola Woolcock
4 March 2007
We write to you to in relation to your article "Muslims accused
of blackmail to make student girls convert" published in The
Times on Saturday 3 March 2007.
While it is commendable that after many years your paper has finally
taken notice of issues facing the Hindu community we wish to draw
your attention to what believe to be a serious breach of professional
conduct on the part of your paper. Specifically you seem to have lifted
quotes directly from a story we published over a year ago in the February
2006 issue of Hindu Voice UK (www.hinduvoice.co.uk/Issues/2/Silence.htm)
without seeking our prior permission to edit and republish these quotes.
You have also taken an image directly from our website and published
it in your newspaper. We believe both of these to be a breach of our
copyright and also a breach in professional conduct and would like
to seek an explanation.
Further, we have spoken to Miss Natasha Jalota, whose story you have
published, and she has confirmed that you neither approached her for
permission to publish her story and her name nor would she have granted
permission for you to discuss her very personal experiences in your
newspaper. Perhaps you do not appreciate the damage you can cause
by inadvertently missing out key details and also trying to warp this
story into something it is not. You also do not seem to appreciate
that it took a long time for Miss Jalota to be able to talk about
what had happened to her and that we have been involved with helping
her and other victims to come to terms with what has happened to them.
You on the other hand have simply come along and exploited her to
quickly publish a story while missing out key details in order to
sell more copies of your paper. The net effect is going to undoubtedly
be that fewer girls will be willing to come forward with their stories.
We very much doubt that you even grasp the dangers of publishing such
a story without the correct context and sensitivity.
On this issue too we would like an explanation from your paper and
details of how you intend to resolve this. This is in addition to
the aforementioned explanation of why you breached our copyright and
did not seek to contact us before publishing this piece.
Yours sincerely,
Rajesh Patel
Editor
Hindu Voice UK