[WSIS CS-Plenary] World Summit on the Information Society - bloggers and cyber-dissidents offer ad

[Andy Carvin]

 Hi Hossein,

Do you know if any of the cyberdissidents are still attending the prepcom,
and if so, are they blogging from here?

thanks,
andy

-------------------------------------------------
Andy Carvin
Program Director
EDC Center for Media & Community
acarvin @ edc . org
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org
http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/
-------------------------------------------------













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      Subject:    [WSIS CS-Plenary] World Summit on the Information Society
- bloggers and cyber-dissidents offer ad
"Hossein Amir" <westasiaregion at hotmail.com>
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02/24/2005 06:53 AM GMT
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International17 February 2005

World Summit on the Information Society - bloggers and cyber-dissidents
offer advice

A preparatory meeting for the World Summit on the Information Society began
on 17 February in Geneva. Reporters Without Borders is there with a
delegation of cyber-dissidents and bloggers in order to put a face to the
repression against Internet users in some of the countries that will be
parading at this conference, and in order to present five recommendations
for online free expression.

The Reporters Without Borders delegation attending the preparatory meeting
:

Zouhair Yahyaoui (Tunisia, the country hosting the second stage of the
WSIS)
was imprisoned from 4 June 2002 to 18 November 2003 for making fun of
President Ben Ali on his website, Tunezine.com. He received the Reporters
Without Borders Cyber-Freedom Prize in June 2003.

Ibrahim Lutfy (Maldives) was arrested in January 2002 for helping to
produce
Sandhaanu, an electronic newsletter about President Gayoom's human rights
violations. He escaped from prison in May 2003 and has since lived in
Switzerland, where he has been granted political asylum.

Cai Chongguo (China), a philosophy professor and political dissident, had
to
flee his country after the Tiananmen Square massacres. He has been given
asylum in France, where he is studying the system of online censorship that
has been introduced in China.

Jay Bakht (Iran) is a founding member of Penlog, a group of Iranian
bloggers. He lives in Britain, where he fights for the release of
imprisoned
bloggers and campaigns against the Iranian government's Internet filtering
policies.


Zouhair Yahyaoui

Ibrahim Lutfy

Cai Chongguo

Jay Bakht



Read the four cyber-dissidents' accounts of their experiences on the site
dedicated to this initiative : www.radionongrata.org

Reporters Without Borders' five recommendations for online free expression

1. Any law about the flow of information online must be anchored in freedom
of expression as defined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of
Human
Rights

2. Internet users alone must decide what material they can and wish to
access online. Automatic filtering of online content, by governments or
private firms, is unacceptable. Filters must only be installed by Internet
users themselves and only on their personal connection. Any policy of
higher-level (national or even local) filtering conflicts with the
principle
of the free flow of information.

3. A decision to shut down a website, even an illegal one, must not in any
circumstances be taken by the site's host or any other technical provider
of
Internet services. Only a judge can ban an online publication. A technical
service provider cannot therefore be held criminally or civilly responsible
for any illegal material posted on a hosted website unless the service
provider refuses to obey a ruling by an impartial and independent court.

4. A government's civil or criminal powers are limited to content hosted on
its territory or specifically aimed at the country's Internet users.

5. The editors of online publications, including bloggers and those running
personal sites, must have the same protection and be shown the same
consideration as professional journalists since, like them, they exercise a
basic freedom, that of freedom of expression.

More details at : www.radionongrata.org

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