/ 11 September 1998

New voice for the oppressed

Dan Jellinek

People living in some of the world’s most oppressive regimes are using the Internet to engage in civic and political activity, according to a leading international human rights activist.

Jean-Paul Marthoz, of the Brussels- based group Human Rights Watch, last month told an Outlook for Freedom conference in Budapest that the Web is now widely used to circulate information about human rights abuses.

“By jumping over borders, by opening cheap access to information and by providing forums for debate in countries where the media are monopolised, the Internet offers the disenfranchised a chance to participate,” says Marthoz.

NGOs working within and outside countries with oppressive regimes can use the Internet to bypass government control and communicate directly with ordinary citizens. Where governments exert too tight a control over Internet use by their own citizens, as in Vietnam or Burma, websites communicate with expatriate communities, sympathetic foreign audiences, and also with internal groups which are able to access the Internet illegally by dialling out of the country using mobile telephony.

The New York-based group Casa Alianza, for example, has developed a “rapid response” website with information about police violence against the more than 40-million street children in Latin America, .

During the recent riots in Indonesia, Marthoz’s own organisation posted information on its website, , about attacks on ethnic Chinese women, who were a target in the riots as they were perceived to be taking away jobs from Indonesians.

Nigerian journalists also use the Internet to organise campaigns against unlawful arrests and tortures of their colleagues by their country’s harsh regime; while the Afghanistan Women’s Association International website, , provides a voice for women made all but invisible by the Taliban government’s severe brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

Marthoz views unnecessary governmental control of the Net, given its liberating potential, as a violation of human rights. “Regulations to censor the Internet violate the freedom of speech enshrined in democratic constitutions and international law,” he says.

The Outlook for Freedom conference is being organised by the Global Internet Liberty Campaign, , an international grouping of more than 40 human rights organisations, whose own website provides a round-up of worldwide measures to censor the Internet, .

Professor Gabor Halmai, director of the Hungarian Human Rights Centre that is co-hosting the conference, says there are dangers in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union of excessive curbs on Internet use, stemming from these countries’ histories of controlling traditional broadcast media. As an example, Halmai cites a recent edict from the Ukrainian government to protect “state interests in the information sphere”, which ruled that all connections to foreign computer networks from within the Ukraine shall take place through state-controlled systems.

Halmai says that if governments resist their instincts to exert control, the less developed countries of Eastern Europe could benefit economically from being less restrictive than their western neighbours, who are introducing surprisingly tight controls in areas such as the use of encryption.