huridocs-tech INTL: Human rights groups are using the Net to fight abuses

Edited/Distributed by HURINet - The Human Rights Information Network
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## author     : onnik@clicks.co.uk
## date       : 03.09.98
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[This article has been excerpted.]

FREE FOR ALL
Human rights groups are using the Net to fight abuses,
says Dan Jellinek

The Guardian, 27 August 1998: 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 will
next week tell an Outlook for Freedom conference in Budapest
...the Web is now widely used to circulate information about
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.

Non governmental organisations, 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, Web sites communicate with expatriate
communities, sympathetic foreign audiences, and...with
internal groups who are able to access the Internet
illegally by dialing out of the country using mobile
telephony.

The New York based group Casa Alianza, for example, has
developed a "rapid response" Web site with information about
police violence against the more than 40 million street
children in Latin America (www.casa-alianza.org).

During the recent riots in Indonesia, Marthoz's own
organisation posted information on its web site
(www.hrw.org) 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...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 Web site
(http://wilbur.wellesley.edu/A-M/dhaya/AWAI/html) provides a
voice to women made invisible by the Taliban government's
severe brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

Marthoz views unnecessary government 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."

The Outlook for Freedom conference is being organised by the
Global Internet Liberty Campaign (www.gilc.org), an
international grouping of more than 40 human rights
organisations, whose own Web site provides a round-up of
worldwide measures to censor the Internet
(www.oneworld.org/index_oc/index.html).

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...all connection to foreign
computer networks from within Ukraine shall take place
through state-controlled systems.

Halmai says...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..




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