huridocs-tech Racist speech versus freedom of speech on Internet

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Title: HUMAN RIGHTS: Racist Speech Finds Course Clear on
Internet

By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb 18 (IPS) - The international community is
preparing for the first world conference against racism,
without yet having come up with formulas to deal with hate
messages on the Internet without compromising freedom of
speech.

That dilemma has been debated for the past several years by
United Nations agencies and civil society forums, such as a
seminar that ended Friday in Geneva, preparatory to next
year's UN World Conference Against Racism and Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, to be
organised in South Africa.

So far the discussion has been largely limited to
industrialised countries, where the overwhelming majority of
Internet users are concentrated.

Swiss expert David Rosenthal said there were an estimated
201 million people on-line in September 1999: 112.4 million
in Canada and the United States, 47.15 million in Europe,
33.61 million in the Asia-Pacific region, 5.29 million in
Latin America, 1.72 million in Africa, and 880,000 in the
Middle East.

The biggest discrepancies have been North-South in nature,
or have arisen between the United States and countries
seeking to clamp down on expressions of racism and hate
speech.

The disagreements emerge from differing national conceptions
on the absolute or relative nature of freedom of expression,
said Swiss official Joel Sambuc.

The discrepancies have stood in the way of an agreement on
even minimal controls over Internet content and
international procedures to put them into practice, said
Sambuc, the vice- president of the Swiss Federal Commission
Against Racism.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson called
on the ''Expert Seminar on Remedies Available to the Victims
of Acts of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and
Related Intolerance and on Good National Practices in this
Field'', which opened Wednesday, to come up with a clear
diagnosis of the newly emerging forms of racism, with a view
to next year's conference in South Africa.

''In this regard, we must note that new forms of
communications technology such as Internet are being used to
support the dissemination of racial hatred,'' said the UN
official.

''Another phenomenon which must receive adequate attention
is the situation of migrants whose numbers are increasing
all the time. The phenomenon of large-scale migration has
often been accompanied'' by expressions of racism and
xenophobia, Robinson added.

The base document presented by the secretariat of the
seminar stated that the use of technical media like the
Internet should be a priority in international aid.

Cooperation between police forces and legal systems is
needed to effectively combat racism beyond national
frontiers, the document added.

But Sambuc pointed out that attempts to clamp down on racism
and hate speech on the Internet ran up against major
hurdles, due to technical aspects and the differing
legislation and policies of each country.

As long as websites exalting hatred and racial supremacy are
allowed to exist in the United States, due to the conception
of freedom of speech based on the first amendment of the US
constitution, punitive action by other nations is
effectively blocked.

''As a consequence, the US has developed into a 'safe haven'
for racists spreading their word worldwide by using the
Internet. Not only people living in the US are taking
advantage of this situation, but also many Internet users
from other countries,'' he pointed out.

Rosenthal cited a US report published in March 1999 which
listed 1,426 known Internet sites promoting ''racism, anti-
Semitism, hate music, neo-Nazis and bomb-making. As of Jul
15, 1999 this number has skyrocketed to over 2,100 sites.''

Given such challenges presented by the Internet, Rosenthal
said he was in favour of ''a new reading'' of international
conventions on the promotion and defence of human rights.

But most non-governmental organisations are opposed to any
interference with the Internet, for fear of censorship by
anti- democratic regimes and the possibility of finding
themselves deprived of a valuable tool for spreading the
word on human rights.

One alternative brought up this week, which has also been
debated by other forums on Internet content, proposes
censoring or self-regulation schemes.

But Rosenthal agreed that any filtering scheme or limitation
of freedom of speech ''inherently carries the risk of being
used in an unconstitutional way or even abused by
anti-democratic regimes around the world for their own
purposes. Under the cloak of combatting racist speech, such
regimes may try to ban other content they find disturbing.''

Nor is self-regulation, touted by neo-liberal ideologues, a
solution, because all it does is transfer the burden of
touchy decisions to industry, he added.

Self-regulation plans, whether of the public or private
sectors, fail to provide safeguards against the abuse of
power, the Swiss expert argued.

One proposal Rosenthal presented at the seminar referred to
limiting access to racist messages by users located outside
the United States through the use of encryption systems.

In some European states, on-line lotteries use such systems
to keep users from other nations from participating in
violation of laws in their own countries.

The ''compromise solution'' suggested by Rosenthal would
''limit racist speech geographically'' by reducing the
spread of racist propaganda to US nationals with free access
to websites.

''It today is technologically possible to block access to
certain websites by international users. Vendors of
encryption technology on the Internet have effectively
practised this: Only people in the US or using US Internet
access infrastructure were able to download software with
strong ecryption, while others were directed to software
with weak encryption,'' he said.

Rosenthal also proposed ''effective content identification,
another compromise strategy (which) could be to persuade the
US government to regulate racist speech in a way to ease its
detection and filtering wherever required. Although the US
government may not outright ban racist speech, it may impose
reasonable restrictions.'' (END/IPS/tra-so/pc/mj/sw/00)





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