[huridocs-tech] Cyber-freedom prize for 2006 awarded to Guillermo Fariñas of Cuba

Press release Reports Without Borders 
12 December 2006 

Guillermo Fariñas, "El coco", head of the independent news agency
Cubanacán Press, began a hunger strike in February 2006 to demand the
right for all Cubans to have access to a "fee Internet". The authorities
hospitalised him and put him on a drip to try to end his campaign, which
was widely covered in the international media.

After he had spent several months in intensive care suffering from kidney
and heart problems, the authorities told Guillermo Fariñas he could have
"limited" access to the Internet. He refused, explaining that he could not
honourably exercise his profession as a journalist by looking only at news
and information which had been filtered by the government.

"El coco" only ended his hunger strike on 31 August after a brush with
death and the loss of 15 kilos. He is continuing his work at Cubanacán and
has become one of the leading voices among Cuban opposition journalists.  
He also still keeps the foreign media up to date with human rights
violations in his country and in particular passes on information about
intimidation and harassment of independent reporters.

Cubanacán, founded in 2003, is the leading news agency of the new
generation of Cuban journalists. None of its 17 reporters has the right to
use the Internet or fax to send articles abroad. Their reports are mostly
filed from public telephones. Since telecommunications charges are very
high, the calls are mostly placed by collect.

Internet in Cuba, a network under tight surveillance 

The Cuban government uses a variety of tools to ensure the Internet is not
used to "counter-revolutionary" ends. First of all, private Internet
connections are more or less banned. Cubans wishing to surf the Net or
check their emails have to go to public places such as cybercafés,
universities, youth computer clubs and so on, where it is easier to keep
checks on what they are doing. Then, Cuban police have installed software
at all cybercafés and big hotels which sends out an alert as soon as
"subversive" key words are entered. The government also depends on
self-censorship. In Cuba, one can be sentenced to 20 years in prison for
posting a few "counter-revolutionary" articles on foreign websites and to
five years simply for going online illegally. Few Internet-users dare to
take such a risk to defy state censorship.

The other 2006 nominees in the "Cyber-dissident" category were: 

Habib Saleh, Syria President Bashar al-Assad has made Syria into one of
the worst "black holes" in the Internet. He has set up systematic
filtering of online opposition publications and sent his political police
to mercilessly track down dissidents and independent journalists
expressing themselves online. Writer and businessman Habib Saleh, 59, has
paid the price of this systematic repression. On 29 May 2005, he was
arrested at his office in Tartus, 130 kilometres north of Damascus. He was
sentenced to three years in prison at the end of an unfair trial at which
he was accused of "spreading lies" on the Internet.

Yang Zili, China 

Computer technician Yang Zili was sentenced on 28 May 2003 to eight years
in prison for "subversion". His "crime" was to post articles on his
website lib.126.com, "the garden of Yang Zili's ideas", in which he wrote
about his support for political liberalism, criticised the crackdown on
the spiritual movement Falungong and condemned the economic woes of
China's peasants.

He was only 30 when he and his wife were arrested on 13 March 2001. "It
was like the films about the cultural revolution", his wife, Lu Kun later
said. "They ransacked my apartment and held and questioned me for three
days in the cellars of a police station. It was only when I returned home,
without my husband, that I began to cry."

This is the fourth time that Reporters Without Borders has awarded a 
"cyber-dissident" prize. The previous three years. winners were: 

2003 - Zouhair Yahyaoui, Tunisia 
2004 - Huang Qi, China 
2005 - Massoud Hamid, Syria 







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