MEMBERS OF EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT URGED TO SUPPORT GLOBAL ONLINE FREEDOM ACT 'S EUROPEAN VERSION

Press release Reporters Without Borders
16 July 2008
Reporters Without Borders is backing a proposed directive which Dutch MEP Jules Maaten will submit to the European Parliament on 17 July and which would prevent Europe's internet companies from being forced to cooperate with repressive regimes in censoring and monitoring the internet.Inspired by America's proposed Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), it would allow these companies to adopt a series of joint measures to resist such governments.
"We support this proposal and urge all Members of the European Parliament to support it too," Reporters Without Borders said. "Online freedom is not just threatened by Yahoo's cooperation with the Chinese authorities. Some European companies are also the accomplices of online censors.'
Telecom Italia, for example, owns part of the Cuban telecommunications company ETECSA, the only ISP available in Cuba. The French ISP Orange is involved in China, Vietnam and Egypt, which are all on the Reporters Without Borders list of "Internet Enemies." The German company KCC Europe supplies North Korea with internet access under an exclusive partnership signed in 2004.
Proposed by Maaten, a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, the directive urges European companies to assume their "responsibility to uphold the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and requires them, inter alia, to locate their servers outside repressive countries.
"Internet companies say they have to comply with the laws in the countries with which they have agreements because their servers are located inside these countries," Reporters Without Borders said. "But these laws very often violate international treaties that guarantee free expression. The European GOFA offers an alternative to such constraints, which are often a way for repressive government to obtain private data about these companies' clients and have them arrested."
The GOFA, which was proposed by Republican representative Christopher Smith and enjoys bipartisan support, has been approved by the House of Representatives foreifn affairs committee and, as the energy and commerce committee waived its right to examine the bill, it now only awaits approval by the full house.
The GOFA was inspired in part by the example of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which the US Congress adopted in 1977 with the aim stopping US companies from bribing corrupt officials in other countries and which had greater impact after the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development adopted a similar anti-bribery convention in 1988.
This European version of the GOFA aims to forestall online censorship possibilities and to regulate the potentially repressive activities of European internet companies. It would open the way for the creation of an Office of Global Internet Freedom with the job of compatting online censorship by the most repressive governments and protecting the personal data of internet users.

Learn more about this topic:Freedom of Expression.
HREA:www.hrea.org
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MINORITIES AND MINORITY RIGHTS

There is broad agreement on the main parameters in the identification of minorities, even if it has not been possible to achieve complete consensus at the international level on a definition of the term. Applying these parameters is a matter of observation of objective criteria and common sense.Some governments claim the right to determine who is and who is not a minority, a claim rejected by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the body that monitors implementation of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights(ICCPR). A useful working definition has been offered:" A minority is a population group with ethnic, religious and linguistic characteristics differing from the rest of the population, which is non-dominant, numerically smaller than the rest of the population and has the wish to hold on to its separate identity.
Many communities do not commonly use the term "minority",this is also the case in Sudan.It is important in this situation to identify which communities regard themselves as having a separate identity, and what their issues are. In Sudan, all communities are numerically minorities.The crucial issue is the element of dominance, for example the Dinka occupy most positions of political power in the South, but the Nuer occupy most of the oil-bearing land. In addition, a group may be powerful in one region but weak in another.
In dealing with a community, humanitarian actors should use the term that clearly has the widest acceptance-if one exists.But this in no way undermines the usefulness of minority rights as a conceptual framework for understanding grievances, power relationships, and patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and designing interventions accordingly.
Furthermore the minority and indigenous concepts are those that are used in international human rights law,although the minority rights framework does not demand that a person accept the label to enjoy the rights.
The basic elements of minority rights are laid out in Article 27 of the ICCPR, and further developed in the Declaration on the Rights of National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities(UNDM), which was adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly in 1992.
It is useful to present minority rights in the form of four pillars:
1.The right to exist:like everyone, minorities benefit from the right to life.
2.The right to non- discrimination: protecting minorities from direct or indirect discrimination on the basis of ethnic, religious, linguistic or cultural identity.
3.The right to protection of identity: preserving the freedom of minorities to practise their culture, religion and language in the public and private spheres, and taking measures to enable minorities to develop their culture, religion or language.
4.The right to participation in public affairs: ensuring that minorities can participate in decision-making that affects them and can form their own associations freely.

Website:www.minorityrights.org
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