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FC: UN frets about 1st Amendment, wants to ban racist US

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 09:15:36 -0500 To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: UN frets about 1st Amendment, wants to ban racist US sites Send reply to: declan@well.com

--- Note:

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

Of course, that requires the cooperation of the U.S. web sites...

More: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=un

-Declan

---

Inter Press Service February 18, 2000, Friday

HEADLINE: HUMAN RIGHTS: RACIST SPEECH FINDS COURSE CLEAR ON INTERNET BYLINE: By Gustavo Capdevila

The international community is preparing for the first world conference against racism, but without a clear plan on how to counter 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 today in Geneva, preparatory to next year's U.N. World Conference Against Racism and Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, to be organized in South Africa.

So far, the discussion has been largely limited to industrialized 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.

U.N. 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 on Feb. 16, 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 U.N. 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 main 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 U.S. constitution, punitive action by other nations is effectively blocked.

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

Rosenthal cited a U.S. 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 July 15, 1999 this number has skyrocketed to over 2,100 sites."

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

But most non-governmental organizations 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 making controversial 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 U.S. 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 practiced this: Only people in the U.S. or using U.S. Internet access infrastructure were able to download software with strong encryption, 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 U.S. government to regulate racist speech in a way to ease its detection and filtering wherever required. Although the U.S. government may not outright ban racist speech, it may impose reasonable restrictions."

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