Vi·gnette (vĭn-yĕt')

Monday, January 09, 2006

A Response to Free Press Debate

I am posting this opinion in response to Ben Macintyre’s “Mullahs versus the Bloggers”. This article was published on 23 December 2005 in the The Times, U.K. It was written in the context of the Iran Government’s intolerant stand on bloggers. Infact this was a timely attempt by Ben to cover the current scenario of repression of freedom of speech and expression and closing down of free press in Iran. Ben writes:

With almost all Iran’s reformist newspapers closed down and many editors imprisoned, blogs offer an opportunity for dissent, discussion and dissemination of ideas that is not available in any other forum. There is wistful yearning in many Iranian blogs, and a persistent vein of anger: “I keep a weblog so that I can breath in this suffocating air,” writes one blogger. “I write so as not be lost in despair.” Blogs by Muslim women are particularly moving in their bitter portrayal of life behind the veil.

The Iranian State has done its utmost to smother the nascent Iranian blogosphere. In 2003 the Government began to take direct action against bloggers — more than 20 have been arrested, on charges ranging from “morality violations” to insulting leaders of the Islamic Republic. One blogger was sentenced to 14 years in prison for “spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries”; in October, Omid Sheikhan was sentenced to a year’s jail and 124 lashes for a weblog featuring satirical political cartoons.

See: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1068-1957461,00.html

Iran, may be the major thrust in Ben's article. Free press is a contentious issue in some other countries also and it is a grim fact. According to a recent Press Release of Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF):

In 2005, 63 journalists were killed and more than 1300 were physically attacked or threatened. 807 journalists were arrested and 1006 media outlets were censored. At the dawn of New Year 2006, 126 journalists and 70 cyber dissidents were in jail. Some of countries covered by RSF where Internet is under tight control is Tunisia, Turkeministan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Libya, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Burma and Maldives.

At the outset I should say that it is a relevant article. Blogging is a fine example of media democratization. It becomes an alternative mode of expression in the absence of a Free Press. It is wise to realize the fact that suppression only leads to more expression and that too in varied forms. In an age when we are exploring the benefits of the extra computing power for harnessing growth and eradicating poverty in the developing countries, it is sad to know of Iran's stand on the issue of blogging. Instead let us focus more on how Internet can be used as a powerful tool of development. To draw from the focus of UN Development Programme and Information and Communications Technology (ICT), ‘[it is widely recognized that] Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is a powerful tool for participating in global markets; promoting political accountability; improving the delivery of basic services and [thus] enhancing local development opportunities’. Considering the advancement of newer interventions in information technology, International Organizations like the UNESCO, the ITU, the WTO, WIPO, UNCITRAL, the World Bank and OECD are all considering complex issues affecting freedom of expression and freedom of the press like intellectual property rights and content regulation. The World Summit on the Information Society(WSIS, Geneva 2003- Tunis 2005) provided an opportunity for the international community to reaffirm its commitment to Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Many voices of mankind often result in a policy dialogue and free press is a vital component in the deliberation, dissemination, and discussion of such initiatives. This social, cultural, economic and political dialogue is a feed for the policy makers; the Government. After all the functioning of a free press and the right to freedom of speech and expression is intertwined with development. It strengthens the democratic institutions and UN also affirms that ‘No Democratic Society Can Exist Without A Free Press’. The General Assembly declared an annual observance of World Press Freedom Day (3 May) in 1993, but it affirmed press freedom as far back as 1948, when it proclaimed the right to information in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That article enshrines the individual’s right to freedom of opinion and expression and the free flow of information through any media regardless of frontiers. Therefore Freedom of expression is an inalienable human right, and freedom of the press is an indivisible part and a guarantee of other freedoms. As long as the contents covered by the media are not sacrilegious, unethical or improper, freedom of speech and expression should prevail.

Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) writes:

....The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free State; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publication, and not in freedon from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity.

In a comment contributed to the International Herald Tribune, Joseph Stiglitz who is a Nobel laureate in economics and a Professor at Columbia University and Roumeen Islam, a manager at the World Bank Institute state that Countries [have] to find ways to develop the incentives, policies, education systems, and technical expertise that will allow them to take advantage of the enormous changes brought by the rapid spread of communications and information technologies”.

Therefore is it not a Universal Responsibility of All Nations to return to free press in an age of Internet, Cyberspace, Digital and Satellite technologies?

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