Global Policy Forum

By Patrick Burnett

IIn the days leading up to the official opening of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on Wednesday, the Tunisian authorities blocked plans to hold an alternative civil society forum, harassed human rights activists, confiscated cameras, insulted and beat people, shut down a website and disrupted meetings at the official summit venue.

The fiasco over the human rights attitude of the Tunisian authorities peaked on Tuesday morning, when civil society organisations took the decision to cancel their parallel events in protest and as a show of solidarity with Tunisian civil society who, once the summit shuts down, will continue to bear the brunt of abuses by the Tunisian government. In explaining the decision to cancel events, one civil society activist said: "The Tunisian organisations feel incredibly emotional and they want a show of solidarity. We can show solidarity and draw attention to basic violations which are a contradiction of what the WSIS is trying to achieve." Not all civil society organisations holding events abided by the protest, with some feeling that airing debates about the free flow of information that they had scheduled was more important than remaining silent.

The day before, representatives of international civil society organisations had tried to meet with their Tunisian counterparts in order to organize an unofficial parallel civil society event – a standard occurrence at large international summits designed to give a voice to those who cannot be a part of the official summit. Several attempts to secure a venue for the Citizens Summit on the Information Society had failed because booked venues had been cancelled, even when they had been pre-paid, said R. Jorgenson, co-chair of the WSIS human rights caucus.

The organisations involved had met on Monday to discuss what to do about the difficulty of securing a venue, but security police had prevented the Tunisian representatives from entering the venue where the meeting was taking place, at the Goethe Institute in Tunis. When the international representatives had joined their Tunisian colleagues outside, they were pushed and harassed. "All of us were pretty stressed and frightened," said Jorgenson at a press briefing later, adding that: "We are supposed to be discussing how to empower people and yet we are not allowed to meet people to discuss the issues."

The Association of Progressive Communications (APC) reported on the incident as follows: "Omar Mestiri, Director of the online magazine Kalima (http://www.kalimatunisie.com) and a founder member of the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia (Conseil national pour les libertés en Tunisie - CNLT) was seized as soon as he arrived at the site for the meeting of the coordinating committee of the Citizens' Summit on the Information Society (CSIS). Bombarded with blows and insults, Mr. Mestiri kept calm, before he was able to break away from the group of plainclothes policemen."

The website of the Citizen's Summit on the Information Society was subsequently blocked by Tunisian authorities. Reports also circulated about a blogger having his camera confiscated by security guards after taking pictures during the registration process.

In a brief presentation held before a scheduled panel discussion entitled ‘Human Rights in the Information Society' on Tuesday morning, civil society representatives described events that took place the day before as an attack on the right to assemble and speak freely and the subsequent blocking of the alternative summit website as "the cyber removal of the rights of people".

Earlier reports by the Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG), a coalition of free expression organisations, have repeatedly raised concerns about the imprisonment of individuals related to expression of their opinions, the blocking of websites, restrictions on freedom of association, restrictions on the freedom of movement of human rights defenders and political dissidents together with police surveillance, harassment, intimidation and interception of communications and the use of torture by the security services with impunity.

The group has called on the Tunisian government to release prisoners of conscience, end arbitrary detentions, end harassment and assaults on human rights activists, stop blocking websites, end censorship of books and newspapers, open up the press and broadcasting, respect freedom of movement, assembly and association, and allow independent investigation of alleged cases of torture.

As the summit kicks into gear the host government of Tunisia is showing no signs of recognising the contradictions between their repressive policies on freedom of expression and the essentially free flow of information on the internet. And so while thousands of delegates meet to discuss issues of internet governance and bridging the digital divide, freedom of expression activists that have angered the Tunisian government will remain behind bars.

These include Mohamed Abou, a founding member of the International Association for Solidarity with Political Prisoners and the Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. He is currently serving a three-year prison sentence after publishing an article in February 2005 on the banned web site www.tunnisnews.com, which protested President Ben Ali's invitation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Tunisia. According to a Human Rights Watch report launched Tuesday at the WSIS ‘False Freedom: Online Censorship in the Middle East and North Africa', his wife says that: "When I see him, his clothes are full of the blood of bugs from his mattress."

The Human Rights Watch report also documents the arrest of youths in different parts of the country, accusing them of planning to join jihidist movements and preparing terrorist attacks. "In most cases the convictions were based heavily on the statements given to the police that the defendants later contested – without success – on the grounds that they had been extracted through torture or through threats of torture." But as one of the report's authors noted at the launch, increased repression associated with the internet is not only a Tunisian phenomenon – it is also a trend in the countries of Syria, Egypt and Iran also covered by the report.

The right to association and freedom of expression are basic rights that repressive governments have long tried to quash. What's different is that the internet allows for new forms of organisation and association, so its no surprise that governments will attempt to crack down on this area also. As Charlie Lewis, from the Link Centre at Wits University explains, email and the internet allow new ways of organizing and so a website of an NGO, for example, becomes a way that people associate with and a point around which organisations assemble. One of the ways in which governments violate that right to freedom of expression and association is therefore not only through physical means, but also by blocking websites, for example.

But it is not only the right to freedom of expression that is being directly violated in Tunisia. The information society is fuelling other abuses of human rights that mostly go unrecognized. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, there is evidence that the mining of coltan – used in a wide variety of electronic devices - has fuelled the war that according to some estimates has claimed 1.8 million lives since 1997. Another example can be found in the dumping of defunct computers and other electronic equipment in Africa, which creates an environmental hangover for the continent.

As the summit moves into the rubber stamping stage, the actions of the Tunisian authorities over the last few days have raised awareness about the links between human rights and the information society, and made clear the contradictions of holding an event to discuss how to open up the internet to all in a repressive environment.

UPDATE: Reporters sans frontií¨res (RSF), Paris reports that French international television station TV5 Monde announced the withdrawal of a two-person team in Tunis because it had been "subjected to close surveillance."

"Since 11 November, a 'Libération' journalist has been beaten and stabbed, a crew with the Belgian television station RTBF has been attacked and now, to cap it all, two TV5 ournalists have been harassed," the press freedom organisation said.

At the summit venue, further controversy brewed on Wednesday after five events with a focus on freedom of expression - due to be held at Kram exhibition centre outside Tunis - were apparently placed under a banning order by the Tunisian organising authorities, who viewed the events as not being consistent with the the idea of ICT for development. It's unclear from what level the instructions came. At the time of writing on Thursday morning, it looked like one of the events "Expression under Repression" would take place.