Since 9am this morning, Wednesday 22 May 2013, the police have been trying to clear the ZAM community center, one of the liveliest in Milan, against the tenacious resistance of MilanoInMovimento activists who have occupied it for the past 3 years.
Several protesters were injured in clashes with police as the barricade was torn down.
Zam.
For Americans the idea of using any and all means to spread ideas is second nature.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution put in writing what had become common place in first the 13 colonies and then the United States. The protection given to freedom of speech and press has expanded as technology changed.
"Press" no longer means just a printed document.
A French freelance reporter has said she was expelled from the city of Gao after reporting on allegations of human rights abuses in a nearby town, according to news reports.
Dorothée Thiénot, who contributes to various French news outlets, published an article on the French daily L’Express on January 20, 2013, that cited claims by anonymous local residents that Malian army soldiers were killing real or perceived Islamist insurgents and their accomplices in Sévaré, a frontline town in the conflict between the government and militants linked to Al-Qaeda.
The article quoted a Malian army officer as denying any knowledge of the allegations.
Thiénot told CPJ in an email that she became the target of intimidation once local army officers became aware of the story. She said two days after an officer publicly threatened to expel her from the country, two soldiers entered her house in Gao and escorted her out of the city without allowing her to collect her belongings from the house. She said she was forced to return to Bamako, the capital.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Lt. Col. Nema Sagara, a senior officer with the Mlian army, accused Thiénot of attempting to “ruin the image of the Malian army” with her reporting.
L’Express issued a press statement condemning Thiénot’s expulsion.
from Committee to Protect Journalists http://cpj.org/2013/05/malian-army-expels-french-journalist-from-gao.php
CIMA announces the release of its most recent report, The New Gatekeepers: Controlling Information in the Internet Age, by veteran journalist and media development trainer Bill Ristow. The report traces how the technological revolution of the past few decades has created a new corporate world of Internet-based companies that have become the new gatekeepers of information.
The technological revolution of the past few decades has opened up a world of information for anyone with a computer, smartphone, tablet, and an Internet connection. And it has created a new corporate world as well: companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago but that have become among the most highly capitalized in the world by creating ways to help us work, play, converse, learn, argue, shop, and do nearly anything else, all online.
In the process, whether by helping us find information, organize it, prioritize it, or share it, in many ways these Internet companies have become the new gatekeepers of information–and their data-parsing algorithms the twenty first century equivalent of the stereotypical editor with the green eyeshade who filtered the news before passing it along to readers. Of course, there are many big differences between that editor and, say, Google, Twitter, or Facebook. But one of the biggest is that these new gatekeepers aren’t just working in a single newsroom in a single city, largely isolated from everyone else.
The Internet companies, though the largest of them are based in the United States, are literally working on the World Wide Web, playing on a global scale and hoping to elbow out their competitors to lock up rich international markets. As they have expanded globally, these pioneering corporations have had to face, and deal with, a tough reality. The Internet that gave them birth espouses all sorts of high-minded principles of open and free expression. But many of the governments in countries that offer tantalizingly large commercial markets not only do not espouse those principles, they actively deny them. And so the computer and software engineers who have taken us out into the world increasingly find themselves having to navigate its thorniest problems, balancing profit against human rights, and thinking about hate speech, censorship, and yes, whether an image of a woman breastfeeding her baby violates a policy against depicting nudity.
As they forge ahead, a growing number of academics, civil-society organizations, and advocacy groups are working to monitor the impact of the new information gatekeepers. They appreciate the challenge these companies face, and laud them for much that they have achieved. But they also argue articulately that more oversight, more transparency, is needed. And they point to the companies’ own principles. Google, for instance, has long been known for an informal motto from its early days, “Don’t be evil.”
Given that, “it’s difficult to do business in a country that doesn’t have that principle,” said Madeline Earp, of Freedom House. When it comes to the thorny issues of free flow of information, she said, “companies themselves cannot be the final arbiters, which they are by default right now.”
Colin Maclay, managing director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, makes a specialty of studying such things. “Can we get the Internet companies to set a standard? Do we know what good behavior looks like?” he wonders. “If we can set global norms about what’s good behavior and what’s not, then we’re hopeful that in some of those challenging markets we can have better outcomes.”
Center for International Media Assistance.
(Washington, DC | April 26, 2013) Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (RFK Center), expresses profound concern for the decision of the United Nations Security Council to renew the mandate of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) without a human rights component. Such action will leave the Sahrawi people without a permanent mechanism that can protect them from ongoing rights violations by Moroccan forces in Western Sahara.
In a press release dated April 12, 2013, the RFK Center applauded the unprecedented United States’ draft resolution calling for a human rights monitoring and reporting mechanism to MINURSO. Such initiative could prevent many of the human rights violations that national and international organizations have reported. In its recently launched report “Nowhere to Turn: the Consequences of the Failure to Monitor Human Rights Violations in Western Sahara and Tindouf Refugee Camps,” the RFK Center details grave human rights violations against the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara, including summary execution, enforced disappearances, torture, and arbitrary arrests, violations to the rights to life, liberty, and integrity. The report highlights violations of the freedoms of expression, association, and assembly committed by Moroccan authorities.
After its September 2012 visit to Morocco and Western Sahara, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture reported that “torture and ill-treatment were used to extract confessions and that protesters were subjected to excessive use of force by Moroccan law enforcement officials, and that members of the Sahrawi population are specifically, but not exclusively, victims of such violations.” The Special Rapporteur cited a “pattern of excessive use of force in repressing demonstrations and in arresting protesters or persons suspected of participating in demonstrations calling for self-determination of the Sahrawi population.” The Special Rapporteur also visited the Laayoune prison and reported receiving “credible testimonies relating to torture and ill treatment including rape, severe beating and isolation up to several weeks, particularly of inmates accused of participating in pro-independence activities.”
The Special Rapporteur and the United Nations Secretary General have called for a permanent human rights protection mechanism for the Sahrawi people. The Special Rapporteur recommended that “the entire region would benefit from a robust regional inter-governmental human rights monitoring mechanism as an important confidence-building measure which can help to improve the situation with respect to human rights observance and particularly with respect to the prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.” In his April 8, 2013 report concerning the question of Western Sahara, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that “[g]iven ongoing reports of human rights violations, the need for independent, impartial, comprehensive and sustained monitoring of the human rights situations in both Western Sahara and the camps becomes ever more pressing.”
“It is appalling that despite the evidence of unquestionable human rights violations against the Sahrawi by Moroccan state agents, the United Nations Security Council overlooked the recommendations of its own Secretary-General and Special Rapporteur and left the Sahrawi defenseless once again,” said Kerry Kennedy, President of the RFK Center.
The RFK Center welcomes the discussion within the Group of Friends—United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and Spain—to incorporate a human rights mandate to MINURSO and encourages that such debate be the basis for continuing discussions. In addition, in order to address the increased concern by the international community with the human rights situation in Western Sahara, the RFK Center calls upon the Security Council to ensure that, based on the current Resolution, the UN mechanisms responsible for the protection of human rights be allowed monthly visits to Western Sahara including, among others: the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the rights to freedom of opinion and expressions, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, the Independent Expert on minority issues, the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and the Working Group on enforced and involuntary disappearances. These discussions and visits should take place this year with an aim to have a permanent United Nations mechanism to effectively monitor and report on the human rights situation in Morocco-controlled Western Sahara and Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, by next year.
“Establishing a mechanism to protect human rights should be an automatic procedure for the UN, particularly in cases that the same UN reports the violations. It is inconceivable that some countries prefer to close their eyes and allow human rights violations to continue. However, even if the Security Council considers a permanent mechanism unnecessary, they can still have more effective supervision under the current Resolution, by facilitating more UN presence in the region.” said Santiago A. Canton, Director of RFK Partners for Human Rights and former Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
