Tunisia chided over Web censorship

By Victoria Shannon - Business - International Herald Tribune: "The hundreds of Tunisian flags waving across the capital city are like so many miniature red carpets unfurled in welcome for the 10,000 or so people, including scores of heads of state, who have come here to talk about the Internet this week.

Back in 1998, when Tunisia first proposed playing host to the United Nations summit meeting on communications issues, fewer than 5,000 of its residents were online. Today, Internet access in the North African nation has surged to nearly 790,000 out of a population of about 10 million.

The government says that nearly every public school is connected to the Web now, and it has subsidized about 400 low-cost Internet cafés nationwide.

But Human Rights Watch, the New York-based public advocacy group, said in a report Tuesday that the government of President Zine Abidine ben Ali censors hundreds of Web sites, jails online writers for expressing their opinions, and uses police presence to harass and pressure opponents.

Ever since summit meeting officials started gathering here over the weekend, several journalists and representatives of public policy groups have complained of harassment, the breakup of civil meetings or worse.

Like many developing nations, Tunisia's gains in spreading use of the Internet among its citizens are balanced by its desire to control that use, human rights observers say.

Many of the Web sites it has targeted as impolitic, for instance, are widely accessible on the free wireless connections the Tunisian government has provided inside Le Kram, the convention center near the airport where the World Summit on the Information Society officially begins on Wednesday. But at hotels outside the center, they are unreachable.

Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro are some of the press Web sites that have been cut off in Tunisia, according to Eric Goldstein, Human Rights Watch's regional director. Le Monde recently criticized the Tunisian government for its treatment of the press in an editorial.

In its report, called "False Freedom: Online Censorship in the Middle East and North Africa," Human Rights Watch also cited censorship and freedom of expression issues in Egypt and Iran, and said that the Syrian government "tampers with the very fabric of the Internet," restricting the use of basic communications tools that allow people to send e-mails and contact Web sites.

Nouredine Kacem, a first secretary at Tunisia's UN mission in New York, played down the protests about his country's human rights record in an interview with The Associated Press.

"Everywhere you go you have a protest. The people are not happy everywhere," Kacem said. "In Tunisia, we try to make the best of it. We are working very hard in human rights, the economy and so on. We are doing much better than other countries."

Goldstein argued that the summit meeting was an opportunity for the Tunisian government to show off its commitment to freedom of speech and human rights issues. But the incidents this week underscored the difficulty governments like Ben Ali's have in giving up control.


Progress made on Net talks

Delegates trying to hammer out an official document of principles on the future of the Internet made several breakthroughs at the talks Tuesday, including widespread agreement to organize an international forum to take on policy issues like security, stability of the system, cybercrime and spam, the International Herald Tribune reported from Tunis.

But consensus was still out of reach as talks over the language in about 13 paragraphs on Internet governance dragged into the evening.

Without agreement, the World Summit on the Information Society could officially reconvene in Tunis on Wednesday after more than three years of high-level global negotiations with no accord on Internet governance.

Delegates remained divided on the amount of power such a multilateral group would hold, with the United States and its allies like Canada and Australia pushing for a nonbinding advisory group. Others, including Brazil, urged the group to embody more oversight over the workings of the Internet.

The United States now has essential control over how the Internet addressing system is operated through the Commerce Department's oversight of Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, based in California.

Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, was optimistic that the delegates would agree that oversight of his nonprofit agency would be left undecided this week, allowing an "evolutionary approach" to Internet governance and administration."