Day against Cyber Censorship
The Cyber Censorship logo designed by Reporters Without Borders
Today, March 12th, is the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, another of those international observances.
The day has quite an interesting history in that when it was first proposed by Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International and was first marked as the International Online Free Expression Day in 2008. The idea behind the day was to rally everyone in support of a single Internet without restrictions and accessible to all.
UNESCO, at first, gave their approval to the day but then withdrew its patronage on the day of the event giving as reasons that RWB “published material concerning a number of UNESCO’s Member States, which hadn’t been informed of and could not endorse” … and that “UNESCO’s logo was placed in such a way as to indicate the Organization’s support of the information presented.” So, it’s an International Day of Observance which is no longer officially sanctioned by the United Nations.
Reporters without Borders had already publishing its lists of countries which were Enemies of the Internet and Countries under Surveillance, (the first was started in 2006 when it lsted 13 countries which either indulged a capacity to censor news and/or “systematic repression of internet users” … and the second was added a year later). The two lists are updated annually and countries are moved from one list to another depending upon the assessment of their performance during the year.
So far, Kyrgyzstan hasn’t appeared on either of these lists, although the OpenNet Initiative pointed out in 2010 that “the government has become more sensitive to the Internet’s influence on domestic politics and enacted laws that increase its authority to regulate the sector.” However, some of our neighbours have made it onto these lists: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan … and, of course, China.
It is true that, in the past we have had trouble accessing certain sites – but I am told that is usually the result of their blocked elsewhere, before the information is routed to an internet user who had requested it here in Kyrgyzstan, (for example, in Kazakhstan or Russia from whom bandwidth is purchased by Internet Service Providers – ISPs – here in Kyrgyzstan).
There have been a number of occasions which have received wide publicity where the authorities here have blocked sites … and I’ll mention just two:
There was a case when ISPs were asked to block a number of pornographic sites. The letter containing the request was scanned and posted on the internet and was subject to considerable comment. My personal reaction to this was that it was like “a drop in the ocean …”. There were just a handful of sites and no way that blocking these would have caused much of a problem to anyone who really wanted to access pornography.
I see that a similar debate is currently underway in Britain and the States where different forms of filtering internet content are being considered which would be more likely to catch such content.
The second is the case of the independent news agency, Ferghana.ru, which the parliament insisted should be blocked because of material posted on the site after the events in Osh in June 2010, which were considered to have a detrimental effect on inter ethnic relationships – and which, in the opinion of some of the deputies, amounted to incitement of racial hatred.
Kyrgyzstan has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in Central Asia, (although the figures gathered from different sources vary widely). Some access the internet via PC’s and there are a large number of internet cafes, (especially in the main cities), but apparently a lot of people are able to use their mobile phones.
The market is fairly liberal, with apparently something like 40 different ISPs, although the market is dominated by a just a handful.
As it happens, Kyrgyzstan seems to have a fairly mixed reputation when it comes to Press Freedom … recently improving its ranking by two places, (to 106th … out of 179 countries and territories), in the 2013 Press Freedom Index, (also issued by Reporters without Borders). Other Central Asian countries, in contrast, didn’t fare so well … Tajikistan came in at 123rd – down one place; Kazakhstan fell six places to 160th place; and Uzbekistan at 164th fell seven places.
According to some reports … the government doesn’t really need to censor the press – journalists tend to do it themselves.
I am sometimes asked if I am ever subject to pressure writing these postcards and I have to say that, as yet, I haven’t. Long may that last!
Bishkek