The debate over the direction of the web has just started, and contradictory messages that need careful scrutiny are emerging from governments and corporations alike, says Kirsty Hughes
This article was originally published on Open Democracy, as a part of a week-long series on the future digital freedom guest-edited by Index
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If there was ever any doubt that the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was the wrong body to run the internet, you only needed to look at its handling of its own World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT), which ended today in Dubai in a little resolution but a lot of dispute.
With the conference centre doors closing and the delegates sent packing Friday evening, it’s still not clear where all the 174 countries represented at Dubai actually stand on the WCIT review of the ITU’s International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), a de facto treaty facilitating telecommunications between the states. (There’s an updating chart here — http://www.ipv.sx/wcit/).
The core dispute is over the ITU’s current and future role in the governance of the internet. The United States, United Kingdom and Sweden were among the 55 states who have so far either refused to sign the new accord or have “reservations” — meaning that they will opt out of the bits they don’t like. Eighty-nine countries signed. Index on Censorship remains concerned by this incomplete resolution. The threat of extended government influence over the internet remains.
When the existing accord was signed 24 years ago the internet was a technical concept, not the global change maker it is today. The ITU wanted to bring the ITRs into the 21st Century by bringing the internet into its ambit. This became the UN “plot” to take over the internet of popular outrage.
But going on their performance up to today in Dubai, the ITU makes for a pretty forlorn bunch of conspirators. It is by nature a very technically minded body — facilitating “global interconnection and interoperability of information and communication services”.
Criticised by civil society for the lack of transparency, openness, and public consultations that marked its work, the ITU came up with a public access policy on the hoof. Documents (already widely leaked) were formally released and public submissions solicited at short notice (then filed and ignored).
The free expression organisations that attended, including Index on Censorship, got more access than expected to the key drafting plenaries. Some NGO delegates were signed up by states as members of their national delegation, giving them even more access to the back and forth behind the scenes.
What they saw behind the curtain was not pretty. Unused to discussing such issues in a public forum, its national delegates battered by often contradictory instructions from their capitals, struggling with the sheer pace of text revisions, the entire process reduced to low comedy on the penultimate day.
The ITU leadership attempted to find a compromise by filleting some text from a document agreed in Tunis in 2005, passing it off as a non-binding resolution to “foster the development and growth of the internet” and approving it by a weird call for a non-vote, a call to test the “temperature” of opinion about it. Nobody knew what it was if not a vote — it certainly looked like one — but the Tunis fillet went into the final papers regardless. Cue global outrage and statements of disappointment.
The main problem in all this has its roots in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis in 2005 and the “Tunis Agenda”. That proposed the creation of an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) for a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue on Internet issues.
Thereafter the ITU should have been a “mere” stakeholder in the process along with all the other stakeholders — not the focal point for government-led internet governance that many of its more authoritarian nation members wanted it to be. But the Tunis Agenda promised much more of a role for all the myriad stakeholders — private, public and individual — that the IGF has delivered. With the WSIS process up for review itself this shortcoming will not go away.
Civil society groups working across the Dubai conference, once in, used the internet itself to coordinate information from the different plenaries. With some delegations so confused by the process that they were sometimes working from superseded drafts, sometimes the independent observers clearly had a better understanding of the unfolding arguments.
This grasp of the business gave them even greater credibility among the official delegations. But it didn’t and doesn’t pass for actual engagement. Recognition of the multi-stakeholder approach is urgently needed.
The treaty is scheduled to go into force in January 2015, with the WSIS review, another IGF gathering and the World Telecommunication/Information and Communication Technology Policy Forum (WTPF) to run before it. Plenty more damage could be done there and then.
Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor and Deputy Chief Executive of Index on Censorship
Index and many other civil society organisations that fight for free speech and internet freedom oppose moves to give the ITU authority over the internet. Join more than 33,000 other citizens from 166 nations and sign here to ask your nation’s leaders to protect global internet freedom
If you are an academic or work for a civil society organisation — join us by signing on here and send the letter to government officials who are participating in the ITU process
Maher El Gohary is a broken and defeated man who has grown tired of life on the run. After a four-year battle to have the Egyptian state recognise his Christian faith, he is seriously contemplating reverting to Islam.
“I am seen as an outcast and have lost everything: my family, my home, my dignity and my inheritance,” he laments.
Maher El-Gohary and daughter Dina in hiding during 2010 (Photo: Compass)
For Maher and his daughter Dina, life has become “practically intolerable”. A former Muslim who converted to Christianity 30 years ago, Maher publicly announced their change of faith in 2008 when he filed a lawsuit against the Mubarak government hoping to gain the right to change the religious status on his national identification card from Islam to Christianity. He was only the second citizen to attempt to get the state to recognise his changed faith.
The change would have allowed Dina to receive a Christian religious education. But public declaration of faith-change from Islam — apostasy — is taboo in conservative Muslim-majority Egypt and Maher and Dina (who was 14 at the time) were forced to go into hiding after receiving death threats from extremists.
To this day, Maher has not won the right to officially convert. He and Dina have faced violence, humiliation and hostility for his effort. In Alexandria on Friday, Maher told Index:
We’ve been spat at, cursed and assaulted on the street many times and have been snubbed by all our relatives, neighbours and friends
In a 2009 hearing of his case, opposing lawyers urged the judge to convict him of apostasy and sentence him to death. They argued that Islam was “the highest ranking religion so followers of the faith could not convert to a lesser or inferior religion”. One lawyer claimed that cases like Maher’s were part of a Zionist conspiracy against Islam, warning that Copts (Egypt’s Christians) who protect and defend converts from Islam were doing so “at their own risk”. Maher got little support from within the Coptic community who fear retaliation. In order to get a baptismal certificate —required for official proof of conversion — Maher had to travel to Cyprus.
When I first met Maher and Dina in Abu Kir (a village on the Mediterranean Coast of Egypt) in 2010, they were living as fugitives. They’d spent the previous two years moving into a different apartment at least once a month to throw extremists and police off their trail. Then their goal was to flee the country to settle in “a more tolerant society” where they would be allowed to practise their religion freely and without fear.
Maher felt he had no choice but to seek political asylum abroad. It wasn’t an easy decision but he feared for their safety. “A man threw acid at Dina and she miraculously escaped physical harm. We also faced systemic prejudice on a daily basis and spent several days in detention after being arrested in Port Saeed,” Maher recalled.
Maher’s two brothers, who both worked for Egypt’s notorious State Security Service, also made sure he remained unemployed by threatening and intimidating anyone who hired him. In 2009, Maher and Dina attempted to leave Egypt for China, but Egyptian authorities prevented them from travelling. An hour before their scheduled departure, airport security officers confiscated their passports and notified the pair that they were “barred from travelling on orders from a higher authority”.
When Egypt’s January 2011 uprising broke out, Maher and Dina joined the protesters in Tahrir Square, hoping that the revolt would usher in greater freedoms and justice for all Egyptians.
Dina and I had long suffered state persecution for our beliefs. It was only natural that we would be among those revolting against the brutal regime.
Maher’s eyes swelled with tears as he spoke of the hope and promise the revolution had brought. Their hopes have been dashed.
Less than two weeks after Mubarak was toppled, Maher and Dina boarded a Damascus-bound plane and left Egypt. They chose to go to Syria as Egyptians require no visa to enter the country. After spending two-and-a-half years in hiding, they were finally free and wept with joy as the plane took off. “The revolution was nothing short of a miracle,” said Maher, adding, “for us in particular, it was a blessing.”
He and Dina were soon to discover that life as refugees in a foreign land was no easier than their lives as fugitives. With the help of United Nations, after two months in Syria, they were granted political asylum in Sweden. But unable to speak the language and unaccustomed to the cold, Maher and his daughter felt as alienated as they had felt in Egypt — albeit without the fear. They began to feel terribly homesick.
“Orthodox clerics we encountered were neither hospitable nor accommodating,” Maher lamented. “Their antagonism added to our feelings of estrangement.” After failing to adapt to the new environment, Maher and Dina took the bold decision to return to Egypt to face an uncertain fate.
Nearly two years after the revolution, Egypt’s Christians fear things may be worse for them in the “new Egypt” than they were under the Mubarak regime. The Islamists’ rise to power — and a new constitution currently being written by an Islamist-dominated constituent panel — has fuelled Christians’ concerns that their safety may be compromised and their freedom restricted under Islamist rule.
Under Mubarak, Egypt’s constitution ostensibly provided for freedom of belief and the practice of religious rites. But the regime placed heavy restrictions on these rights. Christians (who make up an estimated 12 to 15 per cent of the population) and members of the Bahá’í Faith (not recognised by the state ) complained of discrimination, especially in government employment. Christians were unable to build or renovate churches without a presidential decree and, according to the 2011 US State Department’s International Report on Religious Freedoms, the government arrested, detained and harassed converts to Christianity, alleging they jeopardised communal harmony.
9 October 2011. A funeral for one of the 27 Coptic protesters killed in the Maspero massacre (Demotix)
Despite promises by Islamist President Mohamed Morsi for a new “inclusive Egypt” where all citizens enjoy equal rights, Egyptian Christians or Copts have suffered a wave of sectarian violence. This has included the torching of churches and a brutal military assault on Coptic protesters at Maspero in October 2011, resulting in the deaths of 27 civilians. This year threats from Islamic extremists that have caused mass evacuations from several Egyptian villages and towns (the latest being the North Sinai border town of Rafah in September). According to a report by the Egyptian Federation of Human Rights, 93,000 Copts fled Egypt fearing for their safety in the six months after March 2011. The new draft constitution does not bode well for religious freedom and minority beliefs.
The ultra-conservative Salafis are calling for the new constitution to make the “rulings of Sharia Law” the foundation of Egypt’s legislative framework. This stricter interpretation of Sharia Law will further alienate Egypt’s minority Christians, who have long suffered marginalisation and exclusion. Furthermore, the new draft only recognises “the three Abrahamic faiths”. Adherents to non-Abrahamic faiths, such as the estimated 2,000 followers of the Bahai’i faith, are not mentioned and therefore may be denied the right to practise or build places of worship. Moreover, anti-blasphemy laws stipulated in articles 38 and 40 of the draft prohibit “the defamation of messengers and prophets”, failing to specifically define what is meant by “defamation”.
This is the Egypt that Maher and Dina have returned to after spending nearly two years as refugees outside their country.
Traumatised and confused by the experiences of the last four years, father and daughter say they are resigning themselves to what may come. They realise that the tide of conservatism sweeping Egypt may result in an even more antagonistic environment for Christians, particularly for converts from Islam. Dina has already reconverted to Islam and Maher has lost his fighting spirit.
“I’m utterly exhausted and drained,” Maher said, his voice choked with emotion. “I have no more energy to fight.”
Shahira Amin is an Egyptian journalist and broadcaster
The third ever Belgrade Pride parade took place last Saturday behind closed doors in the city’s Media Centre, due to a last minute ban imposed by authorities. The move attracted widespread international criticism as a violation Serbian citizens’ constitutional right to freedom of expression.
Last Wednesday, only three days before the long-planned march through the city, Prime Minister Ivica Dačić announced a blanket ban on all public gatherings set for 6 October, citing “security concerns“.
“Pride parades are a litmus test for freedom and human rights adherence in Europe”, said Swedish Minister for EU Affairs, Birgitta Ohlsson — heavily implying is was a test Serbia had failed. She was due to deliver the keynote speech at the parade during her state visit to the country.