World Web Summit Worries Journalists With Good Reason

source: Editor & Publisher

20.Oct.03 - This unsigned editorial appeared in the Oct. 20 issue of Editor and Publisher.

When the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) met last week in Chicago, it wrestled with the many issues that personally concern Latin American newspaper publishers, such as the death threats that are all-too-frequently carried out against their reporters. Yet, again and again, the IAPA meeting returned to an issue that at first blush seems remote from the quotidian concerns of Latin American publishers and editors: the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that convenes in Geneva Dec. 10 to 12.

IAPA officials peppered speeches with warnings about the event, and the group unanimously passed a resolution expressing grave doubts about the intentions of many summit participants.

Why all this fuss about yet another United Nations chat fest? Because Latin American journalists have learned through long and bitter experience that the obtuse blather issued at these international jaw-jaws is often used by their governments back home to justify censoring and closing newspapers and fining or imprisoning journalists. And that, Latin newspapers fear, is what may be in store for them in Geneva.

The summit has the noble purpose of eliminating the so-called "digital divide" between rich and poor nations. But in the preparatory meetings for the summit, numerous governments have used this goal to slip in restrictions on the free flow of information on the Web. Cuba, for instance, has tried to insert language that would encourage government "screening of private media.

The problem is, the WSIS allows 185 UN members a shot at regulating the Internet, and authoritarian nations such as China -- which keeps its Web users inside a Great Firewall -- are not shy about trying to impose their censorious standards on the world at large. It cannot be taken as a good sign that this whole summit process will wind up in 2005 with a declaration and "action plan" issued from Tunisia, where Zouhair Yahyaoui languishes in jail after being arrested and tortured by special Interior Ministry police last year because his news Web site TUNeZINE made fun of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

There is some good news about the WSIS. The United States is taking the position that the Internet must be allowed to operate under the same free press and free speech principles as any other media. And in a high-level preparatory meeting in Paris last week, ministers finally adopted language that's been missing from previous working papers: a declaration that WSIS standards must include press freedom and universal access to news and information.

The enemies of liberty, however, are nothing if not persistent. Like their Latin American counterparts, U.S. newspapers must remain alert to the dangers this summit could impose on world press freedom.