Almost a year ago, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt declared before the UN Human Rights Council that the “same rights that people have offline … must also be protected online.” This was the underlying theme of a groundbreaking May 2011 report by UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Frank La Rue. The report, which was endorsed by 41 governments, detailed how established human rights principles apply to the internet and made recommendations for putting these principles into practice. After a year of inaction, the time has come for a concerted, collective effort by democratic countries to carry out the recommendations of the La Rue report.
When news broke last month that Swedish telecommunications company TeliaSonera had collaborated with Eurasian dictatorships, it should have come as no surprise. The firm reportedly gave the security services of Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Uzbekistan complete access to their countries' telecom systems, thereby facilitating intercepts of telephone calls and text messages. This collaboration, sadly, fits a pattern.
The progress that sub-Saharan Africa has achieved in building democracy over the past generation is coming undone. After two decades of significant gains, the continent has experienced a steady decline in democracy over the last several years.
Writing on the revolutions of Central Europe in the New York Review of Books two decades ago, scholar Timothy Garton Ash made the observation that “the crucial medium was television. In Europe, at the end of the twentieth century all revolutions are telerevolutions.”
As we mark the first anniversary of the events that led to the Arab Spring, it is worth highlighting the uprisings’ far-reaching repercussions for freedom, both in the region and beyond. Freedom in the World, the report on global freedom issued annually by Freedom House, found more declines than gains worldwide for 2011, but we believe that the overarching message for the year is one of hope and not reversal. At a minimum, we can say that developments in the Middle East touched off the most serious challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism. While the challenges today are far more complex than in 1989, the basic theme of captive peoples seeking freedom after decades of oppression is very much the same.
by Rachel Jacobs Research Analyst, Countries at the Crossroads
Photo Credit: LidandPe-Bangkok
As the waters of Thailand’s monsoon-swollen rivers are finally receding and this year’s unusually devastating floods are declared over across the country, the political landscape is still reeling from the disaster. The months-long crisis and the official response raised a number of questions about the weak points in Thai government institutions. Many reports have assigned blame to individuals or focused on structural factors like corruption and overdevelopment, but the most important issue highlighted by the floods may be the unresolved status of the armed forces. The ambiguity of the military’s constitutional role has enabled its long-standing entanglement in all aspects of political life, including at least 20 coups d’état in the last century.
There is never a dull moment for the media sphere in China, home to the most elaborate censorship apparatus in the world. Drawing on nearly 40 issues of the China Media Bulletin, Freedom House staff have identified the following as the year’s worst and weirdest developments surrounding press and internet freedom in China.
by Mary McGuire and Sarah Trister* The year 2011 will be remembered as one of immense political and social change around the world, particularly the Middle East. On this International Human Rights Day, Freedom House looks back at a few of the best and worst developments of the year with respect to their long-term implications for the global state of human rights.
Perhaps the biggest story to emerge from Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Russia is the central role played by new media. To be sure, the failure of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party to obtain a solid majority in the State Duma, even while cheating, is significant. But the Kremlin-approved parties that profited from the antigovernment protest vote—the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and the faux-opposition A Just Russia party—appear unlikely to stimulate reform. The election results thus reflected deep disillusionment with Putin, but utterly failed to provide a road map to future change.
Vladimir Putin’s foray into the ring to congratulate the winner of a mixed martial arts match the week before last provided ordinary Russians with an extraordinary view of their country’s paramount leader. The live national television broadcast captured emphatic booing by the crowd of 20,000 that was clearly directed at Putin, who has made management of his image a top priority. Things quickly returned to normal, however, at least by the standards of state-dominated mass media in Russia. By the following day, Kremlin-controlled television stations had sanitized their coverage of the event, cleansing it of any heckling aimed at Putin.
In a recent New York Timesopinion piece entitled “To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan,” Paul V. Kane advanced a scheme that he claimed would, among other things, fix the American economy and lead to a new and mutually beneficial relationship with China. The United States, he proposed, should jettison its support for Taiwan—firmly, absolutely, and forever.
In exchange, China would write off the over $1 trillion in U.S. debt it currently holds, which amounts to some 10 percent of the total national debt. Beyond that, Kane asserts that “this savvy negotiating posture” could also convince China “to end its political and economic support for pariah states like Iran, North Korea, and Syria.” Such a deal would extricate U.S. foreign policy from outdated Cold War templates, he contends, and enable doves within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership to gain the upper hand over the hawks by removing the sensitive Taiwan issue from the table.
On November 4, to mark the release of this year’s edition of Countries at the Crossroads, Freedom House and the Atlantic Council hosted a discussion on the prospects for successful democratic transitions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—particularly in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, which were among six MENA countries examined in the new Crossroads report.
The study, which assesses democratic governance in 35 countries around the world, found that despite promising post-uprising openings in areas including freedom of expression and freedom of association in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the task of “rebuilding basic institutions like the justice system, law enforcement agencies, and regulatory frameworks for the media and civil society, all of which have been warped and corrupted by decades of authoritarian rule, will require many years of effort.”
by Charles Dunne Director for Middle East and North Africa Programs
Eight years and a day after President George W. Bush laid out a broad agenda in support of freedom and representative government in the Middle East at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood before the National Democratic Institute (NDI) on November 7 to essay a detailed overview of the Obama administration’s response to the Arab Spring. The secretary’s remarks did much to advance and clarify the administration’s policy. But their historical continuity with the Bush policy was equally striking. Call it the Bush Freedom Agenda 2.0.
by Karin Deutsch Karlekar Project Director, Freedom of the Press
Threats to media freedom inSouth Africa—which has had one of the most open press environments on the continent since the end of apartheid more than 15 years ago—have increased in recent years, raising fears of backsliding in a country seen as a model in the region. These threats have occurred in the context of multiple challenges to democratic consolidation, including recent encroachments on judicial independence and other institutions that provide checks and balances on executive power. In addition, an upsurge of inflammatory rhetoric directed at the white minority, particularly by the faction headed by Julius Malema, president of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, has led to the overt injection of race into various debates on political and socioeconomic issues and resulted in increased self-censorship by non-blacks on a range of issues.
by Sarah Cook Senior Research Analyst, Freedom on the Net *With research assistance provided by Maggie Shum
Since 2005, observers of the Chinese blogosphere have noted the presence of users who are paid to support the authorities in online discussions, often referred to as the “50 Cent Party” for the alleged fee they collect for each posted comment. Several incidents in recent weeks have once again drawn domestic and international attention to this effort by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate public debate. Last month, the Propaganda Department in a small county in Hubei Province accidentally posted online a videoshowing local officials training progovernment internet commentators. The media quickly took interest in the revelation, which stipulated commentators’ duty to guide public opinion in a “constructive” way and engage the internet as “an important battlefield of ideology.” Meanwhile, at a seminar in Beijing at the end of September, the vice minister of public security said that the police should use microblogs as a communication platform to “release correct information and dispel misunderstandings.”
by Paula Schriefer Vice President for Global Programs
It is an increasingly common occurrence for repressive countries with dismal human rights records to put themselves forward as hosts for major international forums—whether in the sphere of sports and entertainment or in politics. Think China, who hosted the last summer Olympics, or Russia, who will host the next winter games, or Kazakhstan, who hosted the last Summit of the OSCE. All are examples of countries whose treatment of both its own citizens and its neighbors belies the spirit of human achievement and international cooperation such venues are intended to foster. The latest addition to this phenomenon is Azerbaijan, an oil-rich country in the South Caucasus region with a particularly dismal record on human rights, which has won its bid to host next year’s annual Internet Governance Forum.
