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31 international and national organisations from different countries have already signed EDRI statement on a new Recommendation from the Council of Europe (CoE) failing to uphold freedom of expression in the online environment.
As other related instruments are currently in preparation by the CoE, EDRI calls for NGOs and groups from all over the world to sign up in support of EDRI statement and take further action to help avoid the risk of more damages to freedom of expression and information in the online world. Signatures should preferably be gathered before 28 October 2007, as the next meeting of the CoE expert group having prepared this Recommendation is scheduled on 29-30 October 2007 in Strasbourg and will be attended as an observer by EDRI representative.
In this statement, EDRI expresses its serious concerns over this Recommendation that promotes opaque "self-regulation" and other soft law instruments driven by private interests and implemented through technical mechanisms. EDRI is deeply concerned that such instruments will be used to legitimize subtle means of censorship, through privatised censorship and measures to protect against so-called harmful content.
As the OpenNet Initiative reports through its Internet filtering study, and as numerous filtering cases reported in EDRI newsletter have shown, technical mechanisms are used to remove local content or block access to it when hosted on foreign websites to censor political and social content found objectionable by some. Even when the content is allegedly illegal, filtering is seldom, if at all, operated following a legal order, leading to serious breaches of the rule of law.
In addition to freedom of expression, privacy and access to information and knowledge are other fundamental rights at stake when technical filtering mechanisms are promoted and used. Given the lack of transparency of the filtering tools, no one knows what happens to the personal data of persons tentatively accessing blocked content. Finally, such filters are more and more used on content-sharing platforms, while they are still showing many design failures, including some leading to massive over-blocking of legal and legitimate content.
EDRI considers thus this Recommendation to be damaging and a retrograde step for freedom of expression and freedom of the press in the online world, as well as for other fundamental rights and for the rule of law principle.
First signatories, EDRI statement and background information in 7
languages
http://www.edri.org/coerec200711-signatories
OpenNet Initiative
http://opennet.net/
Selection of filtering cases reports in EDRI-gram
http://www.edri.org/issues/freedom/jurisprudence