Blogging for Human Rights: Free Speech

Is free speech a human right?

Google says no.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says yes.

“Yahoo just happens to have transformed this abstract ethical dilemma into real human suffering by helping the government of China identify and imprison four writers and journalists for crimes against the state,” says The Los Angeles Times.

Human vs. Civil Rights

According to philosopher Thomas Paine in the Rights of Man (1791), human or “natural rights” are inherent to every living being — and not contingent upon law.

Keeping with this logic, Internet censorship is a civil rights violation; the government infringes on the civil liberties of its people. And top technology and Internet companies use this argument to justify “offering a product or service that could help any repressive government sustain its regime at the public’s expense,” The Times says.

Censorship becomes a human rights violation when free speech elicits torture, abduction, and/or murder.

Syrian blogger Tariq Baisi is a case in point. “Syrian authorities have held Baiasi, 22, in incommunicado detention since June 2007 for expressing online views that are critical of the government,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

“Even worse, Syrian intelligence has the nasty habit of not telling families where their loved ones are being detained – in effect, disappearing them for periods of time.”

Baisi was held in jail, without trial, for over six months – his whereabouts unknown.

“The UNGA Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance states that enforced disappearance violates the right not to be subjected to torture, and constitutes a grave threat to the right to life.”

On May 11, the State Security Court in Damascus sentenced Baisi to three years for “dwindling the national feeling” and “weakening the national ethos.”