A little more conversation

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

James Emery | Flickr Creative Commons

Hello, and welcome to the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program blog! For the past few years, Yahoo! has been focused upon how to address the fact that our business increasingly intersects with human rights issues around the world, specifically user privacy and free expression on the Internet. We know that we have a responsibility, like all companies, to act responsibly in the communities in which we operate, and we have taken action, including funding academic fellowships, creating the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund, engaging with governments, and helping to co-found the Global Network Initiative.

You can read more about our initiatives on our website, at humanrights.yahoo.com.

At Yahoo!, we believe that access to information improves lives and advances human rights around the world. We also know that with almost half a billion users around the word, we have an opportunity to raise awareness about free expression and user privacy.  The issues at the intersection of technology and human rights are complex, and we believe that we can only benefit from transparency and an open exchange of ideas with engaged and informed people around the world.

With this blog, we are hoping to start a conversation. Will you join us?

by Ebele Okobi-Harris |  Director, Business & Human Rights Program

Muzzling the messengers

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Simone Ramella

The Economist | October 1, 2009 | Rome

On October 3rd a demonstration will be held in Rome to defend media freedom—not in a remote dictatorship, but in Italy itself. Journalists who have called the protest have good reason to worry. In Freedom House’s 2009 survey of media independence, Italy was downgraded to “partly free” and placed 73rd in a list of 195 countries (only just above Bulgaria). In this respect, at least, Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy is distancing itself from western Europe and becoming more like weaker democracies farther east.

The Rome demonstration was called to protest over writs issued by the prime minister against two left-leaning newspapers. Mr Berlusconi is demanding damages of €1m ($1.5m) from La Repubblica for insisting on answers to ten questions about his private life. And he wants €2m from L’Unita (plus €200,000 apiece from five named journalists) for its articles, including one saying he abused his control of the media. L’Unita might close if it loses.

Mr Berlusconi’s writs seem to be part of a drive to flush out the few remaining rebel enclaves in the Italian media. His reply to talk of a conflict between his media interests and his political role has long been that he is still subject to plenty of criticism. Yes, he controls three of Italy’s seven main terrestrial television channels; another three, operated by the state-owned RAI, answer to a parliament dominated by his supporters; and he or his family own a leading daily, Il Giornale, plus a weekly news magazine and the country’s biggest publishing house. But of Italy’s main dailies, La Repubblica is firmly hostile, whereas Corriere della Sera and La Stampa are intermittently critical. The third RAI channel is run by the centre-left, and RAI’s radio network often provided unfavourable coverage. Even the evening news bulletin of Mr Berlusconi’s flagship channel, Canale 5, has run stories that embarrass him.

Since Mr Berlusconi returned to power last year, however, much has changed. Enrico Mentana, the news anchor long seen as a guarantor of Canale 5’s independence, walked out in April 2008, saying that he no longer felt “at home in a group that seems like an electoral [campaign] committee”. Journalists close to Mr Berlusconi have been appointed to edit RAI’s radio news and the bulletins of its first channel. And RAI has withdrawn legal support from its only real investigative programme.

Notwithstanding such efforts to appease the government, Mr Berlusconi’s allies have just launched an unprecedented assault on RAI, after one of its current-affairs programmes gave airtime to a woman who claims to have been paid to spend the night with the prime minister. Up to now, RAI has been seen as answerable only to a parliamentary committee. But on September 26th the government demanded that its most senior executives attend a meeting to “verify the impartiality” of the programme. A day later, Il Giornale and another newspaper close to the prime minister appealed to readers to stop paying the licence fees on which RAI depends for almost half its income.

Not since Mussolini’s time has an Italian government’s interference with the media been more blatant or alarming. Journalists, and other Italians, have every reason to protest.

The OpenNet Initiative Presents New Findings in Africa

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Future Atlas

by Jillian York

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has released updated reports on Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and new reports on Uganda and Nigeria, where ONI tested for the first time in 2008 and 2009. All four profiles can be accessed at: http://opennet.net/research/regions/ssafrica.

Many governments across sub-Saharan Africa view the Internet as a key tool for development and are developing ICT policies accordingly. While the region has a history of media abuses and restrictions on freedom of the press, ONI testing found evidence of consistent filtering in only one of the countries tested: Ethiopia.

Filtering in Ethiopia was found to be substantial in regard to both political and conflict/security sites. Ethiopian authorities have also blocked two major blogging platforms, Blogger and Nazret, suggesting political bloggers are the prime targets of censure.

Today’s release of new data and analysis follows the ONI’s May 2007 release of its first global survey and the subsequent publication of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008), and joins recently updated reports on China and the Middle East and North Africa. In the coming months, ONI will release additional, updated reports on countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, and Latin America, as well as on North America and on Australia and New Zealand. These reports will provide the analytical basis for a book to be released in early 2010, Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights and Rule in Cyberspace.