Human Rights Organizations Worldwide Decry Attacks on Freedom (Wikileaks)

[EFerrari]

Human Rights Organizations Worldwide Decry Attacks on Freedom of Expression
Call To Action by Katitza Rodriguez

It has been almost two weeks since cablegate.wikileaks.org, the website hosting leaked US diplomatic cables, was taken down, and the right of Wikileaks to publish truthful information was immediately besieged. Since then, human rights organizations around the world have condemned the attacks on WikiLeaks and have raised their voices to protect freedom of expression online.

EFF has noted that Wikileaks has suffered as a result of corporate policies that suppress free expression on matters of intense public importance. In such cases, readers lose their right to read the information that Wikileaks published, and online publishers lose trust in those companies that have demonstrated a willingness to bow to political pressure to remove unpopular or controversial content. EFF has also launched the Say No to Online Censorship campaign, drawing public attention to the fact that shutting down publishers like Wikileaks is a very serious attack on freedom of expression.

To help illustrate what human rights and other organizations are saying internationally, we have highlighted some excerpts from their own institutional statements over this David-Goliath style battle.

International human rights law recognizes freedom of expression

• On December 10, International Human Rights Day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights addressed this issue in her statement: “While it is unclear whether these individual measures taken by private actors directly infringe on states' human rights obligations to ensure respect of the right to freedom of expression, taken as a whole they could be interpreted as an attempt to censure the publication of information thus potentially violating Wikileaks' right to freedom of expression.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/human-rights-organizations-freedom-expression

[EFerrari]

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[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. We're losing freedom to save the big-shots from embarrassment. What a deal. K&R