Only in Asia do people go to jail for surfing the Net

Rome (AsiaNews) – The countries that punish the "subversive use" of the Internet with prison are all in Asia. On top of the list is China which jailed 63 cyberdissidents, followed by Vietnam (7), the Maldives (3) and Syria (2). This is what the recently released Internet Under Surveillance 2004, the annual report of Reporters Without Border (RWB), reveals.

Many Asian governments block access to the websites of independent newspapers or those of banned religions or human rights groups. For instance, Saudi authorities have blocked 400,000 web pages in order "to protect citizens from offensive content and content that violates the principles of Islam and the social norms." China is the world's greatest prison for cyberdissidents and can boast having the most highly developed web interception technology. Yet, in Iran censoring independent websites has not stopped the development of the World Wide Web so that today it is the Middle Eastern country with the fastest growing Internet. By contrast, Myanmar and North Korea have adopted a different policy: They restrict Internet access to a tiny minority of users, all members of the regime.

A Chinese cyberdissident was selected to be the RWB's 2004 Cyberfreedom Prize recipient. Huang Qi has been in prison since January 2001 in Chengdu, Sichuan province, charged with "subversion and incitement to overthrow the state power." He had founded www.tianwang.com (since closed by the Chinese authorities) where, on payment, people could post information about missing persons. In 1999, the China Youth Daily had dubbed Huang Qi's site "the most important cyberevent in China," becoming well-known and a favourite of visitors. Many users also posted articles on different subjects like corruption of state officials, rural poverty, pro-democracy activities, Falungong and the Tiananmen massacre. Just before his arrest on June 3, 2000, Huang Qi sent an e-mail message to his readers saying: "Goodbye everyone, the police want to take me away. We've got a long road ahead of us. Thanks to all those helping to further democracy in China."

Whilst in the prison, Huang Qi was regularly beaten by police. (LF)

• china
• internet
• freedom
• of
• expression
• human
• rights