 |
 |
|
|
|
Information
is a powerful commodity. It advances personal growth and
strong decision-making. Informed people can participate
in shaping their own futures. Government officials and
other authorities understand the power of information,
and many of them throughout the world are determined to
sever connections between a nation's people and the
information that they are entitled to have. In scores of countries, governments attempt to prevent people from reading, looking at, listening to, or speaking of anything that does not meet with official approval. Some authorities use vague, sweeping laws to stop the flow of information. Some violently attack ordinary citizens who reject silent obedience, community and labor organizers, political activists, and anyone else perceived as challenging state authorities. The human rights abuses involved in blocking access to information range from stifling free speech to preventing free association to denying the right to due process of the law. The Chinese government has been so relentless in trampling free speech that virtually no political dissidents remained publicly active in the country at the beginning of 1997. In Mexico, challenges to government policies have resulted in death threats, kidnapping, arrest, and sometimes torture. Turkmenistan retains the former Soviet Union's legacy of committing outspoken citizens to psychiatric hospitals. Cuba's penal code prohibits "contempt of authority" and other so-called crimes often amounting to nothing more than peaceful exercise of free expression and free association. Gatherings to exchange information and ideas or to protest government policies provoke harsh repression in Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, and many other countries. Citizens of Kenya must receive government approval for all public gatherings, even weddings and funerals. Teachers around the world have been punished for speaking before student groups, writers have been arrested for meeting with other writers, and participants in public rallies have been brutally beaten by police. In some places, sending a greeting card, drawing a cartoon, making a videotape, or singing a song can result in arrest and harsh punishment. When a Russian environmental researcher wrote an article on nuclear submarine hazards, the government charged him with treason. Authorities intent on keeping news from the general public usually marshal their resources against independent media. Lebanese officials recently gave independent radio and television stations a choice between ceasing to report on political developments or ceasing to broadcast altogether. Government monopolies on media outlets turn news reporting into state propaganda. Sudan closed down its last independent newspaper in 1996. Iraq and Syria are among other countries with no remaining independent media. When Albania's largest daily newspaper offended government officials, they forced it to close by confiscating its delivery trucks. The machinery of censorship also grinds away the right to receive information in Japan, where the Supreme Court recently upheld as permissible the practice of deleting from textbooks references to Japanese World War II atrocities. Under intense public pressure in the United States, the Chrysler Corporation backed off from its insistence in 1997 that magazines carrying Chrysler advertising notify the corporation prior to publication of potentially "provocative or offensive" articles. Some governments, especially in Asia, block public access to the Internet. Anyone who imports, purchases, or uses a modem without government permission in Burma can be jailed for 15 years. Officials in Singapore censor on-line information considered undermining to "public morals, political stability, and religious harmony." Government agents also use an array of tactics to keep journalists from disseminating news. Officials sometimes revoke visas or citizenship, direct violent assaults, order arrests, or hand down long prison sentences as punishment for reporting the news. Russian helicopters have fired on clearly marked press vehicles in the breakaway Chechen Republic. A Turkish journalist covering the funeral of prisoners beaten to death was himself detained and killed with blows to the head and body. Between 1987 and 1997, more than 170 journalists were assassinated in Latin America. More than 50 journalists have been killed during the past six years in Algeria. News about today's abuses of the rights to receive and impart information, in itself, is an indication of individual people's successes in breaking through official information barriers. The information they provide, often at great personal risk, links people worldwide to the power of knowledge. Act Now:Request and Read Act Locally Act Nationally or Internationally Grab a Partner Raise Your Voice |
National Coordinating Committee for
UDHR50. |
|