Global Voices Online

Last month, Global Voices launched its Help These Bloggers page, signaling the organization's entry into blogger advocacy. (Find out how to add our advocacy badge to your website here.) Although always part of Global Voices mission, support for jailed bloggers became particularly pressing in the past six months due to the arrests of two bloggers close to the Global Voices community. Global Voices' Northeast Asia Editor, Hao Wu, was detained without charge in China in February. He has still not been granted access to his family or to a lawyer. The second blogger arrested was Alaa Abd el Fatah, co-creator of the Egyptian blog Alaa and Manal's Bit Bucket. Fortunately, this blogger's story ends happily. Alaa's release was announced this week, after six weeks in prison, and he returned home after a horrific night in a police cell.

Nevertheless, as the influence of political bloggers increases so does the persecution they endure from governments who wish to silence all voices of criticism. In fact, 50% of all people arrested for statements made online are blogger. It was in order to learn more about this phenomenon that I visited the international headquarters of Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières), a Paris-based organization dedicated to defending press freedom around the world. I was there to talk to Julien Pain, head of RSF's Internet Freedom Desk. I was interested in how Julien and his colleagues protect bloggers.

RSF was founded in 1985 by four French journalists who wanted to defend imprisoned journalists and protect freedom of the press around the world. The Internet Freedom Desk was a natural outgrowth of this goal. It was founded in 2001 as a direct reaction to the perceived crack-down on media after September 11th. Explained Julien, “Governments used the fight against terrorism as a pretext for controlling the internet and invading privacy. This worried us.” The Internet Freedom Desk at first focused on protecting privacy on the internet. However, when Julien took over the desk in 2003 he changed the focus to advocating on behalf of people who are jailed or persecuted because of what they write online.

In the beginning, bloggers were not the focus. The people most often targeted by authoritarian governments were “cyber dissidents,” traditional political dissidents who “went cyber” and started publishing critical material on the internet. They were not writing in blogs, but rather on traditional websites like Boxun.com, a US-based site advocating for human rights in China. Even in September 2005, when the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber Dissidents was published, it was cyber dissidents and not bloggers who were most often targeted by repressive governments. This was because, according to Julien, political blogging was still in its infancy in most of the world and thus bloggers did not pose much of a threat. Bloggers made up only 7% of all people arrested for statements made online, compared with 50% today.

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