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Civil society finds poor welcome in Tunis
Stefania Milan
November 15, 2005

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/tunis/viewstory.asp?idnews=358

A day ahead of the official opening of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) here, civil society representatives are said to be "stressed and frightened" by an escalation of intimidation by the Tunisian authorities.

Most civil society activities planned for Tuesday were cancelled "as a response to the abnormal circumstances in which the Tunis Summit is taking place," Rikke Jorgenses from the Human Rights caucus said.

A correspondent for the French newspaper Libration has already been assaulted in connection with an article on human rights violations in Tunisia, the Tunisia Monitoring Group of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) charged.

On Monday, "human rights advocates and journalists were being harassed and even physically harmed on the streets of Tunis" even as the final preparatory conference was taking place under tight security, civil society representatives wrote in a press statement.

The Citizens Summit on the Information Society (CSIS), a civil society side event to the conference has still been unable to find a place to stage their events.

"We booked several spaces which were repeatedly cancelled for reasons we believe are linked to political pressures from the Tunisian government," Jorgenses said.

When the organizers tried to meet at the Goethe Institute in downtown Tunis on Monday to discuss how to move on, Tunisian representatives were refused access to the locals by people who identified themselves as security guards, the CSIS organisers said.

"The CSIS is not intended to be on Tunisia as such, but on the summit issues," Jorgenses said.

The CSIS is being staged as a side event because some Tunisian NGOs are not recognized by their state, and therefore do not fit the UN criteria for accreditation to the official WSIS conference.

"Any event that may take place outside is not considered a WSIS event, and this is where our responsibility stops. What happened yesterday is not linked to the summit and therefore is outside our scope," International Telecommunication Unions spokeswoman Francine Lambert told IPS in reference to Mondays incidents.

"But the ITU, like the UN, believes in freedom of expression and upholds article 19 of the Human Rights Declaration. Any action that would deprive or limit that freedom of expression is regrettable," she added.

ITU official figures report 9,329 civil society representatives from 597 NGOs accredited to the summit, making civil society the most represented group of the three stakeholders: the others are governments and businesses.

Events cancelled Tuesday include a debate on freedom of expression organized by IFEX and the Community Media Forum. The groups opted instead to protest against the "abuses against journalists and freedom of expression", IFEX said.

"It is not our intention to boycott the summit, but to use all channels to focus the international spotlight on the issue of human rights in Tunisia. We need to keep this in mind after the WSIS closes down," Jorgenses said.

Access to the CSIS website is blocked to ordinary Tunisians; however, it remains accessible from the summit location.

Interfering with its citizens access to the web is not an aberration, says Human Rights Watch, which Tuesday launched a report on online censorship in the Middle East and North Africa.

"The Tunisian government has cited counter-terrorism as justification, but we also found many political websites blocked," said Elijah Zarwan of Human Rights Watch.

To get a better view of internet censorship in Tunisia, the organization attempted to access 1,947 sites in September 2005; it found that 184 of them had been blocked.

Blocked sites included those run by Reporters Without Borders and the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights. More recently, Italian news websites Amisnet and Lettera 22, which launched a campaign for the release of several web surfers jailed for their internet activity, have also been blocked.

As the curtain is raised on the WSIS, it remains unclear whether or not the CSIS will ever take place. CSIS organizers say, however, that they will petition to the United Nations to, in the future, give "careful consideration to hosting events of this nature in countries where the necessary preconditions for people meeting and working together peacefully do not exist".

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