Outgoing Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen got told off last year for sending out tweets from the weekly cabinet meeting. "You go ahead, I'll be a little later because this session is dragging on," he messaged to his Twitter followers who were waiting at a party. His cabinet colleagues were not amused.
A year on, the caretaker foreign minister is still an avid Twitterer with 40,308 followers, and unlike many a celebrity, his tweets are not tapped in by a ghostwriter. It's all his own work. Mr Verhagen's unwavering commitment to unrestricted internet access was manifest on Thursday too when he participated in an international meeting hosted by his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner in Paris.
Internet dissidents
At the conference, France and the Netherlands called for the protection of free speech on the internet and of cyber-dissidents in particular, asking firms that specialise in filtering and jamming information to stop helping repressive countries muzzle their citizens.
"We have to support cyber-dissidents as we've supported political dissidents," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told a few journalists just after the opening in Paris of the first meeting of a "pilot group" formed by some 20 countries, firms and NGOs tasked with defining a framework for free speech on the web.
"The internet must not become an instrument of propaganda, surveillance and censorship" any more than "a vehicle of racial or religious hatred", the French minister added. "This isn't an ideological battle. It's not the West versus the rest of the world," he said.
There must be "a setting out of specific measures so that the internet can be a universal forum", said his Dutch counterpart, Maxime Verhagen. "Iran has blocked websites and social networks" and "this is a human rights violation", he recalled.
Filtering
Set up by France and the Netherlands, the "pilot group" is to work on the creation of an international code of conduct for private firms exporting filtering and jamming technology and on a mechanism to monitor the commitments states make to internet free speech.
A ministerial session has been convened in the Netherlands in October. Asked whether China might be invited, Maxime Verhagen said that could "be useful". "The new technologies enable the authorities to locate dissident voices," he said, with regret.
Representatives of technology groups like French-American Alcatel-Lucent and America's Cisco, Miscrosoft and Google, attended the meeting.
Alcatel, Nokia and Cisco
Secretary-General of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Jean-Francois Julliard said his organization wanted to persuade the firms "not to sell just anything, anyhow" to China, Iran and Burma.
We are very well aware that the equipment sold "enables surveillance and monitoring of cyber-dissidents when the time comes", said the RSF official. This is "the case with Alcatel which sells communications and telephone surveillance equipment to the Burmese government, of Nokia, which sells telecoms equipment to the Iranian authorities and of Cisco which provides routers, modems and encryptors to the authorities in China".
Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi has often condemned supplies by Finland's Nokia and Germany's Siemens of "software that allows surveillance of telephone conversations and email exchanges" to the Tehran regime.
"We've asked ourselves about the responsibility of France Telecom which holds shares in certain operators in Morocco and Tunisia where there isn't complete freedom of distribution of information on the web either," said Jean-Francois Julliard.
"In the United States, Yahoo which buckled to Chinese law and is to blame for the jailing of a young Chinese has made honourable amends by setting up a compensation fund for cyber-dissidents," he added.
The United States is working on "a draft law that would allow US firms no longer to respond to requests for information from repressive governments", he said.
Twexit?
A follow-up conference has been organised in The Hague later this year, Maxime Verhagen tweeted on Thursday, sending his message from aboard the High Speed Train to Amsterdam. Whether he will be there as Foreign Minister is an open question, since it is not clear whether his party will remain in government.
(AFP)
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