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Last week, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers voted to adopt what they term in bureaucratese: “the Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime.” According to a CoC press release this Protocol requires member states to criminalise the dissemination of allegedly “racist and xenophobic material through computer systems, as well as racist and xenophobic-motivated threat and insult including the denial, gross minimisation, approval or justification of genocide or crimes against humanity, particularly those that occurred during the period 1940-45. It also defines the notion of this category of material and establishes the extent to which its dissemination violates the rights of others and criminalises certain conduct accordingly.”

The scope of this Protocol is defined self-contradictorily as :

- to harmonise substantive criminal law in the fight against racism and xenophobia on the Internet,
- to improve international co-operation in this area, while respecting the right to freedom of expression enshrined, more than 50 years ago, in the European Convention on Human Rights.

You can’t have it both ways. Speech is either free or it isn’t, and if “freedom of expression” is to have any substantive meaning at all, it must include protection of expression that is racist and xenophobic.

The CoC’s speech-policing “protocol” is a hideously dangerous piece of legislation, however well-intended to politically correct sort of addled thinking. (Countries who support the amendment will then need to ratify it in their national legislatures before making it law, so there is still some faint hope that it won’t be widely adopted). The notion of qualified free speech is an oxymoron. Rationalistic fudges like “responsible speech” will not do. Once you introduce the notion of “responsible speech,” the question is begged: “responsible to whom?” Obviously in this instance to the commissars of political correctness. These people are ideological fascists. What’s next? Forced “re-education?”

One of the bulwarks of free society is free speech, and one surefire characteristic signalizing totalitarianism is the suppression of free speech. Qualified freedom is not freedom at all. It is seductively easy, especially in an era in which the notion of absolutes has become unfashionable, to fall prey to the unfounded notion that “freedoms” can be qualified to exclude things one disagrees with and/or finds offensive. That view may be emotionally and ideologically attractive, but qualified freedom is not freedom at all. You cannot set up qualifications on “freedom” without also setting up Star Chambers to arbitrarily decide what is “offensive” and what is not.

The chill that legislation like this execrable CoE protocol imposes fosters an ethos of ‘prior restraint’ self-censorship by commentators and media, an inclination to err on the safe side by blocking out certain kinds of opinion and information in order to stay out of potential legal trouble. Anything even remotely controversial begins to get purged before it ever appears in public forums.

As the prescient Goerge Orwell prophesied: “The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects now existed for the first time.”

About a decade ago, Jonathan Rauch, now a columnist for The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a book that I wish was required reading in every high school. It was entitled “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks On Free Thought” (© 1993; U. Of Chicago Press), and it is one of the most concise and to the point denunciations of politically correct notions and speech policing that I have encountered. Rauch writes:

Jonathan Rauch, by the way, is Jewish and a self-proclaimed homosexual, not that those things should matter in this context, but in a PC-beleaguered world they are significant. I also somewhat wearily want to emphasize here tat defense of free speech for everybody does not constitute or imply sympathy with or approval of racist, xenophobic, or other repugnant forms of expression -- only that all voices must have the right to be heard, regardless of how offensive they my be.

An excellent deconstruction of the CoE protocol by The Register’s Thomas C Greene notes that the protocol’s so-called ‘racist and xenophobic material’ would apply to any controversial Web-site, or even a mean-spirited posting to a BBS or an e-mail newsletter.

I encourage you to read Greene’s excellent commentary in its entirety here:
http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/28033.html

Wired’s Julia Scheeres notes that many European countries have existing laws outlawing Internet racism, which is generally protected as free speech in the United States.

Scheeres reports that “Spain recently passed legislation authorizing judges to shut down Spanish sites and block access to U.S. Web pages that don’t comply with national laws,” and quotes a Spanish cyber-crime expert who allows:

But is America a staunch bastion of protected free speech?

A U.S. survey released in 2000 by the New York-based First Amendment Center revealed that even in avowedly freedom-loving America, the civil freedom ethic is being eroded to an alarming degree. The poll found that:

• 37% of Americans polled couldn’t name a single freedom guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (such as freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, to assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances)

• 51% said the press in America has “too much freedom to do what it wants.”

• 20% thought the government should be allowed to approve what newspapers publish.

• 36% would support a law that banned “public remarks offensive to racial groups.”

• 31% said a group should not be able to hold a rally if its cause is “offensive” to some in the community.

• 58% thought the government should restrict sexually explicit Internet content.

The indication was that roughly 40% of Americans have been gulled into thinking that politically correct expression-policing is a good thing. What these earnest (and mostly well intended within their own impoverished philosophical understanding) would-be inquisitors fail to grasp is the objective truth that without the freedom to offend, freedoms of speech, and expression cease to exist.

A Web-published paper by Human Rights Watch entitled SILENCING THE NET: The Threat to Freedom of Expression On-line notes that:

The question that must be addressed is whether the freedom to freely express one’s opinions without fear of censorship or reprisal merits the cost of tolerating the expression of opinions that one finds objectionable. In my considered opinion, the freedom is worth the price, and the costs of censorship are far too high.

The Internet has been one of the few free and democratic information mediums on the planet. Freedom inevitably makes the forces of repression and tyranny nervous. Whether they march under the banner of human rights, political correctness, moral virtue, or whatever, these people want to be in control. They aren’t always evil or ill-intentioned, but they are woefully and dangerously mistaken. Censorship with a humanitarian face is still censorship. You could be the next one the kindly inquisitioners decide to silence. Be vigilant.

Charles W. Moore

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