The Council of Europe needs something useful to do. Although the inter-governmental organization of European states frequently makes beautiful statements about the importance of freedom of expression and other human rights, unfortunately, the actions of the CoE too frequently take another direction: censorship.
The Internet Governance Project reported this morning about the CoE’s plans to pass criminal sanctions against unacceptable political and religious speech on the Internet as a protocol to its Cybercrime Convention. According to IGP, the CoE wants websites that are offensive or xenophobic to be considered a dangerous cybercrime. Professor Milton Mueller of IGP succinctly describes why this approach is flawed and won’t work:
"Essentially, the Council proposes a strategy of global censorship to respond to misguided ideas. Instead of refuting these ideas and mobilizing people against them, it wants to forcibly suppress their expression or lock up the people who voice them. The CoE proposals are based on the idea that governments can establish truth, and can legitimately suppress any expression of ideas or theories that dispute or fail to conform to the officially designated truths. This is a method that has no demonstrable record of success, but inevitably brings major chilling effects and spillover restraints on legitimate forms of political expression…."
That is not all. After the WIPO Member States rejected the Broadcast Treaty last year, the European broadcast industry simply took its proposal to an easier forum: the Council of Europe. So now, the CoE has begun talks to pass the very same treaty that WIPO Member States rejected - largely because of its negative impact on free expression and innovation. Read these reports from the European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRi) and IP-Watch and the Council of Europe on CoE’s resuscitation of the Broadcast Treaty.
And at the 2007 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio de Janeiro, a representative from CoE stated that the Council’s position was that ‘intellectual property rights are human rights’. Law Professor William Patry took CoE to task for that lapse of legal judgment on his blog.
Here’s a thought: shouldn’t the Council of Europe be battling against state censorship rather than imposing it? Isn’t that is what human rights organizations actually do?