"Swiss President Samuel Schmid has been censored by Tunisian television for harshly criticising states that muzzle civil liberties," reports NZZ Online.
In his opening speech at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)in Tunis, Schmid said: "It is, quite frankly, unacceptable for the United Nations to continue to include among its members states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticised their government on the internet or in the media."
Index on Censorship records other examples of Tunisian repression, such as:
In the run up the 16-18 November conference Christophe Boltanski, a journalist with the Paris daily Liberation, was tear-gassed, beaten & stabbed in Tunis under the eyes of police who later refused to log his assault. The attack occurred less than 24 hours after Liberation ran Boltanski's story on how plain clothed police had beaten human rights activists in the weeks before WSIS.
A world map marking the 15 'enemies of the Internet' -- "countries that trample on free expression on the Net" and pointedly including Tunisia -- was put up by media rights group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). It was removed by officers in minutes.
In one particularly bizarre incident, plain clothed police physically prevented RSF secretary general Robert Ménard from leaving an Air France plane after landing in Tunis on 17 November. Ménard said he was told that he would not be allowed off the plane since he did not have accreditation for the WSIS. He did.
In Tunis there were the usual moves to wrestle "control of the Internet" from the US. It might be more useful if the UN spent more of its time looking at how so many member countries use it to prevent their citizens getting access to information (China, Iran etc) or want to use it to spy on their own citizens (doesn't that include the UK?). The democratic members of the UN could also worry about how much worse the Internet would be if their colleagues representing repressive dictatorships horse-traded their way into controlling it.
Either way, you can expect dozens more meetings attended by tens of thousands of officials (all enjoying their free food, posh hotels and international travel at the public's expense), producing millions of convoluted words arranged in thousands of tortured sub-sub-sub-sub-paragraphs, all to do something that would be much better done by one bloke acting responsibly. Which it used to be, of course, when the one bloke was Jon Postel.
