Wafa Ben Hassine - The Crime of Speech: How Arab Governments Use the Law to Silence Expression Online
Executive Summary: Since the revolts that took the region by storm
in 2010 and 2011, the Arab world continues to face a diverse set of
sociopolitical challenges. Each of the countries studied in this report–Egypt,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia–has responded to the uprisings differently.
Government reactions range from the expansion of rights, to social upheaval, to
civil war.
- Download report (.pdf)
- Download data (.csv): Arrests/Detentions / Anonymous Arrests / People
Additionally, the rise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) poses a
threat to all four countries.
In reaction to
fundamentalist groups often relying on the Internet for propaganda and
recruiting, several governments in the Arab world have passed shortsighted
cyber-crime and counter-terrorism laws – ostensibly to combat these groups on the
digital front. It
is unclear what kind of motivation lies behind these laws; however, as it
stands, national security appears to give lawmakers a convenient excuse to
crack down on rights.
Research has found
that each country’s law enforcement uses a wide range of mechanisms to stifle
dissent. These laws do little to prevent activity by terrorist groups such as
ISIS. Instead, they frequently explicitly criminalize speech that the
government finds threatening to its legitimacy, and are often used to
supplement other totalitarian practices to target and stifle unwanted or
politically critical speech.
In order to better
understand how online speech in particular is targeted, this research tracked
instances of arrest, detention, and imprisonment of individuals for speaking
online under the pretenses of counter-terrorism or fighting cyber-crime. I
tracked cases from 2011 to the present.
I have found that
Saudi Arabia and Jordan rely on counter-terrorism and cyber-crime regulations to
prosecute online activism. Egypt uses a new anti-protest law passed in 2014 and
Tunisia, in contrast, relies on old defamation and anti-drug laws that have
been used for decades prior to the revolution. In all four countries, the
prosecution and imprisonment of Internet users for expressing themselves
effectively chills critical speech and cripples civil discourse–all the while
neglecting to create any long-term and comprehensive solution to the threat of
terrorist movements.
This report hopes to
raise awareness of the human rights abuses that are committed by these
governments in the name of countering acts of terrorism. It also hopes to
galvanize policy-makers to consider alternative measures that prioritize human
rights and the rule of law as fundamental bases of the fight against
terrorism.
Introduction: As individuals concerned with rights in the
Arab world, we often express concern over the possibility of law enforcement
regimes abusing national security rhetoric to clamp down on fundamental rights. However,
researchers do not track which laws are used in furtherance of this rhetoric,
nor do we have solid data on instances of arrest and time served in jails. In
some cases, we lack even the most basic consistent terminology with which to
discuss these laws across regions: for instance, the terms “cybercrime” and
“cyber-terrorism” have very different meanings in the United States than in the
Arab world. In the United States, the term “cybercrime” is used to describe a
number of individual laws whose subject matter ranges from gaining unlawful
access to protected network systems to
fraudulent identity theft and software piracy. In
some countries in the Arab world, laws on cybercrime and counterterrorism are
actually laws against certain types of online speech. My research aims to
demonstrate these differences in understanding and help track how varying
interpretations are used to target rights defenders in the region... read more:
https://www.eff.org/wp/crime-speech-how-arab-governments-use-law-silence-expression-online
