“Tunisia, China, and Vietnam all promote electronic communication as a vehicle of modernization,” said Minky Worden, Electronic Media Director of Human Rights Watch.” Yet these governments continue to detain and jail Internet publishers and ordinary web users.”

Examples of cases the Human Rights Watch campaign spotlights include:

• - Zoheir Yahiaoui, a Tunisian cyber-publisher of a satirical online magazine has been detained for two years on fabricated charges of “stealing” Internet services—presumably from the cybercafe where he worked in exchange for online time to edit his webzine—and spreading false information.


• - Huang Qi, founder of a website to publish information on missing family members in China, was arrested after fans began posting opinions on many other social and political issues, including discussions of the Tiananmen crackdown. He has been detained since June 3, 2000.


• - Dr. Nguyen Dan Que, one of Vietnam’s leading democracy activists, was arrested in March 2003, after e-mailing a statement that challenged Vietnam’s claims of respecting freedom of expression, and endorsed U.S. proposals to circumvent Vietnam’s Internet censorship to a relative in the U.S.

“As we have seen in Tunisia, China and Vietnam, even as use of the Internet grows globally, so too do government efforts to stifle public criticism,” said Worden. “Too often new technologies give repressive regimes new tools to monitor individual publishers or users and to block web sites based on content.”