For at least three or four centuries now, many philosophers and political theorists have
very clearly demonstrated that freedom of speech and freedom of expression
is at the heart of building substantive equality and democracy.
Without freedom of speech, let's be clear:
There is no democracy.
Freedom of speech is essential to economic development and to gross.
That has been well demonstrated, particularly by the economist Amartya Sen
who has shown very vividly that in countries where there is freedom of the press in particular,
there is no famine, there is no starvation.
Freedom of expression is essential to peace and security.
And I know nowadays we have a tendency to see them in contradiction,
but let me remind you that immediately after World War II
The drafters of the universal declaration of human rights, clearly stated that freedom
of information is basically the touchstone of all the freedoms and shrine
in the Human Rights Project
because all of the man made disasters that have required hatred to be implemented, whether
it's the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the slave trade, the genocide, and now
the sectarian killings in the middle east.
All of those not only require hatred but they also require complete control over
people's expression and sometimes people's conscience.
Unfortunately every global indexes on the state of the world is showing that after
several decades of volatile peace around the world, we're starting to see a clear deterioration of
of the indicators of peacefulness within society.
That is reinforced by the work that press freedom organizations and human rights organizations
are doing, which are highlighting, for close to ten years now, a slow but clear degradation
of the protection of freedom of expression and of freedom of the press.
The internet revolution has brought an unbelievable growth of opportunities
for the expression and the information.
On the other hand, because of these multiplication of opportunities, governments have become
very worried.
As a result, for the last close to five years, we've seen a multiplication of laws being
adopted to control the expression online.
The problem with all of those laws is that they are creating threshold and benchmark
which are not in keeping with the standard that had been established for
the material world.
Governments and parliaments have either increased the number of years of prison punishment or
they've simply changed the threshold of what is acceptable under freedom of expression.
The other problem that is having a very negative impact on freedom of expression is security.
Post 9/11 we've seen the security agenda taking over
not only the United States but internationally.
You could say fair enough, we need to protect security and so on.
Unfortunately two things have happened:
One, as with the rest of the legal restrictions related to the online world,
the restrictions related to the fight against terrorism have often created new threshold.
The second problem is they are completely abused.
Historically, national security and public holders have always been abused by governments,
now they appear to have almost carte blanche to do so.
If you take a very long term view on the protection of freedom of expression there is no doubt that
over a century progress has been made everywhere, including in places where you least expected it,
including in places where freedom of expression was reviled rather than hailed.
So China for instance is one example where at the moment it is a draw back but if you're
looking at the last fifty years, the expansion of the space for freedom of expression
leaves no doubt.
If you look at the history of our world, again you see over and over again, the centrality
of opinion and expression goes beyond my control setting and my historical
setting to the core of my humanity.
I have to say something.
I have to express myself.
So to me it is as universal as it gets.
Subtitles: Tamur Qutab