Foreign ministers will be meeting later this year in the Netherlands to decide on measures to strengthen freedom of expression on the internet. That is the outcome of a conference on the subject which was held in Paris on 8 July. It was attended by around 75 representatives of governments, business, international organisations and human rights organisations.

The conference, which was opened by Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxime Verhagen and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner, recommended possible measures that could be taken to prevent censorship on the internet.

‘Measures are needed,’ said Mr Verhagen. ‘Authoritarian regimes limit access to the internet, censor its contents, and even use it to persecute people for their opinions. But freedom of expression applies everywhere, including on the internet.’

The conference participants discussed ways of monitoring censorship on the internet, and supporting human rights defenders who make extensive use of internet facilities. They also talked about a code of conduct for companies to limit exports of internet filters.

An initiative group comprising representatives of around 20 countries will meet again in Paris in October to flesh out possible measures and to prepare the ministerial conference.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxime Verhagen gave the following speech at the conference:

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen,

Late this May Bernard Kouchner and I signed a joint French-Dutch statement in Rotterdam about freedom of expression on the internet. We pledged to join forces and establish a pilot group of countries to help protect internet freedom. The pilot group’s first meeting is planned to take place in France after the summer holidays. The Netherlands looks forward to organising the second meeting at the end of 2010. Relevant international and regional organisations, NGOs and of course dot.com companies should also be part of this group. Its objective is to identify specific measures that can help ensure that the internet is and remains a universal, open forum where fundamental freedoms – mainly of course freedom of expression and information – are safeguarded.

I am glad that this meeting in Paris could be held so soon after we issued our statement. The mix of participants here, with representatives of both the public and private sectors, is most important. I would like to sincerely thank Bernard and the other organisers for the speed with which they have organised this meeting. I care deeply about this issue. So I am especially glad that I could be here this morning.

Ronald Reagan once called information ‘the oxygen of the modern age’. He said it ‘seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire’ and ‘wafts across the electrified borders’. When the 40th president of the United States spoke these words, the worldwide web did not even exist. There was no email; there were no text messages. The information revolution that has transformed our daily lives was still in its infancy. Yet even then the power of information was manifest.

Today, 25 years later, the developments Reagan was describing have far outstripped expectations. The ease with which we now provide, find and retrieve information was unimaginable in his time. Thanks to new technologies that are widely available, people around the world can make contact and communicate with and learn from one another. More than 100 million people use Twitter; I’m one of them. I think it’s a fantastic medium: it supplies direct contact, rapid interaction, and immediate, concise information. More than 400 million people around the world are on Facebook, exchanging not only holiday photos but also ideas and opinions.

These new social and other media have an amazing power to mobilise people. They can set positive change in motion. So they can be an exceptionally useful tool for human rights defenders all over the world, who can send their messages to the four corners of the earth and gather support for their cause, from a wide public or from very specific target groups. In this way protracted struggles that disappeared long ago from the headlines can be kept in people’s minds, so that pressure is kept up on governments.

New media are helping globalise the news. Thanks to them, abuses that were once invisible are making headlines. There is a host of examples of mobile phone photos and films of torture and other forms of violence that have been broadcast across the world. This has made it harder to operate in secret; images can be made public from one day to the next. Censorship and exclusion of foreign journalists, which used to be tried and tested tactics, no longer yield the same results; the information gets out anyway. All this constitutes a threat to those who violate human rights.

The new media make a difference not only to rulers but also to their subjects. The fact that people can more easily become aware of their rights makes them more assertive and makes it harder to keep them down. Human rights education through the internet and social media is helping to improve the human rights climate. Thanks to the information revolution, ‘local’ and ‘global’ are no longer two separate realities, but two facets of the same reality. In the 21st century freedom of expression has taken on a new, digital dimension.

Last April the Netherlands held a conference aimed at drawing the attention of human rights defenders to the new media’s potential. There was an extensive exchange of ideas and experiences with a group of human rights defenders from several different countries.

Yet the new media do not always work to the advantage of human rights defenders. The conference last April showed clearly that there are also risks. Authoritarian regimes are making clever use of new technologies to track down and silence dissident voices. Information is being censured; the public is being digitally misinformed; and the traces that people leave behind on the internet are being detected and used against them. In several countries people have been sent to prison for expressing their opinions on the internet. The Iranian internet blockade, taking entire websites and social networks offline in order to disarm protesters, is still fresh in all our memories.

This is a violation of human rights. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is crystal clear: everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. This right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. It is an internationally accepted principle that the free flow of information must not be impeded.

Human rights are at the heart of Dutch foreign policy. Freedom of expression is a priority for us, because it affects so many other rights – not least because it affects people’s ability to publicise the violation of other rights. This is why I think it is vital to reflect on this new arena, in which we must work to safeguard freedom. We must join forces to protect the free flow of information, on the internet as in more traditional media. How we can do so will be the subject of discussions later today.

Work has already begun in various ways. The Netherlands has acquired considerable experience in recent years with supporting projects to promote freedom of expression, particularly on the internet. We are supporting efforts in Belarus, Burma, Iran and other countries aimed at ensuring the greatest possible media diversity. The focuses include scope for a free internet and respect for freedom of speech on the internet. The Netherlands is also working systematically to defend the rights of bloggers and other cyber dissidents who are contending with censorship, persecution or even imprisonment. These Dutch experiences will be presented later this afternoon.

In response to the Iranian elections – a striking example of the role of the new media in information provision – I raised in the European Union the issue of protecting freedom of expression on the internet and defending internet access. The possibility was discussed in the EU of drafting a corporate code of conduct to prevent internet filters from ending up in the hands of the wrong regimes. By the way, I am pleased that companies are increasingly aware of the role they can play in promoting human rights. It is good to see that companies, for example in the US, are themselves taking the initiative to develop codes of conduct. I have proposed in the EU that we either endorse a US code or develop a European variant, so that European companies too send a clear message about the importance of fundamental freedoms such as freedom of expression.

Ladies and gentlemen,

If the internet had existed during the Cold War, the Wall would probably have fallen sooner. Internet and the new media are ensuring that information doesn’t just seep through the walls but rather floods over them. The breeze wafting across the borders has become a hurricane! We need to use its power for good. It is our task to ensure that internet freedom can be used to maximum advantage to combat human rights violations on a global scale.

I wish you all a productive meeting. Thank you."

Comments/Questions? Email netherlands@un.int