[Media Caucus] FW: Press conference WSIS : Reporters Without Borders presents its delegation of cyber-dissidents and bloggers / Conf érence de presse SMSI : Reporters sans frontièresprésente sa délé gation de cyberdissidents et de webloggers

[Tracey Naughton]

PRESS CONFERENCE
Preparatory meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS)

Reporters Without Borders presents its delegation of cyber-dissidents and
bloggers

Thursday, 17 February 2005, 2 p.m.

Charly's Multimedia Check Point

Rue de Fribourg 7 - 1201 Geneva - Switzerland
(10 minutes from the Palais des Nations)

UN member states will meet in Geneva from 18 to 25 February to prepare the
 next World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Reporters Without
 Borders is concerned that the countries that least respect free expression
 are playing a dominant role in the preparation of this conference.
 
 The organization has therefore decided to be represented at Geneva by a
 delegation of Chinese, Iranian, Tunisian and Maldivian cyber-dissidents and
 bloggers so that they can describe the violations of online free expression
 that take place in their countries. "We would like to put a face to the
 repression against Internet users in some of the countries that will be
 parading at the WSIS, " the organization said.
 
 The participants at this press conference will be:
 
 - Zouhair Yahyaoui (Tunisia, the country hosting the second stage of the
 WSIS) was imprisoned from 4 June 2002 to 18 November 2003 for making fun of
 President Ben Ali on his website, Tunezine.com. He received the Reporters
 Without Borders Cyber-Freedom Prize in June 2003.

 - Ibrahim Lutfy (Maldives) was arrested in January 2002 for helping to
 produce Sandhaanu, an electronic newsletter about President Gayoom's human
 rights violations. He escaped from prison in May 2003 and has since lived
 in Switzerland, where he has been granted political asylum.

 - Cai Chongguo (China), a philosophy professor and political dissident, had
 to flee his country after the Tiananmen Square massacres. He has been given
 asylum in France, where he is studying the system of online censorship that
 has been introduced in China.

 - Jay Bakht (Iran) is a founding member of Penlog, a group of Iranian
 bloggers. He lives in Britain, where he fights for the release of
 imprisoned bloggers and campaigns against the Iranian government's Internet
 filtering policies.

 - Julien Pain is the Internet desk officer at Reporters Without Borders.
 - George Gordon-Lennox is the Secretary general of Reporters Without
 Borders' Swiss section and the official representative of the organization
 at the UN.
 
 The press conference will be held in an Internet café so the
 cyber-dissidents can support their presentations with concrete examples of
 censorship.
 
 Please confirm your attendance by contacting:
 internet at rsf.org  or ++ 33 (0) 1 44 83 84 84
 
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