The Internet Under Surveillance
February 24, 2004
Reporters Without Borders
RSF
Conservatives muzzle the Internet during elections
Judge Said Mortazavi signals closure of pro-reformist news web site www.emrooz.ws
Iranian authorities have followed official harassment of pro-reformist newspapers with an attack against online news publications, said Reporters Without Borders, which protested at the latest development.
Judge Said Mortazavi announced on 23 February that he would shortly shut down the pro-reformist web site www.emrooz.ws
Calling for the site to be made available again in Iran, the international press freedom organisation said, "The Internet is now regularly used by Iranians to access independent news, despite controls put in place by the authorities.
"We call on conservative judges to halt their ideological censorship of the net, which has clearly intensified during this electoral period."
Emrooz has been blocked in Iran since the start of the year but remains accessible from abroad. The decision announced by Judge Mortazavi will shortly mean a complete shutdown of the news site, viewed as "damaging to the security" of Iran.
The independent online news site www.gooyaa.com, popular with Iranian Internet-users, was also added to the "black list" at the start of the year. Reporters Without Borders has information that this order has since been lifted.
Weblogs - personal or collective pages in which Internet users make their own comments about the news - are also subjected to censorship by the conservatives. Among the 50 or so bloggers commenting on the Iranian elections are:
http://sobhaneh.com and a collective weblog "news about the boycott" (
http://home.c2i.net/hasanagha/tahrim/tahrimmajles01.htm). The authorities have also stepped up harassment of the news site www.rouydad.ws which has been the target of technical strikes that made it inaccessible for several days. Rouydad.ws has officially been blocked from 18 February onward and may be soon closed down by the authorities.
Finally, the Reporters Without Borders site www.rsf.org (available in Farsi), has recently been added to the list of filtered sites and is therefore now unavailable in Iran.
As the organisation revealed in its previous report on free expression on the Internet (available on www.internet.rsf.org) Iran is very repressive towards the Internet and managers of online publications. Censorship, which is officially said to protect people against immoral content, quickly extended to political news. It is moreover now easier to access pornographic sites on the Internet in Iran than those of censored pro-reformist publications.
According to information obtained by Reporters Without Borders, Iranian delegations are currently in France and Germany with the aim of updating technical means for the Islamic Republic of Iran to control the Internet.
http://www.rsf.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=20Vote count nears end in Iran, conservatives set for easy first round win
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TEHRAN (AFP) - The final results from Iran's disputed parliamentary elections were expected to show an easy first round win for the conservatives in polls that most of their reformists rivals were barred from contesting.
Counting was still going on in the capital Tehran, which returns 30 deputies to the 290-seat Majlis.
But results from two-thirds of the ballots counted showed a likely coalition of hardliners, conservatives and centrists on the cusp of crossing the 146-seat majority mark.
In contrast, reformists have managed to win less than 45 seats.
Some 58 seats will have to be contested in a second round, but with most reformists already eliminated before the polls, the second round of voting is certain to add to a crushing conservative majority.
Friday's voting was overshadowed by the mass blacklisting of reformists by the Guardians Council, a hardline political watchdog that screens candidates for public office and vets laws for their compliance with the constitution and Islamic law.
Iran's foreign ministry on Tuesday angrily hit back at what it said were "unacceptable and interventionist comments" from the United States and European Union (news - web sites) (EU) over the elections.
The foreign critics were "not informed of the realities and the complexities of developments underway in Iran", spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told the state news agency IRNA.
On Monday, the United States said the polls did not meet "international standards" and were "deeply flawed", given the blacklist. And EU foreign ministers called them a "setback for democracy".
Top regime figures here had called on Iranians to vote en masse to deal a blow to the United States, with which Iran has not had diplomatic relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Gholam-Ali Hadad-Adel, head of the conservative Builders of an Islamic Iran -- a right-wing bloc poised to take all of Tehran's seats -- told reporters the EU should avoid making "premature judgements".
Amid the international criticism, a political battle in Iran over the record low voter turnout continued to rage with the interior ministry hitting back at conservatives' allegations it was seeking to discredit their win.
The reformist-run ministry, responsible for organising the polls and overseeing the vote count, put turnout at 28 percent in Tehran and 50.57 percent nationwide -- the lowest for a major election in the 25-year history of the Islamic republic.
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