Amnesty International: Free Speech & The Internet

In May 2006, a year after the death of the organization’s celebrated founder Peter Benenson, Amnesty International UK launched their Irrepressible campaign - a campaign combining Amnesty’s dedication to free speech with their anti-net censorship message. That’s right….while the letter writing campaigns will always be a feature of Amnesty’s campaigning, they are moving to the internets!

As part of the Irrepressible campaign, Amnesty held a conference yesterday featuring American freelancer and formerly imprisoned journalist Josh Wolf and the Observer’s Kamal Ahmed to speak on corporate compliance, wrongful imprisonment, net neutrality, blogger rights and filtering circumvention tools. The webcast is available on the Irrepressible website.

One of the strange nuances of Amnesty’s stance is that while they support free speech, they are quick to condemn hate speech and hate-related materials thus graying the lines of censorship. Nevertheless, the organization’s recognition of net rights as human rights is a great way to bridge the generation gap between old and new progressives.

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