The Council of Europe, an inter-governmental committee established to promote human rights, is currently developing a proposal on the right of reply within the online environment.
The committee, which also aims to protect media freedom, is exploring how the right of reply could be applied to the online media so that "any natural or legal person, irrespective of nationality, should be given the possibility of reacting to inaccurate factual statements in the media which affect his or her personal rights".
The draft recommendations will be considered by the council and, if approved, would be passed to individual government representatives. They would then develop legislation to implement the ruling.
But the proposal could pose a threat to freedom of expression.
Article 19, the global campaign for free expression, says it could put human rights groups in the bizarre situation where, for example, they would be forced to use their own limited resources to publish responses from a repressive government.
Andrew Puddephatt, executive director of Article 19, spoke to dotJournalism about its campaign to stop the proposal.
"The problem is that the ruling treats all sites like the traditional mass media because the ruling could be used to apply to any site, be it a health service or human rights group," he said.
"It’s ludicrous. You just can’t treat all sites the same."
The proposal states that the right of reply should be limited to factual statements that the subject claims are inaccurate. The committee says that the right of reply is particularly appropriate for the web environment because corrections can be made instantly and cheaply so there would be no cost to the subject.
However, Mr Puddephatt feels that the ruling would ultimately discourage sites from publishing challenging or controversial information, which goes against the principle of free speech.
"Legislation like this would penalise organisations for publishing rather than not publishing. This is encouraging people to shut up," he said.
The legislation, if introduced, would apply only to European online publishers. But the international format of the web would mean that organisations determined to avoid the legislation could move the home of the publication outside Europe.
"If we had to, in theory we could just move our server to California and be outside the jurisdiction. But we won’t have to do that.
"We’ll be raising our concerns with the media and lobbying respective governments to get this thrown out. It’s rubbish."
See also:
http://www.article19.org
http://www.article19.org/docimages/1656.doc
http://www.coe.int/T/E/Human_Rights/media/
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