Is France Giving Bush New Ideas to Eliminate Dissent?
I haven’t seen this reported in the media outside of computer and tech journals like PC World, Macworld, or Info World. This is from Macworld:
France bans citizen journalists from reporting violence
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
The article points out the irony of this decision being made on the 16th anniversary of the beating Rodney King, which was caught on video by George Holliday:
If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.
The French law seems to have a very wide ruling and be sweeping in authority. It will criminalize the recording of any public violence except that of an accredited journalist. It makes you wonder if there are exceptions for private security surveillance cameras. I don't know the details and none of the articles pose or answer that question.
The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities...
The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.
Does anyone doubt the desire of similar measures by the Cheney Misadministration?
[UPDATED] Mar 07, 2007 at 12:28 AM CST:
Changed title to: France Bans Citizen Journalists
Dropped old title to first line in diary intro.