Conservatives muzzle the Internet during elections

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.gooya.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.