• Jiang Lijun, sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for his online pro-democracy articles in China.

• Post Mumbai blast in July 2006, the Indian government blocked the website hinduunity.org and banned blogs like exposingtheleft.blogspot.com and pajamaeditors.blogspot.com on suspicion of terrorists using these sites for carrying out their threats.

• Jiahao Chen, a student finishing his studies in the US, was forced in April 2005 to close down his site for criticizing a system of university grants administered by a governmental agency.

• Yap Keng Ho of opposition Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) was accused of posting a video of him speaking in public on his blog (uncleyap– news.blogspot.com) and was ordered to remove all related documents.

Of late, the Internet has become one of the most potent means of spreading information, sharing knowledge and reporting abuse of any kind. People voice their opinions and views on various subjects from government policies to the newest Bond in Hollywood. The Internet was considered to be one of the most democratic platforms of expression till some time back. Not any more. Online censorship is the newest form of repression practiced by governments from Iran to Maldives, Cuba to Vietnam to crack down on those found guilty of using the Internet as a medium to communicate their views. World human rights organization, Amnesty International finds "Internet to be a great tool for the promotion of human rights-activists can tell the world about abuses in their country at the click of a mouse."

Web users are locked up, Internet cafes are shut down, chat rooms are policed, blogs are deleted, websites blocked, foreign news banned and search engines filter out sensitive information, all in the name of warding off threats to national security. Amnesty's website declares that companies like Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Yahoo and Google, all have been found guilty of assisting governments for censoring Internet or tracking down individual users. In 2004, Microsoft released information about the nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu to the Israeli authorities without his knowledge and the data provided was initially used for prosecuting him for having contact with foreign media. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, which was the first company to agree to censor its search engine in China, has allegedly been collaborating for years with the Chinese police so that they can arrest and sentence dissidents and independent reporters.

Lone Warrior
Reporters Sans Frontiers, a civil liberties group based in France is working to reduce the use of censorship and opposes any laws designed to restrict press freedom. The non-profit group, founded in 1985 by French Journalist Robert Menard, has recently come out with a list of countries that crack down hardest on the Internet, censoring independent news sites, publications, monitoring the web to stifle dissident voices and harassing, intimidating and sometimes imprisoning people who deviate from the country's official line.

In its fifth annual RSF Worldwide Press Freedom Index, North Korea, Turkmenistan and Eritrea have been rated as the worst violators of press freedom. Surprisingly, developed nations like France, the US and Japan are no better when it comes to freedom of the fourth estate and they too have slipped in the overall rankings. Countries from the less-developed parts of the world have moved up in the ranking index. "This is a good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant to freedom of expression. Meanwhile, the steady erosion of press freedom in the US, France and Japan is extremely alarming," Reporters Without Frontiers said. Northern European countries once again bagged the top position in the index, with no recorded censorship, threats, intimidation or physical reprisals in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and Netherlands with all incidentally sharing the first place.

Long been accused of violating human rights in treating Iraqi prisoners, the US (#53) has slipped nine places since last year after it bagged the #17 position when the index first came out in 2002. France too slipped five places during the last year due to a sudden increase in the number of searches of media offices and journalists' homes. Rising nationalism and the system of exclusive press clubs (kishas) threatened democratic gains in Japan, which led Japan fall down by 14 places to #51.

The uproar over printing of Prophet Mohammed cartoons last Autumn 2005 year has affected Denmark's ranking (#19), a country otherwise observant of civil liberties. Yemen also slipped four places to #149 because of the arrest of several journalists and closure of newspapers that reprinted the cartoons. Algeria (#126), Jordan (#109), Indonesia (#103) and India (#105) also saw journalists being harassed for the same reason.

Newcomers Scale Up
For the first time in this year's index, two countries Bolivia (#16) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (#19) moved up the index's Top 20. Ghana too (#34) rose 32 places as the authorities no longer threaten it.

War Repress Press Freedom
One of the primary reasons for the repression of press freedom is war which leads to governments clamping down on the freedom of expression and suppressing anti-government news. A series of bomb attacks in 2005 and Israeli military attacks have led Lebanon slipping from #56 place held last year to #107 rank in five years even as the country's media continues to suffer due to the unstable political atmosphere.

Conditions in India's neighbor Sri Lanka are no different. The ongoing war between the Lankan government and the LTTE has affected the rankings of the Sinhalese kingdom which has gone down to 141 rank as Tamil Journalists are physically attacked after being accused of being biased. The democratic revolution in Nepal and the revolt against the monarchy in April this year has led to freedom for the press and its ranking stood at #159.

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