Iranian Bloggers Behind Bars - update

Recently I posted an article from Michelle Malkin's Blog about the arrest of some Iranian bloggers and how to complain to the UN.

Send your protests to the U.N Working Group on Internet Governance, care of Edoardo Bellando. E-mail: bellando@un.org

I emailed Edoardo Bellando and complained about the treatment of the bloggers and appealed to the UN to intervene. Here is his response. Note this however,

Your message -- and the four others I received on the same topic -- will be sent to the Iranian embassy in Geneva and hopefully will help release the five bloggers.

Only 5 people wrote to him to complain??!! We can and should do better than that.

The Working Group on Internet Governance (http://www.wgig.org/) was set up
because UN member states, at the first phase of the World Summit on the
Information Society in Geneva last December, asked UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan to "set up a working group to investigate and make proposals for
action, as appropriate, on the governance of Internet by 2005." The task of
the group is to produce a report to facilitate the negotiations at the
second phase of the World Summit in November 2005.
The members of the Geneva-based Working Group were appointed by the
Secretary-General in their personal capacity and they don't represent
countries nor institutions. But given the close interaction between the
Working Group and the World Summit, its members represent all opinions that
were voiced at the Geneva phase of the Summit. The group also reflects the
geographical variety of the UN membership.
Your message -- and the four others I received on the same topic -- will be
sent to the Iranian embassy in Geneva and hopefully will help release the
five bloggers. Unfortunately the United Nations is the servant of its
member states, not their boss. We take orders from all 191 member states.
At the same time, in the field of human rights, we are supposed to chastise
our bosses -- a situation that always creates all kinds of tensions.
In spite of this, the UN tries to do all it can to protect human rights --
just have a look at http://www.ohchr.org/english/. UNESCO, in particular,
is very active in the protection of journalists -- see
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=2493&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
I have been dealing for years with human rights at my job in public
information, and I have come to the conclusion that just condemning doesn't
help. We could condemn the arrests and expel the Iranian member (who by the
way is an information technology expert, like all other members). But
keeping Iran engaged and working with it will be more profitable.
I have also been a member for many years of Amnesty International (in the
US and in Italy) and more recently of Human Rights Watch. Human rights work
is hard and often disappointing. Reporters without Borders is known for its
harsh, high-profile criticism, and we need that. But we also need the more
patient and diplomatic work of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the
International Federation of Journalists, which (like Amnesty and HRW)
engage the authorities and in the end obtain results -- just see the
announcement of the release of a Cuban journalist on the CPJ web page --
http://www.cpj.org/
With best regards,
Edoardo Bellando
UN Department of Public Information.
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