(RSF/IFEX) – The Iranian authorities have followed their harassment of pro-reformist newspapers with attacks on online news publications. RSF has protested the latest developments. On 23 February 2004, Judge Said Mortazavi announced that he would shortly order the shutting down of the pro-reformist website http://www.emrooz.ws “The Internet is now regularly used by Iranians to access […]
(RSF/IFEX) – The Iranian authorities have followed their harassment of pro-reformist newspapers with attacks on online news publications. RSF has protested the latest developments.
On 23 February 2004, Judge Said Mortazavi announced that he would shortly order the shutting down of the pro-reformist website http://www.emrooz.ws
“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,” RSF said, while asking that the website http://www.emrooz.ws be made accessible in Iran.
Emrooz has been blocked in Iran since the start of 2004, but the website remains accessible from abroad. The decision that was recently announced by Judge Mortazavi will shortly lead to the complete shutdown of the news website, which the authorities view as “damaging to the country’s security.”
The independent news website www.gooyaa.com, popular with Iranian Internet users, was also added to the “blacklist” at the start of the year. RSF has learned that this order has since been lifted.
Weblogs – personal or collective pages in which Internet users comment on the news – are also being subjected to censorship by the conservatives. The 50 or so blogs commenting on the Iranian elections include http://sobhaneh.com and a collective weblog, “news about the boycott”, available at http://home.c2i.net/hasanagha/tahrim/tahrimmajles01.htm
The authorities have also stepped up their harassment of the news website http://www.rouydad.ws, which has been the target of technical strikes that made it inaccessible for several days. Rouydad.ws has officially been blocked since 18 February and may soon be closed down permanently by the authorities.
Finally, RSF’s website, which is available in Farsi, was recently added to the list of filtered sites and is now unavailable in Iran.
As RSF noted in a report on free expression on the Internet, the Iranian government controls Internet access and represses managers of online publications. Censorship, which is officially said to “protect people against immoral content”, has quickly extended to political news. Moreover, it is now easier to access pornographic websites in Iran than those of censored pro-reformist publications.
According to information obtained by RSF, 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.
