The National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) has asked the Communications and Information Technology Commission to unblock a group of blacklisted international websites of human rights bodies. “The NSHR has received no response to our request to unblock these websites of international human rights organizations with their valuable content of human rights information,” said Saleh Al-Khathlan, deputy chairman of the NSHR. It is not clear how many websites of international human rights organizations are currently blocked in the Kingdom, but the websites of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR), Human Rights Watch, and a few others can be accessed in the Kingdom. The blockage of the websites of these human rights organizations is a violation of national and international laws that allow the public to access human rights websites as part of the human right of freedom of speech, he said. The request of the NSHR comes to enhance the human right to have access to information intrinsic to the fabric of the growth of the culture of human rights in the Kingdom, Al-Khathlan said. “The decision to block a website in the Kingdom should be carefully studied and not left to the whims of individuals,” he said. The deputy chairman has called for a clear-cut policy on dealing with decision to block websites, giving the blocked websites the right to appeal the blockade, he said. The NSHR, however, does not object to justified decisions of blocking “bad” websites, he said. Access is denied to some websites in the Kingdom through the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) which acts as a filter for “unsuitable” materials. All Internet traffic is filtered through a central array of proxy servers maintained by the Internet Services Unit (ISU). If a site is blacklisted, the user is directed to a page that explicitly informs him or her that access to the site has been denied. “Our Internet service is unique in the way it preserves our Islamic values, filtering the Internet content to prevent the materials that contradict our beliefs or may influence our culture, which is one of ISU tasks,” says the ISU site. Recent research showed that many of the blocked sites were sexually explicit. Now with the fast-paced technological revolution, it has become much easier to get around the censorship via proxy servers, anonymizers, and satellite Internet, to name a few.
