OSCE Unbound

A friend sent a mailing about a position at OSCE. 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the OSCE ministerial in Dublin Dec. 2012. Photo by OSCE/Sonya Lee.

So Hillary Clinton had her swan song — or one of her swan songs — at the OSCE ministerial in Dublin, and won't return to the world stage as an elected politician, well, until maybe 2016 if she runs for, and is elected for president.

And I'd be one of those who'd vote for her, and the Republicans would really have to come up with someone a lot better. And the reason would be a rather tiny point, perhaps, but big for me: unlike Obama, Hillary never calls for redistribution of wealth; she calls for social justice. I've never heard a "you didn't built that" narrative out of her. She may be on the left, but she has investments herself (which were controversial at one point) and she doesn't hate capitalism and business with the same ideologically frenzy as Barack Obama and some of his chief lieutenants. She is all for women in small business, and of course women's rights as human rights. And that all suits me fine, and I'm all for that.

She also doesn't bring with her that pro-Kremlin tropism that the socialist movements of the 1960s and 1980s bring to bear on today's Russia that one senses in Obama's approach. Say what you will about Hillary — and there are things to criticize — but she's normal. She's solid. She isn't cerebral and ephemeral trying to crush ideological templates down on people's living realities like Obama. Bill Clinton, her husband, was popular because he also didn't hate on business and hate on capitalism — it was more of an approach of trying to ensure more social justice, emphasizing human rights, but not dumping on business with hatred. There wasn't that sense of Shakedown Street — "let's make those rich people pay, aren't they awful." And these may be nuances. They may be cultural things. But they do count with me. The Clintons mean to me what the liberalism of the Democratic Party should be, in which in my view is lost as it lurches to the left and the "progressive" agenda. I'd rather there be four parties. Not what we have.

Now, what did Hillary say in her speech at OSCE, which might be the last speech she will ever give in a multilateral setting ever again as a world official?

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, it is
important to remember that those accords and this organization that
sprang from them affirmed an inextricable link between the security of
states and the security of citizens. They codified universal rights and
freedoms that belong to all citizens, and those commitments empowered
and encouraged dissidents to work for change. In the years that
followed, the shipyard workers of Solidarity, reformers in Hungary,
demonstrators in Prague all seized on the fundamental rights defined at
Helsinki and they held their governments to account for not living up to
the standards to which they had agreed. We are the inheritors and the
guardians of that legacy.

This is a very important statement, and I'm glad it's still part of US foreign policy, and I'm glad it's still said in the OSCE context: the inextricable link. This was the term that Dr. Andrei Sakharov used, and his colleagues about the inseparable link between human rights and peace, between human rights and security. I remember once sitting up late in Moscow talking to Sergei Kovalev, the scientist who was Sakharov's friend and inherited his mantle as a leader of the human rights movement. He asked me earnestly if I and others in the West really understood that this inextricable link really was true? That it really was indissoluble. That this really was a philosophical notion about an inherent property of human rights — that you really would not get security — peace, disarmament, detente — until you got human rights.

I said I did understand it. But too many of my contemporaries in the 1980s did not. They were happy to forego human rights for peace, and sell Soviet dissidents down the river or even forego their own rights. I'll never forget the astonishing thing said by a peacenik in Montana worried about missile silos — that he would be willing to give up his First Amendment rights at home if it would mean security against a nuclear attack. Imagine that! Those were the days when Jonathan Schell's "nuclear winter" animated the imagination with horrible scenarios, the way "global warming" does today…

Now, has Hillary gotten this quite right here in her speech? Well, I'm somewhat perturbed that instead of saying what I believe to be the "classic" form of this Sakharov doctrine or Helsinki doctrine, if you will — human rights and security, there has been a different rendering: security of
states and the security of citizens.

In part, this is a nod to the modern concern about security from terrorism or security from state intrusion of privacy on the Internet or whatever, but it's also an invocation of a somewhat newfangled notion called "human security". This was pushed for a time quite strongly at the UN by a group of states from Europe, Canada, and so on as a way to try to get the security-minded authoritarians to apply some of that lovely security concern to actual people — refugee flows became the issue of human security most often invoked — in other words, if a state thought it gained "security" by oppressing minorities and chasing people off their land, and they began to flee to other parts of the country or nearby countries,in fact, their plight was a security issue, too, and they had to take responsibility for it. I really don't have a problem with the notion of "human security" as it has been (over) developed by various UN think-tankers, yet like "responsibility to protect," it's essentially a linguistic gimmick to avoid confronting offending states with their offenses.

But, well, I like human rights better. It's really more explicit and comprehensive at the same time. Human rights are still seen by authoritarian states, and Russia is at the top of the list there in the OSCE setting, as some kind of threat to the state. They aren't a threat to a *good* state; a capable state, as some analysts would describe it. But they are a threat to a bad authoritarian state at times, and naturally, autocrats like Putin reach for notions like "foreign agents" and "interference in internal affairs" — security — to undermine human rights. In one sense, human rights, if really implemented, probably does threaten a tyrant like Putin; yet in another sense, states can go a certain ways in fulfilling human rights and still stay in power, and it can even enable them to stay in power longer if they allow some of them. I suppose the autocrats are eternally in a quest for that perfect formula of balance…

I'm a tad annoyed at the hipster Obama lingo in the speech — empowered
and encouraged dissidents to work for change.  You know, I never heard Yuri Orlov tell me that he felt "empowered" and he was "working for change". In fact, the Bolsheviks brought so much "change". I think what some people wanted after they were done wrecking everything was normalcy. They wanted justice to work. "Empowerment" wasn't the word they used. You know, what was it, 32 years ago, Yuri Orlov was in Perm labour camp, and he smuggled out this little tiny piece of paper from the camp to the Madrid review conference of the CSCE, as OSCE was called then. The paper (translated by Ludmila Thorne at Freedom House) said:

I am convinced that our sacrifices are not in vain. I am sewing bags on the machine.

They were sacks for potatoes, and hard and numbing work — forced labour. But he said all the pain and suffering wasn't in vain — although it took quite a while to realize anything from it — it would be some six years before he was released from the camps, and then more finally released in 1991. And now some are being put back in again…

But empowered? It was more like validated.  Respected. Authenticated. "Know and act upon your rights" was the phrase. "Empowerment" isn't a word I like precisely because it always implies that there is some thing or some person or — some state — that does that "empowering" of you. In some identity-politics setting, usually. But "know and act upon your rights" means the law is above the state — and you — but you can claim it, against the state's violations.

Now Hillary — her speechwriters — have a list of the kinds of citizens who made the Helsink Accords real: "In the years that
followed, the shipyard workers of Solidarity, reformers in Hungary,
demonstrators in Prague…"

I was very, very disappointed in this line. In fact, my heart sunk. In fact, since Magnitsky was on the floor being debated when this speech was being made, I was quite upset. It didn't mention the Moscow Helsinki Group! And it should have. Yuri Orlov, the chairman of the group, Ludmila Alexeyeva, a founding member who was the Western representative in exile in the US for many years, and now the chairwoman in Moscow — they should have been mentioned as they are the ones who came up with the idea of "Helsinki Watching" in the first place! There wouldn't have been any Human Rights Watch without them first. Remember Millicent Fenwick, founder of the CSCE? She was among the first to meet with the Moscow Helsinki Group. 

The Soviet Helsinki Watch groups in a number of the Soviet republics — more than 50 of these brave people went to labour camps and exile for their work — shouldn't have been overlooked in Hillary's speech. That they were — that they weren't automatically included — was a function of a) someone young drafting the speech or b) some strange desire not to dis the Russians, and leave out mention of a "foreign agent" — as Ludmila Alexeyeva has already been called — to Putin's eternal shame.

Well, Hillary trips along further — mentioning that OSCE election observers even came "to my own country" — although there was controversy there — and that there was a…peaceful transition in Georgia. Okay. It was that! Such a peace, that not a minister from the previous regime will be left out of jail!

But Hillary is never one to shrink from the challenges of human rights, and to stand side by side with the civil society actors — in fact she has done far more of that than Obama:

But I see a growing concern for the future of this organization and the
values it has always championed. More than 20 years after the end of the
Cold War, the work of creating a Europe that is whole, free, and at
peace remains unfinished. I just met with a group of the Civil Society
Solidarity Platform leaders from a number of member states. They talked
to me about the growing challenges and dangers that they are facing,
about new restrictions on human rights from governments, new pressures
on journalists, new assaults on NGOs. And I urge all of us to pay
attention to their concerns.

I'm less than impressed with the Civil Society Platform — one pictures bouncing beaverboard — look at the typically anodyne statement they turned in — and Harry Hummel of the Netherlands Helsinki Committee is harumphing about drones and Guantanamo instead of more than 400 disappeared people in the Caucasus…

In any event, they do flag the obvious: human rights monitors (which we used to call them before they began to be called "defenders" after the passage of the long-sought "Defenders' Declaration" at the UN in 2000) suffer terribly for their work. I'm told that at the NGO briefing for the members of the UN Committee Against Torture, the experts asked the NGOs who had written "shadow" reports as alternatives to the misleading official state report from the Russian government, how many people in the room had experienced reprisals for their work. Nearly all of them raised their hands. And these are people with foreign languages; with the ability to travel abroad; intelligent people who are part of the world's intelligentsia. And they suffer for their work. Do you?

And now, the litany of abuses — we've all written them, they are all familiar:

For example, in Belarus, the Government continues to systematically
repress human rights, detain political prisoners, and intimidate
journalists. In Ukraine, the elections in October were a step backwards
for democracy, and we remain deeply concerned about the selective
prosecution of opposition leaders. In Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, there are examples of the restrictions of
the freedom of expression online and offline as well as the freedom of
religion. In the Caucasus, we see constraints on judicial independence,
attacks on journalists, and elections that are not always free and fair.

And we have seen in Russia restrictions on civil society including
proposed legislation that would require many NGOs and journalists to
register as foreign agents if they receive funding from abroad. There
are unfortunately signs of democratic backsliding in Hungary and
challenges to constitutional processes in Romania and the ugly specter
of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, discrimination against immigrants, Roma,
LGBT persons, and other vulnerable populations persists.

All correct, as far as it go. But there's that troubling downplaying of the severities of the Russian scene. Rozvozzhayev was kidnapped from Ukraine, tortured into confession, and is still held in Russia. And we're only talking here about "restrictions on civil society including proposed legislation"? Really, guys?

I hope that this line, "the ugly specter of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, discrimination against immigrants, Roma, LGBT persons, and other vulnerable populations persists" — applies not only to Hungary and Romania (as it seems to) and not all the other countries, particularly Russia and the stans (as it should).

And now for some American chest-beating — we're not perfect, although we don't let lawyers die in jail or assassinate them! — and the rest:

So it is worth reminding ourselves that every participating state,
including the United States, has room for improvement. The work of
building a democracy and protecting human rights is never done, and one
of the strengths of the OSCE has been that it provides a forum for
discussing this challenge and making progress together. But there is
even trouble here. This organization operates by consensus, so it cannot
function when even a single state blocks progress. Forty-seven states
have cosponsored the draft declaration on fundamental freedoms in the
digital age, yet its path forward is blocked. The same goes for measures
on media freedom, freedom of assembly and association, and military
transparency.

I'm actually quite impressed that there are 47 whole states that voted for the digital age freedoms. That's way more than the 26 or so that had lukewarmedly signed on by June 2012 when I went to the Dublin conference — and the Irish chair convinced the US to drop efforts to lobby for it and not even mention it because it was so contentious  — and Ireland itself didn't endorse it! And given that the CIS has 11 members, you can do the math to figure out where the 10-vote shortfall is… Somehow I don't think it's Andorra…

Ireland had such hopes of resolutions it was going to win…media freedom…journalists' protection…well, none of it came to pass. Really, no human rights progress at all because of Russia blockage — and that's all there is to it. There isn't a doubt in my mind that every single one of the "frozen conflicts" would be better off today if Russian weren't meddling and needling.

But if you found the Irisn chair lack-lustre if well-intentioned — oh, wait until you see who's next in the chair — Ukraine. Fasten your seat belts, we're going back to Astana…

And this 40 year anniversary roadmap stuff? For the birds, totally. Hate it. Bad idea. A very, very wan and weak placebo for real human rights. "Roadmaps" are what you put in when you can't even get weak consensus on a few over-arching principles. Authoritarians love roadmaps — they're doing the driving.

So some stern words from Hillary particularly on military matters — which disturbingly, haven't been mentioned as much in past years after the Cold War, and now are back again — again, due to Russia:

The OSCE must avoid institutional changes that would weaken it and
undermine our fundamental commitments limiting the participation of NGOs
in our discussions, offering amendments and vetoing proposals to
respond quickly to conflicts and crises, trying to exert greater central
control over the field offices and field workers to curb their efforts
on human rights, suspending implementation of treaties and agreements so
there is less military transparency in Europe than a decade ago. These
are not the way to progress in the 21st century.

All of this is Russian meddling and weakening of this institution — they want to do their own crisis response their way through the CSTO; they don't like OSCE field offices because that enables countries to be more independent without their pressure on a host of situations from Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan to Georgia to Belarus. And as we know from Lavrov's raging yesterday on Russian TV, what really got the Russians mad the most was a comment Hillary made not in this speech but in remarks to the press afterward, that there was a disturbing trend to a Soviet re-union, that this "integration" process in the post-Soviet space was not welcome.

Sounding little different than Mitt Romney who said during his campaign that Russia was America's greatest geopolitical foe, Clinton warned, as the Financial Times report (registeration required):

“There
is a move to re-Sovietise the region,” the US secretary of state told a
news conference in Dublin hours before going into a meeting with her
Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

“It’s not going to be called that. It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that,” she said, referring to various iterations of a Moscow-backed plan to deepen economic ties with its neighbours.

“But let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”

While I have my insider critique of Hillary's speech from long practice of wincing when certain things are left out as if they have meaning, Reuters picked up this speech as strong — and as a stern warning that "Europe's rights watchdog' was in danger. And that is the size of it.

It's a bleak time for all of us who have stayed the course these 37 years with the Helsinki process. The wind isn't at our backs now, the flags are in tatters. But, like Yuri as he sewed his bags on the machine, "I am convinced that our sacrifices are not in vain."

NGO colleagues stand up to call for Ales Bialiatski's release from jail at the HDIM meeting last year. Photo by FIDH.

And so the annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe begins again, the meeting with one of those strange multilateral acronyms "HDIM" which you hope doesn't stand for "hope dim" — because in fact this important gathering of both diplomats and activists, unique of its kind, is a hope for many to try to publicize ongoing and even massive human rights violations in Eurasia.

Yes, I single out Eurasia rather than North America because in North America, there scale and magnitude of the violations are indisputably less, and more importantly, the remedies for addressing them with an adversarial bar, independent judiciary, freely-elected parliament, vibrant civil society sector, and free press are immeasurably greater.

I'm unable to go to the meeting, unfortunately, this year, because of other work and family commitments, but the meeting is in good hands.

The US delegation illustrates both the continuity of human rights concerns and diplomacy over the generations as well as decades of dedication to the cause of human rights.

The delegation is headed by Amb. Avis Bohlen who has had a distinguished career in arms control as well as diplomatic service in Eastern Europe. She is also known for her famous father, Amb. Charles "Chip" Bohlen, who dealt with the Soviets in the height of the Cold War. If you read the Wikipedia version, Bohlen was said to differ from George Kennan in the strategy for coping with the Soviet challenge, favouring accommodation rather than containment. The story is more complicated than that, but it is a never-ending challenge for the US today, and what the delegation's leadership tells us is that we still have American officials willing to accept this challenge and deal with it in an informed way.

Also on the delegation is Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, Chair, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, also known for her famous father, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, for whom the Congressional human rights committee is now named. Dr. Lantos has continued the tradition of taking up vocal defense of cases in Russia even when it is not politically expedient, such as that of Sergei Magnitsky. Putting CIRF in a leadership role on this delegation signals the seriousness with which the US takes religious freedom, which is one of the themes emphasized this year.

Others on the delegation such as Amb. Michael Kozak, Amb. Ian Kelly, Amb. Suzan Johnson Cook all represent decades of solid US experience dealing with the daily challenges posed by the continual defiance of human rights norms in one half of the Helsinki space in particular — that dominated by Russia. There's a lot of equivocating and acknowledgement that "we all" have human rights problems, such as racial profiling or discrimination against minorities — and we do. Still, let's hope there aren't going to be apologies for any situation in the US that has that ample civil society I just mentioned to address it, unlike Russia, which crushes civil society: one only has to look at the tides of immigration to the US, somewhat diminished and facing more difficulties in some places like Arizona though they might: it's a 7-lane Texas highway coming in, and a cowpath going out.

The HDIM meets at a time of unprecedented challenge to its very functioning — Belarus (Belarus!) aided and abetted by the usual suspect in the post-Soviet space and unfortunately, some Europeans who should know better — is trying to shorten the length of the HDIM agenda and days of meeting — already over-packed — and dumb down the agenda.

This is just like what Russia is doing here in New York at the UN with the intergovernmental working group set up to make the treaty bodies more "effective" and more "efficient" (read: with less independence as their members are intimidated and forced to submit to a "code of conduct" and without NGO input as their role is challenged and diminished and the role of new media covering the sessions with livestreaming facing resistance.)

Russia has just kicked out the innocuous USAID office from Russia, supposedly for interfering in elections or even espionage, although USAID has trouble interfering even with its own considerable bureaucracy and expense to get the job done, or even spying an opportunity to actually act in the real world. Putin may be surprised to discover some of his own cronies may have just been decoupled from their hook-up.

Putin's representatives at this meeting will feel smug and self-satisfied that they have removed an obvious interference of questionable intent and will snarkily point to America's own tragic losses last week as its ambassador to Libya and three of his fellow diplomats were killed apparently by a terrorist faction in the very course of establishing democracy abroad — with the apparent acquiescence of the locals. The Russians endlessly make hay over this but can never explain why so many hundreds of thousands of their own citizens have slipped the leash to challenge Putin's managed democracy, and why it is necessary club and jail and ban so many of them if it's really only Hillary Clinton's funding that sustains it all.

Let's hope the American delegation stands up to this insidious narrative and double standard  by pointing out that human rights are universal, in the Helsinki context in particular, promoting and protecting them was long ago disavowed as any "interference in internal affairs" and the Russians and their allies are clearly backsliding.

Say, detentions of partisan American journalists around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, always marked by civil disobedience and challenged by lawfarers, and breaking-up of demonstrations by Canadian students whose tuition went up can be seen as counter to the spirit of Helsinki and scrutinized with our anti-Western magnifying glasses as human rights violations, but I'll tell you what's far, far worse: getting a bullet in your head and dying for your exposure of torture and disappearances in Chechnya, like Anna Politkovskaya.  So let's keep it in perspective, shall we?

I'm worried about how two issues will fare at this meeting, especially under the Obama Administration, which has not been very sturdy on them and has caved to various faddish politically-correct notions in the air.

The first is all issues around religious freedom, tolerance and free speech. The US Embassy in Cairo did not take the right approach on this as I've explained (and James Kirchick has explained better) and let's hope our diplomats in Warsaw get this and understand why the State Department rightly withdrew it.

You never know how much cross-pollination takes place between multilateral bodies in the US government, which isn't always so friendly to them on principle, but they should read up on the UN resolution 16/18 at the UN Human Rights Council, which was hard-won language that essentially made the distinction between mere "insult" in hate speech and the more precise concept of "incitement to imminent violence".

The shoddy hate video produced by some strange characters who may or may not be part of a larger hoax does not qualify under the definition of that resolution and other international law as "incitement to imminent violence" (a concept taken straight out of Ohio v. Brandenburg in the Supreme Court.

That's because the movie, as crass and nasty as it is, doesn't call on anybody to beat or kill or harm Muslims.

That the result of this hate movie is violence by those insulted doesn't mean that the "incitement" test was met — that's not how the jurisprudence works. I've written about this at length here, and explained why we need now a resolution on "insult violence," just as we attempted with "honour killings," rather than accept at all anything that remotely goes into the badlands of "defamation of religions". Let's hope that each and every member of the US delegation gets this, and doesn't cave on this in any language anywhere, because it means conceding victory to years of hostile effort by the Organization of Islamic Community at the UN to impose a global blasphemy law on the world's countries and prevent criticism of abusive theocratic states.

There will be enormous pressure to have some kind of statements of conciliation or understanding or condemnation of hate speech, but the key is to focus on the speech itself, not on its outcome and to insist that the "incitement to imminent violent" test be met for the speaker, not the insulted. Nothing justifies violence — one right doesn't trump another. Under no circumstances should anyone begin mumbling about how we need "responsibilities as well as rights" — such "responsibilities aren't defined at Helsinki and can't be with the hostile actors there are there.

The solution to bad speech is more speech, not more creeping notions of "responsibilities as well as rights" that are not contained in domestic or international law for good reason: they are too easily abused by states to curb basic civil and political rights. If we're going to talk responsibilities, let's talk first about the males fired up with machismo who think they get to kill people over insult to their manhood wrapped around their religious figures. The purpose of Helsinki isn't to define rules for duels by insulted people, but to uphold universal principles of freedom of speech, association and religious belief as matters of international law, and advocate non-binding paths of education, dialogue and exchange as "baskets" that help these rights to have meaning and civility.

The other issue I hope won't suffer any damage is on Internet freedom. Not much progress was made at all in the non-official meeting in Dublin organized by the chair-in-office on the perfectly decent US draft resolution on Internet freedom — it does not have full support from all OSCE members, but only something like 27 backing it, which lets us know the problem isn't just the post-Soviet states — Ireland itself didn't support it.

Mercifully, there was no formal concluding document out of Dublin — it wasn't an official conference — but this being the era of faddish new media, there were tweets and a  virtual conclusion provided by the summary record on a Youtube which skipped over the hard parts — like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan blocking the Internet and beating up Internet journalists — and focused unnecessarily on Western issues that are frankly about redistribution (socialism) like "net neutrality" and "Internet development".

Horribly, the version of the Internet freedom resolution that came out of the UN Human Rights Council mentions "Internet development" three times where one would have been too many as I explained— because in UN-speak, "development" means the state becomes involves and "develops" itself and its own goals. Like the Tibetan once asked the Chinese bureaucrat rambling on about "development": "Who develops?"

Emotions can be played on with things like "oh, poor children need laptops" or "we need broadband in rural areas," but for that, you just have to see the rows of dutiful Turkmen children in their stiff native costumes and hair bows and ties sitting at their shiny Chinese-provided new laptops that….don't hook up to the real Internet. Or see the broadband that even Uzbekistan gets to rural areas but which blocks anything that might give anybody any ideas about the Arab Spring. Cuba has all those free innoculations, you know? But they also put in jail people who point out the whole society it sick…

The US should stick to its lasts, which amount to saying "offline rights apply online" — and call it a day. No magic woo-woo about autonomous spaces, borderless realms where rights don't apply — er, like copyright — because we must "innovate" — by which is meant that California companies should have right of way to make giant platforms that everyone depends on, enable free accounts and untrammelled uploads even of infringing content, then make intellectual property holders chase them with DMCA notices — all the way scraping our privacy to sell to marketers.

And a shout-out to that US diplomat who complains to me when I stump on these issues that he has VPN to tunnel to his favourite American TV shows — hey, whose going to keep making the TV for you for free? You can buy it on Google Play now, you know. And Google, bring home your taxes from Ireland! We need them in this country. Oh, and everybody please note: all your efforts in committees and commissions and plenaries to hammer out notions of hate speech and how to act on it are actually irrelevant: Google is now the world-wide adjudicator of these matters by its outsized and unaccountable intermediary row in "safe harbours" and if you complain about how this is done, you are threatened with not only a mute and ban out of an influential Google engineer's stream, but banning from G+ and all Google-related products to boot. Our new town halls are being run by cranky and oppressive neuralgic geeks who don't take kindly to challenges from the norms.

Even if a US judge ruled that the anti-Muslim hate video shoud come down — and I don't believe he should or could if he were consistent with US Constitutional law — it wouldn't matter because Google's very affordances would make it impossible to suppress. It would appear again and again like the Kanye West videos that Google stamps out reluctantly (because it loses ad revenue) when large record companies come calling with lawyers.

Google shut down the hate video in some countries even without any government or court request "just because" Google knows best. The Irish have let this enormous camel's nose in under the Helsinki tent: how will the Helsinki states cope with the giant non-state actors who run our entire lives which all moved online? How can we make them sign the Copenhagen agreement and stop their arbitrary mutes and bans?

Because their gloves are now off and the mask has slipped. While once the companies hid behind human rights coalitions like the Global Network Initiative pretending they were just about not letting Chinese dissidents go to jail (although they focused on their copyleftist agenda), today they've all banned together in a frank lobbying group in Washington openly working on "net neutrality" and against copyright in legislation like SOPA/PIPA. These should not have been subsumed into the human rights agenda and the international human rights movement is to blame for letting this happen.

An Internet run by government agencies redistributing broadband and undermining commercial businesses with intellectual property isn't free.

OK, enough from me, and here's a suggestion for every single NGO speaker: mention two people who used to be side by side with you, literally sitting at the same HDIM table year after year, and who are now in jail:

o Ales Bialiatski, head of Spring or Viasna, the Belarusian human rights monitoring group. Year after year Ales devotedly brought to the attention of the Eurasian publics the sad story of his oppressed country. Now he himself is in jail on an utterly trumped up case, acknowledged by Western governments as contrived for political reasons, involving funds to support the NGO sector. This issue is one that the Western states have capitulated on — it's telling that a Polish and a Lithuanian bank cooperated with Lukashenka's henchmen

To start a resolution negotiation process on "foreign" funding for the NGO sector is only to regulate it and let it into the hands of unfriendly states out to kill NGOs. So that's off. But what's possible is to go on affirming that rights need…development! Yes, development from government and private sector to be implemented for all, and in the Helsinki family, no one actor promoting the goals of Helsinki financially or on a volunteer basis should be viewed with suspicion or hostility. There are no foreign spies in the Helsinki space, unless the Russians decide there are. Projecting much?

o Vladimir Kozlov, the head of the Al'ga! Party in Kazakhstan, whose trial, along with other opposition party members, is under way now and is being monitored by Freedom House. They're charged with "attempting to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan through agitation
and organization of striking oil workers in the western city of
Zhanaozen" — although the oil authorities are the problem, and government troops are the problem, for shooting dead several scores of unarmed demonstrating workers last year.

I starkly remember in 2010 how Kozlov was reprimanded by the then chair-in-office of Kazakhstan at the HDIM in 2010. He read off a long littany of human rights violations, beatings, jailings, closures. He said calmly at the end something to the effect of: "We will seek accountability for these terrible violations. When we come to power, we will come after you," meaning — as he explained afterward — holding them to account.

The chair hysterically took this to be a call to violence and told him he would be prosecuted under incitement laws in Kazakhstan for his speech. What a way to run a Helsinki meeting! This Kazakh ambassador and her fellow delegation members and fellow travellers in the GONGO world did this again and again throughout the meeting. When Kozlov and colleagues from Kazakhstan and Poland's Solidarity held a joint meeting, the Kazakh head of delegation came bursting into the briefing room and demanded to have the floor immediately, because "it wasn't fair" that NGOs were speaking without a government official on their platform (!). I didn't know whether to be more appalled at her outrageousness, or the inexplicable support she got even from some American and European officials who should know MUCH better. She could have asked a question at the end like anybody else, NGO or official. There's no rule that you have to give equal time to the government at your NGO side meeting!

I wrote all these incidents down and addressed a letter to Philip Gordon, in charge of Europe in the State Department, and other OSCE-related officials and urged them that to intervene because after Kazakh stepped down from the chair, it would crack down on Kozlov and others.

Surprise, surprise, it did just that. The reponse from the West, resopnsible for the awful validation that chairmanship gave Kazakhstan, has been tepid in following up. To be sure, Evgeny Zhovtis is finally out of jail, but near the end of his term and in straightened circumstances of continuing intimidation of all civil society actors.

The Chinese dissident whom Yahoo helped put in jail served his whole sentence of 10 years, as the old Soviet zek saying had it, "from bell to bell". So many others in the OSCE space are doing the same, notably religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. I hope with the accent on the religious theme this year that these devout Muslims tortured and jailed after trials behind closed doors without adequate defense get not only a shout-out, but some real serious plan for how they can be released and re-integrated into society. Let's not be harping only about the difficulties of how you take former jihadists and release them from Guantanamo, which had a fraction of the number of people Uzbekistan thrown in cruel dungeons.