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The Council of Europe on Thursday adopted a new cybercrime convention, elements of which look to define and criminalise hate-speech on the Internet.
The 43-nation body, whose aim is to protect human rights, adopted one of the first international treaties on criminal offences committed over the Internet. The treaty looks to criminalise activities such as fraud and child pornography as well as hate-speech committed on the World Wide Web. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, intercepting e-mails, and extraditing criminal suspects.
The news from the Council of Europe came on the same day that Yahoo Inc. won a victory over the French court that had moved to block users from Nazi memorabilia auctions on Yahoo. A US district court told Yahoo it could ignore the French court order. Yahoo welcomed the decision, although the legal battle was largely hypothetical since the company had already amended its auctions guidelines to explicitly ban the sale of "hate-related" material. Nevertheless, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the US District Court in San Jose, California said that the French court has no jurisdiction to block Yahoo, a California-based company, from selling the goods.
While Yahoo's case will be hailed in the US as a landmark decision that protects the US first amendment right of free speech, it also serves as an example of the difficulties the Net creates in enforcing laws which differ from state to state. Under French law, the sale of Nazi memorabilia is classified as a hate crime.
In its ruling on Thursday, the US court agreed with Yahoo that the Yahoo site is outside French jurisdiction.
"Although France has the sovereign right to regulate what speech is permissible in France, the [American] court may not enforce a foreign order that violates the protections of the United States Constitution," Judge Jeremy Fogel said.
The Council of Europe's treaty will be seen as an attempt by the organisation to unify some of the codes that regulate the legality and definition of cybercrime and hate speech that vary across international borders. The treaty becomes effective once five states, including at least three Council of Europe member nations, have ratified it. The United States, Japan and Canada, which have observer status at the Council, were invited to adopt it.
One of the aspects of the law deals specifically with preventing what the Council calls "illegal hosting," or "a practice whereby 'cyber-racists' locate their servers in a country with less strict regulations in order to sidestep the law." This part of the proposed agreement was based, in part, on work by an officer of the Council, Ivar Tallo from Estonia. Tallo explained, "For example, a racist French site aimed at a French audience, but housed on a server located in the United States, would not be able to hide behind American laws protecting freedom of speech."
"The eleventh of September has shown that hate speech can become an action of horrendous magnitude. Therefore modern technology has to have safeguards and one of those is to ban hate speech on the Internet," Tallo added.
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