General Assembly

Secretariat: Servio Reyes

•        Chair: Mayte Fernanda Gómez García
•        Moderator: Iván Alejandro Chávez
•       Conference Officer: Fernando Magaña 

   Topics: 

•       a. Right of freedom of expression, violence and censorship of the media.
•       b. Privatization of the internet, referring to copyrights.
  

   

    Dear delegates, ambassadors and ministers present:

In this model you aren´t just representing a country in a model of a debate of the united nations, but you will do more things you ever imagine, you will learn how they think and live people in other countries around the world, including the possibility of interaction and meet partners that in their lives you haven´t  been spoken or known each other although they are in the same school, you will learn how to defend your ideals and you will learn to understand others.

So I hope that all delegates at least on this committee understand that this is more than just a model for a grade in any month, it is more than that. One day when you are old, you can tell your children, grandchildren, nephews, you can tell your experiences in this model that not all schools do, feel proud of that simple fact.

Luck delegates,

Let's begin the PAZ MUN 2012!

Servio Tulio Reyes Castillo
General Assembly President

 

    General Assembly´s President 

     Hi guys! My name is Servio Tulio Reyes Castillo. I am a dedicated person, I am someone who does not need to be told things to do them many times, I do not give up easily at any time, I like to have  knowledge and someone who is very direct so if you want a point of view or an opinion this will be very specific and without lies.

    

    Age: 14 years old

   

     Hobbies: I do whatever I can for not being bored.

    

      Things I dislike: That people are incompetent, when they do not pay attention and people that easily give up.

   
 General Assembly’s chair 

·         Name: Mayte Gomez Garcia     

      Age: 14                                                                                                                

·         Birthday: 9^th of December

·         Things I like: I like to be with my friends and to know new people, I like to sing even though I sing horrible, I like to dance, I like to drink coffee, to eat candies and to go to the cinema.

·         Things I hate: I really hate the onions and garlic, I cannot stand insects, I detest the smell of cigarette, and principally I hate people that lie.

General Assembly’s moderator

Hey! I guess most of you guys know me, for the ones that don’t my name is Iván Chávez and I’m going to be your moderator for this LaPazMUN 2012. Here’s a little bit more about me and well, I hope we all have a great time together.

 - Name: Iván Alejandro Chávez Castrejón

 - Age: 15 Years, my birthday is on January the 25^th.

 - Hobbies: First of all my friends; I love spending time with my friends (your chair and your secretary general for example, and they’re great!). I also like sports; my personal favorites are football & basketball. Just for the record Dallas Cowboys are what I live for.

 - What I don’t like: Spinach, bananas, etc. I can also say I don’t like boring committees. We have EVERTHING to be the best committee in the model guys: topics, staff & delegate so let’s just do it.

         Now you know me I guess we’re ready to rock! Ohhh and take some time to meet your other staff members, I’m sure you’ll like them.

    Topic A.  Right of freedom of expression, violence and censorship of the media

   Freedom of expression is one of the most fundamental rights that individuals enjoy. It is fundamental to the existence of democracy and the respect of human dignity. It is also one of the most dangerous rights, because freedom of expression means the freedom to express one's discontent with the status quo and the desire to change it. As such, it is one of the most threatened rights, with governments - and even human rights groups - all over the world constantly trying to curtail it.

   The United States, probably like no other nation, has recognized the importance of freedom of expression to safeguard democracy and grow as a nation. However, this does not mean there are no efforts to try to curtail it. The internet has often been the target of this efforts, as it provides practically everyone with the ability to communicate their ideas to wide audiences and escapes the ability of the state to control it.

T  his page is just being born, but in the future we hope to provide you with thorough information about what freedom of speech means, why it is important to protect it and what are the attempts to curtail it. Meanwhile we hope you find the information we do offer useful.

   Countries defending the right of freedom and expression

   Mainly USA, French and Germany are the ones who mainly protects this article.

    Countries violating the right of freedom and expression

   Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville,
Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon,
Laos, Mauritania, Rwanda, Togo, Tunisia, Vietnam, Angelia, Arabia Saudi, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia y Tunes

    Sources of information and research

·       Human rights. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.derechos.org/human-rights/speech/

·       Right of expression. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://issues.tigweb.org/expression

·       UNHRC session resolutions. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.ifex.org/sri_lanka/2012/02/28/unhrc_session/

·       Violations to the right of expression. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4f4b6bf92.html

·       Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2010 - Report of the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?page=search&docid=4daeab852&skip=0&query=violations%20of%20the%20freedom%20of%20expression

Topic B. Privatization of the internet and censorship of the media

     Internet censorship is control or suppression of the publishing or accessing of information on the Internet. The legal issues are similar to offline censorship.
    One difference is that national borders are more permeable online: residents of a country that bans certain information can find it on websites hosted outside the country. Conversely, attempts by one government to prevent its citizens from seeing certain material can have the effect of restricting foreigners, because the government may take action against Internet sites anywhere in the world, if they host objectionable material.
    Barring total control on Internet-connected computers, such as in North Korea, total censorship of information on the Internet is very difficult (or impossible) to achieve due to the underlying distributed technology of the Internet. Pseudonymity and data havens (such as Freenet) allow unconditional free speech, as the technology guarantees that material cannot be removed and the author of any information is impossible to link to a physical identity or organization.

    These are the countries that are against the internet

    In 2006 the organization Reporters without Borders published a list of the 13 "enemies of the Internet" these countries only show certain information filtered to their population limiting their knowledge of information from the world

1. Belarus
2. Burma
3. China
4. Cuba
5. Egypt
6. Iran
7. North Korea
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Syria
10. Tunisia
11. Turkmenistan
12. Uzbekistan
13. Vietnam

    These aren´t the only countries that filter the information before it arrives to their population many others countries also do it but in less scale than the countries previously mention.

   Level of privatization of the internet

   There are different levels of censorship: Pervasive, Substantial, and Nominal. Below are the countries that fall in the different categories.
  
 

    Pervasive

      Cuba

Iran 

Maldives 

Myanmar 

North Korea

People's Republic of China 

Syria 

Tunisia 

Uzbekistan 

Vietnam

    Substantial

      South Korea

Saudi Arabia 

United Arab Emirates 

Yemen

Qatar

    Nominal

      Australia

Brazil 

Canada 

Denmark 

European Union 

Fiji 

Finland 

France 

India 

Israel 

Italy 

Morocco 

Norway 

Pakistan 

Russia 

Singapore 

Sri Lanka 

Sweden 

Thailand 

Turkey 

United Kingdom 

United States of America

   Sources of information and research

·       Enemies of the internet. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.multilingualarchive.com/ma/enwiki/en/Internet_censorship#13_.22Enemies_of_the_Internet.22

·       Internet censorship. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.internet-censorship.com/

·       About Internet Censorship. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.vpnaccounts.com/about-internet-censorship.html

·       Internet censorship. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://www.princeton.edu/~csl/internet-censorship.html

·       Internet censorship. Page consulted on February 28^th. At: http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/issues/internet-censorship.htm

GA	Delegate	Country
1	Gutiérrez Chávez Mario	USA
2	Leomar Antonio González Olmos	RUSSIAN FEDERATION
3	Loza Limón Fernando	UK
4	Larios Xiadani	NETHERLANDS
5	Maza Zepeda Rodrigo	THAILAND
6	Campos Ramirez Pablo	AUSTRALIA
7	Onofre Santana Saul Alejandro	SOMALIA
8	Hernandez Ortiz Carlos	CHINA
9	Torrero Ochoa Fernando Mario	GERMANY
10	Robles René	FRANCE
11	Jallath Sofía	AFGHANISTAN
12	Guevara Guillermo	IRAN
13	Rueda Pla Gibran	CUBA
14	Tamayo Romero Guillermo	LIBYA
15  16	Reyes Pardo Emiliano Torres Castillo Aldo	NORTH KOREA ARAB EMIRATES

Useful Videos: 

Secretary Hillary Clinton's Internet Freedom Speech At GW:

Watch the Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acDcUQoeFxY

Publicity VS SOPA:

Click here to watch a commercial: VS SOPA

The next document talks about useful information concerning both topics. It is a position paper created by one of our Students to go to an outside MUN.

Check it out:

DELEGATION: United States of America

COMMITEE: UNICEF - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

TOPIC A: Crimes Against Journalism

Delegate: Sofia Jallath Carreon    

                                    

                  

                      Paragraphs 1 and 4 are missing from our formal position paper. 

                2) Background

The United States is a leader in the worldwide fight against corruption. When Congress enacted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977, many governments and international financial institutions were reluctant to discuss, much less attack, the problems of corruption found inside and outside their jurisdictions.

However when we talk about crimes against journalism all over the world, the situation changes. Talking first about journalism itself. “The freedom of the press” had always been for the United States of America a prior on its interests to promote its development, from News Papers, to Magazines, to Books, to Radio, to Television or to Internet.

Today the definition includes the freedom of communication and expression through vehicles including various electronic media and published materials. However governments have to protect their people from the misused of this information on behalf of protecting the national interest.

A list of how a violation on Journalism can be abroad stands on:

Misleading headlines

Deceptive or miss represented statistics

Statistics research or opinion from a dubious source


Hyperbole
 Cherry-picking (quotes, facts, science, etc.)


Fallacious arguments


Misplaced assumptions (e.g. news articles that start from a position of assuming marriage is the best option, homosexuality is not ‘normal’, Saddam Hussein is a serious and immediate threat to the UK, USA, Mexico, Canada, Spain and other countries.)


Pointlessness
Lack of context
Use of “scare” quotes.

Stolen Information

Plagiarism

Among Others.

Having to mention as well the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers".

At the same time, the Internet continues to be restrained in a myriad of ways. In China, the government censors content and redirects search requests to error pages. In Burma, independent news sites have been taken down with distributed denial of service attacks. In Cuba, the government is trying to create a national intranet, while not allowing their citizens to access the global Internet. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticize the government are arrested and abused. In Iran, the authorities block opposition and media websites, target social media, and steal identifying information about their own people in order to hunt them down.

3) United States’ Policy and Involvement

For the United States the position stands as on the same line of openness and freedom. However with freedom comes responsibility of calling for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. 

History shows us better on the right to protect our people. The Civil Rights Movement emerged in the mid-1950s with a series of boycotts against racially segregated facilities in the South, sparked by the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in the public schools. The protests reached a peak in the early 1960s, resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were watershed moments in postwar US history.

Overall the United States of America had always deal with this kind of situations because as one of the freest Countries of the World, people express themselves in any way possible. However situations like WikiLeaks are a perfect example of crime journalism, beginning with mentioning that they were put in front of a court because the information they published was stolen. And for that it became a crime.

       5) Proposals

The United States Government has not all the answers. We’re not sure we have all the questions. But we are committed to asking the questions, to helping lead a conversation, and to defending not just universal principles but the interests of our people and our partners.

The first challenge is achieving both liberty and security. Therefore United States Of America promotes the LAW SOPA  (Stop Online Piracy Act) for all the countries to have it as one of their own laws.

It is a proposed bill that aims to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting access to sites that host or facilitate the trading of pirated content.

As part of the same path and to protect journalists as well, The United States of America proposes the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act. Which amends the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to include provisions to spotlight governments that seek to silence any media whatsoever in opposition by calling upon of the examination of the status of freedom of the press worldwide.

Recognizing as well that this is not only a matter for UNESCO to solve but as well to be considered by United Nations of Human Rights.

Bibliography

ND, 2000 – 2001, Report to Congress Pursuant to the International Anticorruption and Good Governance Act (Public Law 106-309), Viewed March 2012, http://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/rpt/c6698.htm

Crimes Against Journalism, January 20, 2010, 2010, http://crimesagainstjournalism.wordpress.com/

Nadasen Premilla, Investigation U.S. History, The Black Freedom Movement, Nd, viewed March 2012, http://investigatinghistory.ashp.cuny.edu/m11.html

 Pepitone J. January 20, 2012, CNN Money, SOPA explained: What it is and why it matters, viewed March 2012,  http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/17/technology/sopa_explained/index.htm

Wikipedia, 23 Sept. 2011, Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, Viewed March 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pearl_Freedom_of_the_Press_Act