Republic Of Tunisia Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies

Distinguished delegates,

Ladies and Gentlemen

First, I would like to express my thanks to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for inviting me and for supporting my participation to this leading event. I also would like to thank and congrats our friends from Kenya for hosting two successful important events in less than a year, it was the IGF in September 2011 and today it is the 2012 online freedom conference.

Speech by M. Moez Chackchouk

The 2nd Freedom Online Conference on Sept 6th and 7th 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya

Panel session I: Censorship vs freedom of expression, assembly and association Introductory speech by Courtney Radsch, Freedom House, USA Panel discussion with: - Moez Chakchouk, CEO, Tunisia Internet Agency, Tunisia - Robert Guerra, Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, Canada - Beryl Aidi, Kenya Human Rights Commission, Kenya - Fieke Jansen, HIVOS, the Netherlands Online questions from Facebook and Twitter Closing remarks and speech by Guy Berger, UNESCO, South Africa

Today, I feel particularly privileged just because if the Tunisian first Arab Spring revolution did not happen in January 2011, I could never be with you for this debate whether as a government official nor as a CEO of the Tunisian Internet Agency, the agency that used to be the censorship machine for Internet in Tunisia for more than 15 years.

So, thanks god for making our Tunisian’s revolution comes true and for abolishing the censorship made by the dictator Ben Ali and his political regime.

Thus, it is worthy to notice again that it is the Tunisian people that generate the change in my country. For sure, it is not just the Internet and the Tunisian revolution was not an Internet revolution. Internet and particularly social media was just a major facilitator.

In fact, by promoting net censorship and by trying to control the Internet as a media, for different political reasons and as a network or a telecommunication facility for sometimes-untrue security concerns, the pre revolution government fueled the movements leaded by many activists and Internet Dissidents. That is obvious, because Internet is freedom and Internet is a human right, so no body could accept or support a government or a company, including multinational ones, which violates its fundamental rights including online freedom of expression and privacy.

So in Tunisia and under the Ben Ali’s regime, all the online content was monitored, and for political reasons, Tunisians Netizens faced the worst kind of net censorship. In fact, the oppressive government has set up all technical and human resources to implement: keywords filtering, DNS and URL blocking, DDoS attacks, profiles and mail hacking, etc, this in addition to DPI and severe active online surveillance.

The pre revolution regime had also arrested many cyber dissidents who made several actions denouncing the net censorship, especially during The World Summit on the Information Society hosted by my country in 2005, some of them get tortured in jail and unfortunately a well known one of them passed away few weeks after jail release.

The first week of January 2011 was decisive for the future of the Internet in Tunisia, Jan. 2, Anonymous announced the “#OpTunisia“ and attacked a lot of governmental websites hosted by the ATI, January 6, the most part of cyber-dissidents were arrested, finally a day before of his escape, Ben Ali announced the end of all sort of censorship in the country and released all the detainees.

Few months after the revolution, censorship has changed sides. Whereas the Tunisian netizens finally enjoyed a free and open Internet, and as our international bandwidth increased by 64% in 2011 compared to 2010, the ATI began facing new challenges and a lot of pressure just because we decided to not censor any more the Internet and promote our essential role as a neutral Internet Exchange point (IXP).

Talking about pressure, we first had complaints lodged against ATI by three lawyers in order to filter pornographic content. By February 2012, we won the case in the highest court and we still defending the ATI decision to not filter any content while encouraging the use of parental control solution instead of global net censorship. For this countries in the MENA region such as Egypt and actually, Jordan need to consider our experience in this field.

Second, we faced investigating magistrates while dealing with complaints lodged by military tribunal and by one person against another for defamation or for spreading false information has ordered the ATI to filter many facebook pages. We responded to those orders with a lot of care and we showed them that censoring does not make their investigation easier, as it will raise the popularity of those contents.

Third, we faced some persons including civil society members and some governmental officials that might have been linked to the regime and wanted to politicize the internet and block our will to evolve ATI and transform it as an IXP by raising in different occasions the intention of ATI to get back to net censorship. So they tried to spread rumors especially while we were defending the reform that the new government is supporting. This was not easy especially when international experts were involved and advised the Tunisian government to abolish ATI, it was in May 2012 and I was completely surprised because those supposed experts worked for new projects to promote economic growth. As we know how much resources are spent to promote ICT and create IXP in Africa particularly, I was surprised completely surprised that some experts wanted to destroy for untrue reason the unique IXP in the country and also a network defender.

For now, be sure that Tunisia will never be back to dictatorship and will not be anymore an enemy of the Internet and all those persons that still trying to get us backwards they are simply loosing their time, and are simply giving us more will and opportunities to get more strength and to be more determined to fight not just for Tunisia, as many other countries in this world, We are determined and we will never give up.

If we are here today, it’s because we are completely aware of the efficiency and the importance to keep advocating from the inside as well as from the outside in order to guarantee online freedom and defend it as a global interest for the humanity and for our future generations. There will be no economic development without ensuring human rights issues related to the Internet.

I would conclude by hoping that the Tunisian government would reveals one day to the world all details related to net censorship and surveillance during the regime of Ben Ali, as part of the transitional justice and the open data programs, and I hope that online freedom would be mentioned in the new constitutions as a fundamental right, so safeguards could make the freedom of Internet remain in Tunisia for ever.

All those hopes could be achieved if we (public and private sectors and civil society) trust each other and join our efforts to make the difference and generate the fruitful change.

And I finish my intervention by recalling what Mr. Frank Larue said in different occasions: “Internet will inevitably prevail as the open space of communication and free flow of ideas between peoples of the world”.

Thank you very much.