French Constitutional Council Validates Internet Censorship

LOPPSI’s article 4 gives the executive branch the power to suppress the flow of information on the Internet. In a highly hypocritical move, the government claims to be fighting child pornography, a goal for which filtering is both ineffective and vastly overkill, especially given the risk of collateral censorship of perfectly legal websites²See the amicus curiæ sent by La Quadrature to the Constitutional Council http://www.laquadrature.net/fr/loppsi-les-sages-devraient-censurer-la-censure-du-net
See also l’Ange Bleu‘s position (pedophilia information and prevention NGO): http://www.ange-bleu.com/article.php?type=actualites&origine=juriactu&id=113. There is a high risk of seeing such a scheme used for other goals.

“This decision about article 4 is a great disappointment. It is obvious that Internet censorship will not help solve the child pornography problem in any way, as experiments in other countries have shown³ See the letter sent by ISPs and the Dutch pedophilia prevention association: https://www.bof.nl/2011/03/07/dutch-providers-abandon-ineffective-web-blocking/ Similarly, Germany gave up on filtering as its efficiency could not be proven: http://www.laquadrature.net/fr/loppsi-comment-lallemagne-a-renonce-a-la-censure-du-net. After HADOPI’s Internet access suspension measures, calls to ban WikiLeaks hosting and recent talks against Net Neutrality, France is siding ever more with the group of countries hostile to a free Internet by adopting administrative filtering of the Internet.”, says Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net.

“It is unfortunate that the Constitutional Council did not build on its own HADOPI jurisprudence by giving the judiciary branch exclusive authority to control restrictions to online free speech. The solution may lie in European institutions: the EU Parliament is currently trying to supervise blocking measures adopted at the national level, which could impede their implementation in France⁴See EDRi’s analysis of the recent vote of the civil liberties committee of the EU Parliament. Address: http://www.edri.org/stop_web_blocking_2. Moreover, administrative Net filtering seems contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights⁵See our memo in French, “Net Filtering Violates the Rule of Law”. Address: http://www.laquadrature.net/fr/le-filtrage-dinternet-viole-letat-de-droit See also: Cormac Callanan, Marco Gercke, Estelle De Marco et Hein Dries-Ziekenheiner, 2009, Internet Blocking: Balancing Cybercrime Responses in Democratic Societies, Aconite Internet Solutions. Address: http://www.aconite.com/blocking/study, and one can expect an appeal before European judges.”, concludes Félix Tréguer, policy and legal analyst for the advocacy group.