This type of power arises from the threat or actual imposition of unpleasant consequences.

I.A Basic Forms

Censorship takes two basic forms: state-imposed and self-imposed. The first form is forced by a group in power on the individuals who are subject to the group's authority. It usually includes penalties, or their threat, that create a “chilling effect,” prompting individuals to impose censorship on themselves to avoid punishment. In addition to the negative reinforcement of avoiding penalties for unsanctioned expression, the second form includes a more positive voluntary self-censorship by individuals who decide for themselves that restricting their forms of expression has its own merit. The channels of censorship can vary widely, from group-to-group communication to person-to-person communication. Likewise, a wide range of media—including literature, art, music, electronic communications, and casual speech—can be subjected to censorship. In each case, censorship is perceived as lessening objectionable expressions and either directly or indirectly promoting beneficial ones.

Abstract

Censorship includes any kind of suppression or regulation, by government or other authority, of a writing or other means of expression, based on its content. The authority need not apply to a whole judicature, and the effects of its censorship may be local. The term is sometimes used polemically by critics of a practice that would not be described as ‘censorship’ by those who approve of it: In the United States, the term has often been applied in this way to the activities of school or library boards in preventing the use or purchase of books that contain sexual scenes or teach Darwinism. It does seem that an activity has at least to be publicly recognized in order to count as censorship; interference with mail by the secret police or covert intimidation of editors would be examples of something else. Accordingly, any censorship implies a public claim of legitimacy for the type of control in question.

Abstract

Censorship involves the suppression of communication that may be valuable or harmful to the censor, the individual or group censored, or the intended recipient of the communication. Researchers and scholars have been censored throughout history by religious, political, military, and corporate powers. During the twenty-first century, much debate has surrounded questions about the potential censorship of ‘dual-use’ biological research that could enable production and use of biological weapons. Whether or not censorship would be ethically appropriate in this contemporary context depends on how trade-offs should be made between the values of free communication and harm prevention.

2.1 Definitions and Differences

Censorship of communication in the modern sense is associated with large, complex, urban societies with a degree of centralized control and technical means of effectively reaching a mass audience. It involves a determination of what can, and cannot, (or in the case of nongovernmental efforts should and should not) be expressed to a broader audience in light of given political, religious, cultural, and artistic standards. Censorship may involve withholding or editing existing information, as well as preventing information from being created. In the interest of keeping material from a broader audience, content deemed to be offensive or harmful to public welfare is suppressed or regulated.

At the most general level any rule, whether codified or customary, proscribing self-expression (e.g., nudity, hairstyles, body adornment, language use) or the surveillance and suppression of personal communication (phone, mail) can be seen as a form of censorship. But our focus is primarily on state-supported efforts to control mass communication justified by claims of protecting the public interest, a form with profound implications for a democratic society.

Censorship assumes that certain ideas and forms of expression are threatening to individual, organizational, and societal well-being, as defined by those in power, or by those involved in a moral crusade, and hence must be prohibited. It presupposes absolute standards, which must not be violated.

Much censorship assumes that all individuals, not just children, are vulnerable and need protection from offending material—whether pornography or radical criticism of existing political and religious authority. Individuals cannot be trusted to decide what they wish to see and read or to freely form their own opinions.

Some censorship is largely symbolic, offering a way to enhance social solidarity by avoiding insults to shared values (e.g., a prohibition on flag burning). It may be a form of moral education as with prohibitions on racist and sexist speech. Or masquerading under high principles of protecting public welfare and morals, it may simply involve a desire to protect the interests of the politically, economically, and religiously powerful by restricting alternative views, and criticism or delegitimation of those in power.

Among the most common historical rationales are political (sedition, treason, national security), religious (blasphemy, heresy), moral (obscenity, impiety), and social (incivility, irreverence, disorder). These of course may be interconnected. What they share is a claim that the public interest will be negatively affected by the communication.

Censorship may be located publicly relative to other legal forms of secrecy. Censorship is justified by the protection of public welfare. Rationales for other legally supported forms include: the protection of private property for trade secrets; economic efficiency and fairness justifications in common law disputes over secret information; the encouragement of honest communication and/or protection from retaliation underlying forms such as lawyer–client and doctor–patient confidentiality, the secret ballot, and a judge's en camera ruling that the identity of an informant need not be revealed; the protection of intimate relations in the case of spousal privilege; the protection against improperly elicited confessions underlying the Fifth Amendment; the strategic advantage justification of sealed warrants and indictments; and the respect for the dignity and privacy of the person justification for limits on the collection and use of personal information, whether involving census, tax, library, or arrest (as against conviction) records. There has been little empirical research on whether, how well, with what consequences, and under what conditions these justifications are met.

Censorship is involuntary, unlike a nondisclosure agreement that parties to a court settlement voluntarily agree to. Censorship is unitary and nondiscretionary—those subject to it don't have the option of communicating. In contrast, the dyad of a confidential professional relationship is discretionary for one party, such as the client; with the client's permission, a doctor or lawyer may reveal confidential information. Censorship seeks to withhold information from a mass audience, rather than a given individual, as with controversial laws preventing revelation of the identity of birth parents to adoptees. Where information exists but censors prevent its release, it is intended to remain secret. In contrast are legal secrets involving a natural cycle of revelation such as sealed indictments and search and arrest warrants, which become known when executed, or an industry confidentiality agreement, which may expire after a few years. Censorship as a form of secrecy stands alone. It is not reciprocally and functionally linked with its opposite—the legal mandate to reveal. For example some civil grand juries compel testimony, but then promise to keep it confidential.

Censorship is distinct from government regulation of fraudulent or deceptive commercial communication, which, unlike opinion and artistic expression, offers a clearer basis for empirically determining truth, as with the Federal Trade Commission's truth in advertising requirements. Censorship is separate from restrictions on communication based on copyright infringements, where the issue is not secrecy, but wrongful use. It is also distinct from editorial gatekeeping based on other criteria such as quality, cost, demand, and relevance, and in the case of regulating public demonstrations and entertainment, public safety and order. These can of course mask a desire to censor that would not otherwise be legally supported.

Government-legitimated censorship is distinct from censorious outcomes that may result from the actions of private groups. With the separation of church and state, only censorship by government has the support of law. Nongovernmental organizations such as a religious group or social movement may prohibit, or attempt to dissuade, members and others from producing, disseminating, or reading, listening to, or viewing material deemed objectionable. They may request editorial changes, advocate boycotts, and lobby school boards, libraries, bookstores, and theaters to exclude such material.

When we look at social processes of information control such as withholding information and selective presentation, a form of censorship may sometimes be seen in propaganda, public relations, and advertising, as public and private sector actors pursue their interest in creating favorable public impressions. Consider for example cigarette companies withholding information on the health risks of smoking or tire manufacturers not revealing the knowledge that their tires are unsafe.

1.4 E-government and Internet censorship

Censorship might seem to be an odd topic for a book on e-government. Yet to the extent that governments limit access to the Web, and its contents, it shapes the number of people who have access to e-government services. Of all of the innumerable myths that swarm around cyberspace, one of the most insidious is that the Internet is an inherently emancipatory tool, a device that necessarily promotes democracy by giving voice to those who lack political power, and in so doing undermines authoritarian and repressive governments. For example, the chair of Citicorp, Walter Wriston (1997, p. 174) argued that “the virus of freedom… is spread by electronic networks to the four corners of the earth.” Such visions appeal widely to Western policy makers, who tend to exaggerate the extent and power of ostensibly freedom-loving cyberdissidents. Closely associated with this idea is that the global community of netizens is a self-governing one in which the state has become largely irrelevant (Goldsmith and Wu, 2006). The reality, unfortunately, is more complex and depressing, and the necessary corrective calls for a state-centered approach. As Lake (2009) notes, “the Web is not nearly the implacable force for freedom that some of its champions have portrayed. The world’s authoritarians have shown just as much aptitude for technology as their discontented citizens.” Many governments across the planet aggressively limit access to the Internet, and as Kalathil and Boas (2003) demonstrate, Internet opposition to censorship and political activism is typically confined to small groups of educated individuals, often diasporas, and has relatively little impact among the masses of their respective states.

Internet accessibility reflects, inter alia, the willingness of governments to allow or encourage their populations to log-in to cyberspace. Repressive governments often fear the emancipatory potential of the Internet, which allows individuals to circumvent tightly controlled media channels. Theorizations of Internet censorship can draw fruitfully on contemporary geographic discussions of the state, power, and discourse; Foucauldian perspectives loom large in this regard. Critical analyses of cyberspace, for example, point to geosurveillance, invasions of privacy, and the formation of digital panopticons (Crampton, 2007; Dobson and Fisher, 2007). Such work has demonstrated that clearly the Internet can be made to work against people as well as for them. Far from being innately emancipatory in nature, cyberspace can be used to reinforce hegemonic powers, spy on citizens, cultivate a climate of fear, and prevent or minimize dissent.

There are multiple motivations for Internet censorship, and thus several forms and types, including political repression of dissidents, human rights activists, or comments insulting to the state (e.g., in China, Iran, Myanmar); religious controls to inhibit the dissemination of ideas deemed heretical or sacrilegious (as found in many Muslim states); protections of intellectual property, including restrictions on illegally downloaded movies and music; or cultural restrictions that exist as part of the oppression of ethnic minorities (e.g., refusal to allow government websites in certain languages) or sexual minorities (i.e., gays and lesbians). Typically, governments that seek to impose censorship do so using the excuse of protecting public morality from ostensible sins such as pornography or gambling, although more recently combating terrorism has emerged as a favorite rationale. Deliberately vague notions of national security and social stability are typically invoked as well.

Governments face a choice in the degree of censorship, including its scope (or range of topics) and depth (or degree of intervention), which ranges from allowing completely unfettered flows of information (e.g., Denmark) to essentially prohibiting access to the Internet altogether (e.g., North Korea); most opt for a position between these two poles. Most frequently, interventions to limit access or shape the contents of cyberspace reflect highly centralized power structures, notably authoritarian one-party states concerned with an erosion of legitimacy. As Villeneuve (2006) points out, states seeking sovereignty over their cyberterritories often generate unintended consequences to censorship (e.g., diminished innovation, negative publicity that may lead to pariah status, reduced tourism, or offended corporations), results that policy makers rarely anticipate or acknowledge when putting such systems into place.

Essentially, censorship involves control over Internet access, functionality, and contents (Eriksson and Giacomello, 2009). Precise filtering is almost impossible, but there is a wide variety of methods used to control the flow of digital information, including requiring discriminatory ISP (Internet service provider) licenses, content filtering based on keywords, redirection of users to proxy servers, rerouting packets destined for a specific IP address to a blacklist, website blocking of a list of IP addresses, tapping and surveillance, chat room monitoring, discriminatory or prohibitive pricing policies, hardware and software manipulation, hacking into opposition websites and spreading viruses, denial-of-service attacks that overload servers or network connections using “bot herders,” temporary just-in-time blocking at moments when political information is critical, such as elections, and harassment of bloggers (e.g., via libel laws or invoking national security). Content filtering often relies on keyword matching algorithms that evolve as the Internet’s lingo changes, and filtering may occur at the levels of the ISP, the domain name, a particular IP address, or a specific URL. Most forms of filtering are difficult to detect technically: the user may not even know that censorship is at work. Most ISPs lack the ability to block transmission to an individual IP address or URL, so governments undertaking this task in volume frequently purchase foreign (usually American) software for this purpose. Filtering mechanisms suffer the risk of overblocking, or “false positives,” i.e., blocking access to sites that were not intended to be censored, and underblocking, or “false negatives,” i.e., allowing access to sites that were intended to be prohibited (Murdoch and Anderson, 2008). Most common and particularly important is self-censorship, as the bulk of Internet users well understand the boundaries of politically acceptable use within their respective states. Often cultivating a persuasive, hegemonic view of dominant powers is more efficient than outright force. Typically both persuasion and coercion are combined as local contexts demand. Once formal censorship is initiated, no matter how benign or transparent, the temptation to enlarge its scope, or what Villeneuve (2006) calls “mission creep,” is always there.

Generally, authoritarian governments in countries with low-Internet penetration rates resort to relatively crude measures, such as restricting public access through licenses and monitoring of cybercafes. A national, sanitized intranet may be offered as a substitute for the global Internet. Cuba, Vietnam, and Burma/Myanmar exemplify this approach. As more people move online, including rising home personal computer ownership rates, a more complex, expensive, and cumbersome set of censorship mechanisms is called for, including firewalls and blocking or filtering website access. Arrests and imprisonment of cyberdissidents may be common. China, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia are prime exemplars of these tactics. A third stage involves widespread Internet access, in which “soft” censorship tactics are the norm, particularly self-censorship and encouraging ISPs to police their users. Singapore and Russia illustrate this type and degree of government intervention. Finally, at least in the hopes of many optimistic observers, widespread Internet usage can overwhelm the state’s capacity to control dissent, as is increasingly the case in China today.

The institutions used to enforce such policies, which are typically outgrowths of older media regulatory regimes concerned with newspapers, radio, and television, are usually government ministries of information and communication. The degree of centrality in the management of Internet censorship varies considerably. Because the state is not a monolithic entity but composed of diverse agencies, sometimes working at cross-purposes, rather than view censorship as the simple repression of oppositional discourses it is more instructive to think of it in terms of multiple, sometimes contradictory authorities that invoke diverse strategies of suppression of various groups and individuals for a broad array of reasons and motivations. Adding to this complexity is the rapidity with which the Internet has grown and changed technologically; often government censors have difficulty keeping up-to-date with changing technologies (e.g., text messaging) or slang terms used to communicate hidden meanings.

However, Internet censorship should be seen as part of a more complex array of contested relations in cyberspace: the Web is not simply a tool of government control but an arena of conflict. Thus, the Internet also serves various counterhegemonic purposes, including human rights groups and ethnic or political movements in opposition to governments. Attempts at censorship are often resisted, sometimes successfully, by local cyberactivists, such as through the use of anonymizing proxy servers in other countries that encrypt users’ data and cloak their identities. Today, numerous groups in civil society use the medium to connect isolated once-invisible populations (e.g., gays and lesbians), unite and empower women’s movements, give voice to human rights activists, and allow political minorities to promote their own agendas. Thus, Internet usage both reflects and in turn shapes prevailing political orders. In authoritarian regimes with relatively weak civil societies, opposition to state control is often weak and ineffectual; in more democratic states, opposition can be organized, vociferous, and effectual. When seen as a contested terrain of political struggle, the interactions between government Internet censors and the various groups that resist such impositions resemble a cat-and-mouse game that continually evolves over time. As the context of Internet censorship changes, including rising penetration rates, deregulation of telecommunications providers, and new geopolitical circumstances (e.g., openness to foreign investment), both government authorities and their opponents resort to changing tactics. Overt control over cybercafés, for example, may give way to government blockages of dissident websites, while opposition groups may utilize foreign proxy servers, anonymizing software, or texting by cell phones to circumvent such obstacles. The outcome of such contestations is inevitably path dependent, contingent, and unpredictable.

International Law on Prior Censorship

Prepublication censorship as an administrative action is incompatible with the free press principle in a democracy. This is explicitly recognized by the American Convention on Human Rights:

The exercise of the right [to freedom of thought and expression] … shall not be subject to prior censorship but shall be subject to subsequent imposition of liability which shall be expressly established by law to the extent necessary to ensure:

1. respect for the rights or reputations of others; or

2. the protection of national security, public order, or public health or morals.

Censorship

Censorship has always been a feature of war. As Susan Sontag (2003) once stated, if the governments had their way, all poetry or representation of war would beat the drum to celebrate the soldier's sacrifice. In the nuclear age, however, censorship is a pivotal feature.

First, because the army filmed and documented the bombings, most narratives are controlled by the army through declassified images provided to the public. The images of atomic mushrooms and the discussion of the power of the bombs in megatons of TNT and political strategies catalyzed people's fascination and anxieties. Even today, the actual effects of the bombs on the Japanese, Marshallese, Polynesian, Native Indian, Eastern European (and many more) hibakusha are not engraved in collective global memories despite a large body of visual and textual testimonies (most of which have long been translated into English). This is the result of the lasting effect of censorship.

Second, censorship was enforced on victims (mostly in Japan). In postwar Japan, as quickly as September 19, 1945, US General Douglas MacArthur and the General Headquarters (GHQ) instituted the Press Code. Public mention and information about the bombings were forbidden in Japan until 1951–52. The Press Code primarily targeted newspapers but inspected everything published or performed in Japan, including books, magazines, newspapers, radios, movie scenarios, theatrical scripts, and pamphlets. The effectiveness of the censorship is often discussed. On the one hand, postwar occupation lifted the Japanese imperial censorship that had produced war propaganda art and literature. Then, a handful of books of A-bomb literature was published at least one year after the bombings: Hara Tamiki's Summer Flowers (1947), Ōta Yōko's City of Corpses (1948), and Nagai Takashi's The Bells of Nagasaki (1949). On the other hand, all of these authors had to navigate through the net of censorship. Nagai was first censored in 1946, then instructed to add a chapter on the Japanese atrocities in the Philippines. Hara's book was published in full in 1949, and Ota's book in 1950. Notably, her second chapter, which referred to the work of Japanese radiation experts, had been censored in the 1948 edition. Then, poetess Shōda Shinoe published her poetry book on the bombings secretly, distributing it illegally, in dire fear of being caught and killed (during wartime Japan, in 1933, proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji was tortured and killed by police).

Once the Press Code loosened, after the San Francisco Treaty was signed in 1951 and enforced in April 1952, a flurry of literary and visual testimonies was rushed into publication in Japan, such as Tōge Sankichi's Poems of the Atomic Bomb (1952), the film Children of Hiroshima (1952), and the photo album Hiroshima: War and City (1952). The latter is a collection of particularly frontal photos of victims. Even more remarkable was the print run of a special issue of Asahi Graph featuring pictures of the two cities and published on August 6, 1954. It sold 520,000 copies the first day (and 700,000 in total). By then, however, the global focus of attention had shifted to Soviet Russia and the Cold War. Nowadays, publications on testimonies are endless and carefully recorded and are displayed by the two cities at their peace museums. Yet, very few of them reach the global collective memory of the bombs.

Censorship is also the key feature of the Cold War. In the United States, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was created in the name of national security but succeeded in keeping secret anything relating to nuclear activities, research, and production. In France, the same goes with the Très Secret-Défense under the section Vulcan. The veil of secrecy can be lifted by accident at times. Irradiation of the Japanese fishing crew of the Lucky Dragon is one example. Another example is India, which took everyone by surprise in 1974, when Indira Gandhi caused many tensions with her “peaceful” test called “Smiling Buddha.” The test prompted Pakistan to have its own program. Another example is the incident of the Rainbow Warrior in July 1985, in which the Greenpeace antinuclear ship was sunk in Auckland, New Zealand, by two French agents of the intelligence services under the code name “Opération Satanique.” The explosion onboard caused the death of two activists.

To shortcut the game of spying officially to know what nation develops what types of nuclear weaponry, the United States developed a “peaceful” strategy. In the heart of the Cold War, US President Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 address to the United Nation, the famous “Atom for Peace” speech, led to the amendment of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to allow for information exchange—and therefore control—with other nations. The speech was directed toward the civilian use of nuclear energy, thus overshadowing decades of research on nuclear medicine that had already been peaceful since the Curies.

The last way to undo state censorship is to listen, record, and disseminate the voice of the victims. This is a role massively taken by survivor's associations, investigative journalism, and militant artists.

See also:

Censorship and Secrecy: Legal Perspectives; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Movement, The; Constitutionalism, Comparative; Discrimination; European Union Law; Freedom/Liberty: Impact on the Social Sciences; Freedom: Political; Fundamental Rights and Constitutional Guarantees; Globalization: Legal Aspects; Human Rights, Anthropology of; Human Rights, History of; Human Rights in Intercultural Discourse: Cultural Concerns; Human Rights: Political Aspects; International Law and Treaties; Judicial Review in Law; Law and Democracy; Law and Development; Law as an Instrument of Social Change; Legal Culture and Legal Consciousness; Legal Positivism; Natural Law; Rights: Legal Aspects; Rule of Law; Socialist Law; Torture: Legal Perspectives

II.C Censorship and Restrictions on the Flow of Information

Censorship takes a variety of forms, and among the most common are the pre-screening and banning of publications. Press laws and other legal devices grant authorities the power to halt publication of newspapers for violating a host of vague provisions and in fact governments across the region have used such laws to shut down newspapers, confiscate editions, or prevent distribution. Examples are numerous and varied.

In the early 1990s after the Algerian military cancelled elections to deny the Islamist Salvation Front (FIS) victory at the polls, the authorities shut down several papers that were sympathetic with the FIS or had been critical of the abrogation of the electoral process. Courts in Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen have ordered papers closed for varying periods for violating the countries' press laws.

In October 1999, a Yemeni court imposed a one-month suspension on the opposition weekly Al-Haq for allegedly inciting sectarianism and regionalism in opinion columns published in 1997 and 1999, including one that strongly criticized government administration in southern Yemen. And in Egypt, the Ministry of Information revoked the license of the weekly Al-Dustour after it published a communiqué reputedly from an Islamist organization threatening to kill Coptic businessmen.

More recently in December 2000, for example, the Moroccan government permanently banned the weekly newspapers Le Journal, Al-Sahiffa, and Demain after they had published or commented on a letter alleging that Prime Minister Abderrahamane Youssefi, a former left-wing activist, had been involved in a 1972 leftist plot to assassinate the late King Hassan II. All three newspapers were banned under Article 77 of the Press Code, which allows the government to suppress publications deemed to threaten Morocco's political or religious foundations.

Sometimes closures take place without any formal legal reference. Arbitrary censorship has been a common feature of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Authority (PNA). The PNA has arbitrarily closed down newspapers and television and radio stations for unfavorable coverage. In a prominent case in 2001, PNA security forces temporarily shut down the Ramallah office of the popular Qatar-based satellite news channel Al-Jazeera for three days in March. The move resulted from an Al-Jazeera promotional trailer advertising a documentary series about the Lebanese civil war which contained an unflattering image of Arafat.

Laws also empower governments to impose news blackouts about certain events. According to the U.S. Department of State in its annual human rights report, Egypt's public prosecutor “may issue a temporary ban on the publication of news pertaining to cases involving national security and order so as to protect the confidentiality of the cases.” In 1997, the government imposed three media blackouts banning all local and foreign coverage of a libel suit between the interior minister and an opposition, the military prosecution of individuals implicated in a deadly attack on tourists in Cairo, and an investigation of a Cairo prostitution ring. Jordan's press law provides similar powers to prosecutors to quash coverage of trials or legal investigations. On three occasions in 1998 there were media blackouts on coverage of major events, such as the trial of leading political opposition figure Leith Shubeilat, a triple homicide in Amman, and a water pollution crisis.

The Algerian government imposed more extreme blanket censorship when in June 1994 it imposed a decree that banned all reporting on political violence except for information provided by the official Algerian Press Service (APS). Authorities also established censorship committees to ensure compliance. These were later abolished and the 1994 restriction eventually made obsolete as the state loosened its grip and newspapers largely disregarded the restriction.

Government censorship in the region also extends to foreign publications. Various ministries and security agencies monitor foreign publications that enter the country and often bar distribution of publications that contain undesirable content. Saudi Arabia, for example, employs one of the more strict regimes for weeding out objectionable news publications. In its annual human rights country report, the U.S. State Department reports that “[c]ensors may remove or blacken the offending articles, glue pages together, or prevent certain issues of foreign publications from entering the market.” In Tunisia, authorities have enforced tight censorship on foreign publications that have been critical of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali or have criticized the country's human rights record. In 1997, the Committee to Protect Journalists documented at least 37 issues of Le Monde that were banned from distribution in the country alone. The practice continues to the present day. Jordan and Syria were among several other countries that also had actively censored foreign newspapers in the 1990s.

In Egypt the government pre-screens foreign publications, including so-called off-shore papers. These publications are often locally run but licensed abroad in countries such as Cyprus in order to circumvent the government's tight restrictions on publishing licenses. Over the years, Egyptian censors have pulled articles and entire issues from circulation because of objectionable material. One title, the English-language weekly Middle East Times, was a regular target of authorities in the 1990s as was the English-language magazine Cairo Times. Some offshore papers have worked out arrangements with the censors to show their proofs for prior approval in order to prevent entire issues from being confiscated.

II.C Other Forms of Content Regulation

Censorship is not the only means of regulating media content. Although free speech and freedom of information are guaranteed (at least on paper) throughout the former Soviet world, constitutions and laws in all former Soviet republics include certain exceptions to the rule. Wording varies from country to country, but the media are generally barred from publicizing speech that incites ethnic or religious hatred, appeals to change the constitutional order through force, or promotes the “propaganda of war.” (This last point has never been applied to news or commentaries supporting officially sanctioned wars and military campaigns, such as the Russian armed forces' battles with Chechen separatists.)

Certain prohibitions on hate speech, such as those found in the constitutions of Russia and the Baltic states, are consistent with European law. However, statutes in some CIS countries are vaguely worded, giving officials broad latitude to punish almost any media criticism. A local newspaper in Kazakhstan was shut down indefinitely in 2000 for “incitement to rebellion.” A decree adopted by the presidential administration in Kyrgyzstan in 2001 changed the Criminal Code to allow prison terms for persons “who produce or distribute information intended to overthrow or undermine the constitutional order.” Watchdog groups warned the measure would create more opportunities to imprison journalists who criticized the authorities.

Prohibitions on disseminating “false news” have also been used in many CIS countries to punish media outlets that publicize negative or embarrassing developments in news reports or critical views in opinion commentaries. Prosecutors opened criminal cases against several Ukrainian publications in late 1998 for allegedly disseminating false information. All of the articles in question criticized President Leonid Kuchma or members of his entourage. Even the media law in Moldova contains a “false news” provision, although Moldovan journalists have faced less persecution than their counterparts in most CIS countries.

In the United States, public figures enjoy less protection from media criticism under defamation law. But across the CIS, the opposite is frequently true: many criminal codes provide special protection for the president or other senior officials, thereby limiting freedom of expression. Journalists in Central Asia and Azerbaijan have gone to prison for violating the rule against “insulting” high officials or “defaming” state institutions. Belarus prohibits the import and distribution of print, audio, and video materials containing “information discrediting the honor and dignity of the heads of state bodies whose status is established by the constitution of Belarus.” The chilling effect of such rules can be difficult to overstate, especially in authoritarian states. As the European Institute for the Media noted in its 1999 study of the media in the CIS, virtually any information about anything in Turkmenistan can be considered an attack on the president when the president controls almost all developments in the country. Moldova's media law bars publications that “defame the state and people of the country,” but the Moldovan parliament in 1996 deleted an article in the Criminal Code specifying the punishment for defaming the president or the speaker of the parliament.

Defamation law does not apply exclusively to senior officials; all of the former Soviet republics forbid slander, libel, and insulting the honor and dignity of any citizen. While rules against libel and slander apply to the media in virtually every country, the way they are written in the former Soviet republics has facilitated a powerful method of post-publication content regulation. For one thing, defamation is covered by the criminal codes of all the countries in question, except for Georgia, where the article covering libel and slander was removed from the criminal code in 2000. Even in the Baltic states, defamation can be considered a crime, not merely grounds for civil damages. Disseminating false and defamatory information is a crime in Estonia. Lithuania's criminal code bars deliberate insult. In Latvia, not only can media outlets be prosecuted for slander, but courts can shut down media that are convicted under that article of the criminal code.

Allowing criminal prosecution for defamatory speech is frowned on in Western legal circles because of the potential for abuse, and the post-Soviet experience bears that out. For example, a Ukrainian newspaper editor was prosecuted for publishing a 1997 article that allegedly defamed the acting prime minister.

However, the media in the CIS and Baltic states rarely face criminal prosecution for defamation. Much more common—but potentially deadly for media outlets—are civil lawsuits seeking large damages. In Russia, as in most former Soviet countries, the majority of court cases involving the media are related to alleged defamation. Plaintiffs win the vast majority of such court cases, because across the former Soviet world, the law places the burden of proof on the media, rather than on the plaintiff. (Georgia's parliament shifted the burden of proof in libel cases to plaintiffs in 1999.) Russian law is typical, requiring media outlets to prove the truth of statements at issue in a lawsuit while not distinguishing between statements of fact and opinion. Because it is virtually impossible to prove the truth of a negative opinion about someone (for instance, when a journalist characterizes a controversial politician as a “fascist”), the deck is stacked against the media.

Heavy fines imposed by courts in defamation cases have caused problems for media outlets everywhere in the former Soviet world. While commentators have often bemoaned the lack of professionalism among journalists, defamation lawsuits have often been used as cover for politically motivated persecution of media outlets, and in many countries such cases have forced media outlets into bankruptcy. Huge damage awards in defamation cases against prominent newspapers in Kyrgyzstan prompted the Committee to Protect Journalists to name that country one of the world's worst places to be a journalist in 2002. A Russian court hearing a libel case against Novaya gazeta, one of the few newspapers to consistently criticize President Vladimir Putin, in 2002 levied a fine roughly ten times larger than the combined fines in more than 50 previous defamation lawsuits in Russia. Azerbaijan ended censorship before the 1998 presidential election, but after that election, several cabinet ministers sued opposition newspapers based on articles that appeared during the presidential campaign. In Moldova, journalists consider libel and slander lawsuits to be the main source of attacks on press freedom.

In line with the requirements for accession to the European Union, the Baltic republics have adopted certain other content regulations—for instance, regarding restrictions on advertising and quotas for non-European production of programming.