Middle East and North Africa
Our member SMEX is hosting its annual Bread&Net event on 1-4 December to address digital rights in the new reality: one that has impacted the digital economy, shifted the conversation around surveillance, and presented new opportunities for governments to censor online speech.
This year, governments in the Middle East and North Africa have continued to shut down and throttle the internet during grade and high school examinations. So far, governments in Jordan, Syria, Algeria, and Sudan have disrupted the internet during examinations.
With the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) kicking off this week in Guadalajara, Mexico, we developed a guide for participants from the Middle East and North Africa, identifying sessions on themes relevant in the region: human rights, security, trade, and the internet economy.
Mohammed Maskati at IGMENA, Tunis. 2 October 2016. Photo by Leila Nachawati Rego Mohammed al-Maskati is a renowned Bahraini human rights defender and founder of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights. He works as a digital security consultant for Front Line Defenders, a human rights organisation founded in 2001 to protect human rights defenders at risk. He has worked with a diversity of int...
Together for a free and open internet is the motto for this year’s IGMENA Summit, an event bringing together more than a hundred digital rights activists, human rights defenders, journalists and other stakeholders around internet rights and internet governance in the Middle East and North Africa, between 30 September and 2 October in Tunis.
This issue paper links challenges to civil participation in internet governance in the Middle East and North Africa and the state of internet rights in the region with civil society advocacy strategies, as well as providing some recommendations, with a focus on Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.
27 October marks one year since Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah was last arrested for his peaceful activism, and he has remained detained since then. We are all gathering around one hashtag – #FreeAlaa – to call for his release and the release of all those unjustly detained in Egypt.
