Derechos Hosts Web Site for Euskal Herria Journal
On July 18, 1997, the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) was forced to shut down the World Wide Web site it hosted for the Euskal Herria Journal after an electronic "mailbomb" campaign accomplished its design of overloading its computers. Instead of the Euskal Herria Journal homepage, visitors to http://www.igc.org/ehj/ now get a page explaining why the Euskal Herria Journal web site was taken off-line.
The campaign to overload IGC's computers appears to be in response to the murder of 29-year-old town councillor Miguel Angel Blanco on July 12 by ETA terrorists. Participants in the mailbomb attack appear to believe that the EHJ website supports ETA and they are committed to eliminating all ETA-related material from the Internet.
This attack on IGC is an attack against freedom of expression on the Internet. Censorship by vigilantes who disagree with a particular viewpoint are just as abhorrent as censorship by a government.
By denying a legitimate form of expresssion to distasteful opinions, those opinions are forced to find illegitimate means of expression. Although Derechos Human Rights may not agree with a particular opinion, it strongly supports the right of these opinions, especially those which are most controversial, to be expressed on the Internet and elsewhere.
As part of its committment to freedom of expression online, Derechos Human Rights has created a mirror of the Euskal Herria Journal web site at the URL: http://www.desaparecidos.org/ehj/
World wide web users can find here the information that some Internet users tried to censor in their attack on IGC.
Derechos Human Rights is an independent organization working for human rights around the world.
Other EHJ mirror sites:
http://osis.ucsd.edu/~ehj
http://www.easynet.co.uk/cam/censorship/ehj
http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/comp_law/ehj
http://zthomas.digiweb.com
http://www.contrast.org/mirrors/ehj/
Derechos Human Rights works against violations to human rights and humanitarian law all over the world.
