Censorship
Censorship
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practices, worship or observance.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19
I. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association:
II. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 20
What is censorship?
Censorship is the vaguest of terms. It takes many forms, ranging from some limited government restriction or regulation on news, information, or performance, to torture or summary execution. Over the years, it has evolved from the duties of the censor and census-taker in ancient Rome, taking careful note of people and possessions and ideas, to the highly technological tools of modern surveillance, carefully hidden from the democracy of the public sphere) In human rights circles, censorship is treated as an affront to individual freedom, a violation of our rights to know, to think, to express ourselves. It is a tool for state repression, for the maintenance of power (the task of any state, whatever color its rosette may be and whatever it claims for itself), achieved through the manipulation of the cultural sphere — ‘the history of censorship belongs to the history of culture and communication’.
Paul O’Higgins distinguishes between six types of censorship? The first is autonomous censorship. This is...
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