At a two day conference in Berlin looking at the rise in
hate-sites on the internet, the German President Johannes Rau
yesterday called for new rules to limit racist and xenophobic web
sites. In Germany alone there are around 330 extreme right-wing web
sites, according to the country’s internal security watchdog.
European Commissioner for Justice and Home affairs, António
Vitorino, told the conference:
“The Commission will propose this year an
initiative in the area of child pornography on the internet as part
of a wider package of proposals, which will also cover issues
associated with the sexual exploitation of children and trafficking
in human beings. We will also examine [...] the opportunity to
propose a similar initiative concerning the fight against [racism
and xenophobia]."
Vitorino went on to describe existing forms of cross-border
assistance as “entirely inadequate” for internet crime
investigations and, to remedy this, called for the application of
“mutual recognition principles to the preservation of traffic data
and the search and seizure of data on the internet.”
He said that the Commission intends closer collaboration with
ISPs and telecommunications operators to assist in training law
enforcement staff.
Robert Cailliau, who is credited as a co-founder of the World
Wide Web with Tim Berners-Lee, called for licensing of internet
users. He said: “I am opposed to censorship by the industry itself,
but sites and authors should be registered [and] the legal
framework must be global.”
