Rights group: Tunisia blocks al-Jazeera's website after elections

Oct 27, 2009, 19:46 GMT

Cairo - Tunisia blocked access to the website of regional satellite news channel al-Jazeera after the results of the presidential election were announced, a rights group said Tuesday.

The claim followed Monday's announcement that Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who has been in power for 27 years, had won a new term with 89.62 per cent of the vote.

The Cairo-based Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, which specializes in reporting on online censorship throughout the Arab world, said Tunisia's ban on the website showed that 'Ben Ali had won, and democracy had lost' in the elections.

'This is a blow to citizens' right to access true and accurate information,' the group said. 'It makes Tunisians easy prey for the official Tunisian media, which is known to lack independence and diversity of opinions.'

'All Tunisians will see now are different faces, all advocating the same opinion,' the group said.

Tunisian government spokesmen could not immediately be reached to comment on the matter, but during the presidential campaign President Ben Ali said he was committed to democracy and freedom of expression.

'No (online) content is blocked or censored, except for obscene material or content threatening public order,' Riadh Dridi, then the charge d'affairs at Tunisia's embassy in Washington, told the New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch in 2005.

Attempts to access al-Jazeera's website from Tunis returned a 'page not found' error message, which is typical of sites blocked in the country.

In August, the Open Net Initiative, a joint project of the universities of Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Toronto, concluded that 'Tunisia maintains a focused, effective system of Internet control that blends content filtering with harsh laws to censor objectionable and politically threatening information.'

The group found that Tunisia employed 'pervasive' censorship of opposition political material on the Internet, and criticized the false 'page not found' error pages as an 'opaque' form of censorship.

This year's presidential election results were the first to show Ben Ali winning less than 90 per cent of the vote. In 2004, Ben Ali garnered 94.48 per cent of the vote, after receiving more than 99 per cent in the previous poll.

Two candidates viewed as friendly to the regime, Popular Unity Party (PUP) head Mohammed Bouchiha and Ahmed Inoubli of the Unionist Democratic Union (UDU), drew 5.01 per cent and 3.8 per cent respectively.

Ahmed Brahim, the only candidate considered to represent a real opposition to the president, came in last with only 1.57 per cent of the vote.