Social media, including Facebook, must proactively block content inciting hatred and prevent online campaigns which target minorities, such as those undertaken in Myanmar, the United Nations human rights chief said on Wednesday.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking after U.N. experts accused Myanmar generals of “genocidal intent” and said Facebook had allowed its platform to be used to incite violence against Rohingya.

Facebook said on Monday it was removing several Myanmar military officials from the social media website and an Instagram account to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” after reviewing the content.

Zeid, whose spokesman said he has met with major tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Facebook and Google, in recent months, was speaking to a news conference before his four-year term ends on Aug. 31.

Zeid said he didn’t feel Facebook took the issue seriously at first but that the company’s attitude began to change after Yanghee Lee, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, told a Geneva press conference in March that Facebook was being used in the country to spread hate speech.

“But it shouldn’t be because the press or the human rights community highlights the problem for them then suddenly to respond. They should be aware of it ahead of time,” he said.

“So I don’t think they should wait until the crisis begins. They should be thinking proactively about what steps they will take to mitigate that,” he added.

Facebook said on Monday that while it was too slow to act in the case of Myanmar, it was now making progress, with better technology to identify hate speech and improved reporting tools.

However, Zeid said there was a danger that social media could be over-regulated in a way that breaches human rights law including the right to freedom of expression.

Tech giants should “keep the broadest space available and open to the exercise of freedom of expression”, relying on international human rights law for regulation, he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him, vowing to address the situation without providing evidence or giving details of action he might take.

Trump’s attack against the Alphabet Inc. unit follows a string of grievances against technology companies, including Twitter Inc and Facebook, which he has accused of silencing conservative voices.

An Indonesian court sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy on Tuesday, after she was accused of insulting Islam for complaining that neighbourhood mosque was too loud.

Meiliana, a 44-year old ethnic Chinese Buddhist had complained the Muslim call to prayer, repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra.

Indonesia has the world’s largest population of Muslims and sizable Buddhist, Christian and other religious minorities. Recent years have seen a rise in conservative and hardline interpretations of Islam, prompting fears that the secular nation’s long-standing reputation for tolerance and diversity was being eroded.

“She had said something that insulted religion, in this case Islam,” said Jamaluddin, spokesman of the Medan district court, adding the defendant had “showed remorse and apologised”.

Political activists have said the country’s stringent blasphemy laws are being used to bully minorities and violate religious freedoms.

Last year, the former ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta was tried and jailed for blasphemy after several Muslim groups accused him of insulting Islam when he said his political rivals were using the Koran to deceive voters.

The ruling was widely condemned and believed to be politically motivated. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama also lost his re-election bid because of the accusations.

There are hundreds of thousands of mosques across the vast archipelago and most use loudspeakers to play the ‘azan’ or call to prayer, which lasts a few minutes. But many also play lengthy versions of prayers or sermons lasting over 30 minutes, which has been deemed unnecessary by the Indonesian Mosque Council.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who is also a member of the Council, formed a team in 2015 to review mosques’ use of loudspeakers and regulate their use and volume. He has previously called on mosques to use their public address systems “wisely”.

Kalla’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on Meiliana’s conviction.

Meiliana’s lawyer, Ranto Sibarani, said they would appeal the verdict, according to The Jakarta Post.

]]> 7821 https://www.faith-matters.org/french-jewish-leaders-criticise-fillon-fundamentalism-comments/ Thu, 24 Nov 2016 17:39:32 +0000 https://faith-matters.org/?p=6214

Jewish leaders criticised French presidential frontrunner Francois Fillon on Wednesday for suggesting Jews had in the past not wanted to respect the country’s rules.

Fillon, tipped to win the second round of a primary this weekend to become the conservative candidate for next year’s presidential election, was talking to Europe 1 radio about the need to fight radical Islamism.

“We must fight that fundamentalism, in the same way that in the past … we fought some forms of Catholic fundamentalism and we fought the drive by Jews to live in a community that did not respect all the rules of the French Republic.”

It was not clear what precisely Fillon was referring to.

France’s Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia later spoke with Fillon about his comments, a spokeswoman for the rabbi said in a statement.

Korsia said that although Jewish groups may in the past have lived in relative isolation from wider society, that was “in no way Jewish citizens’ choice, but the consequence of French society not accepting their peers at the time,” the statement said.

Sacha Ghozlan, head of the French Jewish students’ union UEJF said: “Those surprising comments raise questions about how Francois Fillon defines fundamentalism.”

“The UEJF wonders what period Francois Fillon is referring to when he says Jews refused to abide by the rules of the French republic, if it’s not at the time of Vichy (the war-time government that collaborated with Nazi Germany) when Jews were forced to hide and wear a yellow star,” Ghozlan said in a statement.

Fillon later wrote on his Facebook page that his comments had been misunderstood.

“I never meant to call into question the Jewish community’s attachment to our common values and to the respect of the rules of the Republic,” he said.

Security is one of the top issues in the presidential race following a wave of Islamist attacks over the past year and half.

Fillon, who is likely to face the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen in the final presidential ballot if he wins Sunday’s primary, has repeatedly warned of the risk of French Muslims being radicalised.

“There is a rise of fundamentalism in the Muslim community, fundamentalists are in the process of taking the Muslim community hostage,” Fillon told Europe 1 before his comments on Catholics and Jews.

This report was undertaken by Faith Matters to assess the roles that converts to Islam have within our communities and it shows that there are numerous positive and highly productive roles that they play. There has also been no definitive study on the number of converts and whilst the assessments in this report are projections, we attempt to look at this area using statistical data that is available and through interviews conducted for this research.

The report shows that further work on how mosques can support converts is needed and also highlights the fact that converts can be a bridge between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Press perception around converts is also addressed and we hope that the report is useful to highlight the important role that converts to Islam have and some of the areas of support that need strengthening within mosques and Muslim communities.