EU racism watchdog demands Internet neo-Nazi censorship

ANDREW BROWN

An EU committee on racism has demanded that the Internet be censored to prevent the incitement of racial hatred. The Union's Consultative Commission on Racism and Xenophobia, based in Paris, yesterday urged all member states to follow the example of Germany, which has been attempting to censor racist and pornographic messages in cyberspace.

The latest scandal was caused by Ernst Zundel, a German neo-Nazi, based in Canada, who has hired space on a computer in California to promote his views. This space, known as a web site, greets visitors with the statement: "The Zundelsite has as its mission the rehabilitation of the honour and reputation of the German nation and site challenges the traditional version of the 'Holocaust' - an Allied propaganda tool concocted during World War II - that is not based on historical fact but is a cleverly used ploy to keep the German war time generation and their descendants in perpetual political, emotional, spiritual and financial bondage."

These views are obnoxious in California and illegal in Germany, where the denial of the Holocaust is a crime, along with the display of Nazi symbolism. The Zundel site has links to a flourishing undergrowth of neo- Nazism on the Internet. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles claims to have identified more than 70 neo-Nazi web sites.

More than a million Germans are now able to access these through Internet services. Last week, Deutsche Telekom, the largest provider of Internet services in Germany, cut off all access to the computers of Web Communications, the company which rents space to Zundel. Since this is a large and respectable commercial concern, this also meant that the Deutsche Telekom subscribers lost access to another 1,500 web sites, among them one maintained by Deutsche Bank Securities.

Deutsche Telekom itself admits that this form of censorship is partial and inefficient. A spokesman was anxious yesterday to disclaim legal responsibility for the messages carried over their network. "We are not responsible, but we become associated with it. We think that an individual case like that of Mr Zundel brings bad influence to our reputation in the market."

However, the state prosecutor's office in Mannheim is considering whether to charge Deutsche Telekom anyway.

Stephen Bates, an American lawyer who has made a special study of freedom of speech in cyberspace, said yesterday: "The law is trying imperfectly and inadequately to uphold the idea that some information is acceptable and some is not.

"But law has always been based on territory. Now, in cyberspace, we're seeing, in substantial part, the end of geography, and that creates problems."