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France to Adopt International Definition of Anti-Semitism

The French government will adopt an international organization’s definition of anti-Semitism and propose a law to reduce hate speech from being circulated online, French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday.

Macron, speaking at the annual dinner of a Jewish organization, said France and other parts of Europe have seen in recent years “a resurgence of anti-Semitism that is probably unprecedented since World War II.”

Macron said applying the working definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance would help guide police forces, magistrates and teachers in their daily work.

Since the intergovernmental organization approved the wording in 2016, some critics of Israel have said it could be used suppress Palestinian rights activists. The definition states anti-Semitism can take the form of “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

Macron said he thinks that view is correct.

“Anti-Zionism is one of the modern forms of anti-Semitism,” the French leader said in Paris at the dinner of Jewish umbrella organization CRIF. “Behind the negation of Israel’s existence, what is hiding is the hatred of Jews.”

Macron mentioned anti-Semitism based on “radical Islamism” as a rampant ideology in France’s multi-ethnic, poor neighborhoods.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his appreciation at France’s adoption of the international definition of anti-Semitism, in a phone call with the French leader ahead of the speech, Netanyahu’s office said.

Social media

Macron also said his party would introduce legislation in parliament in May to force social media to withdraw hate speech posted online and use all available means to identify the authors “as quickly as possible.”

He especially denounced Twitter as waiting days, sometimes weeks, to remove hate content and to help authorities so a judicial investigation can be led. At the same time, he praised Facebook’s decision last year to allow the presence of French regulators inside the company to help improving practices combating online hate speech.

Anti-Semitism

Macron’s speech came a day after thousands of people attended rallies across France to decry an uptick in anti-Semitic acts in recent months. On Tuesday morning, about 80 gravestones spray-painted with swastikas were discovered in a cemetery in a small village of eastern France.

Macron observed a moment of silence Tuesday with parliament leaders at the Holocaust museum in Paris.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said Wednesday that a man has been arrested over a torrent of hate speech directed at Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut during a Saturday march by yellow vest protesters. The insults included words like “Zionist!” and “Go back to Tel Aviv!” and “We are France!”

The man was taken into custody Tuesday evening after a police inquiry was opened into a suspected public insult based on origin, ethnicity, nation, race or religion.

The government last week reported a rise in incidents of anti-Semitism last year: 541 registered incidents, up 74 percent from the 311 registered in 2017.

In other incidents this month, swastika graffiti was found on street portraits of Simone Veil, a survivor of Nazi death camps and a European Parliament president who died in 2017, the word “Juden” was painted on the window of a bagel restaurant in Paris and two trees planted at a memorial honoring a young Jewish man tortured to death in 2006 were vandalized.

“That’s our failure,” Macron said. “The time has come to act.”
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In US, Pope’s Summit on Sex Abuse Seen as Too Little, Too Late

In the study of his home outside Washington, former priest Tom Doyle searched a shelf packed with books to find the thick report that led him to walk away from the priesthood and become an advocate for victims of sexual abuse by clergymen.

The 1985 report was one of the first exposes in a sexual abuse scandal that has plagued the Catholic Church. Pope Francis has called senior bishops to meet for four days starting Thursday to discuss how to tackle the worsening crisis.

Doyle, who lost his job soon after the report was made public and eventually decided to leave the priesthood, is deeply skeptical that anything of substance will come of this week’s meeting.

“They’re going to pray and they’re going to meditate. But it’s totally useless,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to have something like this in 2019. These men should know right out of the gate that if you have a priest who’s raping children, you don’t allow them to continue.”

The meeting comes after a year in which fresh revelations about abuse of children and cover-up has shaken the church globally and tested the pope’s authority. Predatory priests were often moved from parish to parish rather than expelled or criminally prosecuted as bishops covered up the abuse.

Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, 67, a professor at Catholic University, said that U.S. bishops have already taken decisive steps to keep children from being abused. In 2002, after decades of abuse in the Boston area became public, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) passed a charter including requirements to report allegations of abuse of minors to police and to remove abusive priests or deacons after a single offense.

“The bishops of the United States are following zero tolerance,” said Rossetti, who helped draft the charter. “If you molested a minor at any time in your life, you’re not going to be a priest in this country. Period.”

Rossetti said the pope and the bishops should use the Vatican meeting to push for similar reforms in other countries where the problem of abuse is still coming to light.

But the U.S. policy “still left the bishops off the hook,” said David Lorenz, a director at Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. He called the pope’s summit “a publicity stunt.”

Recalling how he was abused at age 16 by a priest at an all-boys high school in Kentucky, Lorenz said the church and bishops with secrets of their own will continue to cover up abuse.

“It’s the secrecy. It’s the silence. It’s because I was silent for so long,” Lorenz, now 60, said, welling up. “They rely on that.”
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Priest’s Son Demands Vatican Attention for Clergy’s Children 

The head organizer of the Vatican’s sex abuse summit has met with an Irish activist who is seeking to draw attention to another issue the Vatican has long sought to keep quiet: the plight of children of priests. 

Archbishop Charles Scicluna, for years the Vatican’s sex crimes investigator, met Tuesday with Vincent Doyle, the child of a priest. Through his advocacy and self-help group Coping International, Doyle has sought to compel Catholic leaders to acknowledge the issue of priests’ children and the psychological and emotional impact the church’s enforced secrecy has on them and their mothers. 

In a statement, Scicluna said the issue needed to be addressed and the children of priests acknowledged.  

“Each case should be tackled and handled on its own merits,” said the statement Scicluna gave Doyle, who shared it Wednesday with The Associated Press. “The interest of the child should be paramount.”  

Staying in priesthood

Notably, the statement did not say the priest should leave the priesthood to take care of his child as a layman — the common default response by church superiors. 

This week the Vatican acknowledged publicly to The New York Times that it has internal guidelines on how to handle such cases. 

Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti confirmed that the guidelines’ fundamental principle is looking out for the best interests of the child. As such, he said, the guidelines “ordinarily ask for the priest to present his request to be dispensed from the obligations of the clerical state, and as a lay person, assume his responsibilities as a father, dedicating himself exclusively to his child.” 

Doyle is pressing for that default position to change, arguing that it often is not in the best interests of the child for his father to be fired. 

Doyle also notes that these children are born under a wide range of circumstances, with some the result of sexual abuse by priests against girls and women. 

In an interview Wednesday, Doyle said he met this week with the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, and walked into the Congregation for Clergy and secured a meeting with the department undersecretary, Monsignor Andrea Ripa. 

Doyle said all agreed on the need for case-by-case approach to the issue of priest’s children. The Irish Catholic Church hierarchy has taken the lead on addressing the issue with a child-focused set of guidelines published in 2017. 

“This is important, as it eliminates the default expectations that he [the priest] has to leave,” Doyle said. He said he was heartened by all his meetings and that the Catholic officials were compassionate and understood the pain he conveyed to them. 

Newspaper series

Doyle has been campaigning to help eliminate the stigma children of priests often face, and educate the church about the problems they can suffer as a result of the secrecy imposed on them and the absentee fathers they may never know. Those problems, which can include depression, anxiety and other mental health issues, were the subject of a 2017 series in The Boston Globe. 

There are no figures about the number of children fathered by Catholic priests. But there are about 450,000 Catholic priests in the world and the Catholic Church forbids artificial contraception and abortion. While eastern rite Catholic priests can be married before ordination, Roman Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy. 

Scicluna is one of four key organizers of Pope Francis’ clergy sex abuse summit, which opens Thursday but is not expected to address the issue of priests’ children. 
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May Heads to Brussels Again, Seeks Brexit Movement

British Prime Minister Theresa May makes another trip to Brussels on Wednesday, hoping European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker may prove more yielding than of late to salvage her Brexit deal.

With Britain set to jolt out of the world’s biggest trading bloc in 37 days unless May can either persuade the British parliament or the European Union to budge, officials were cautious on the chances of a breakthrough.

The key sticking point is the so-called backstop, an insurance policy to prevent the return of extensive checks on the sensitive border between EU member Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland.

May agreed on the protocol with EU leaders in November but then saw it roundly rejected last month by U.K. lawmakers who said the government’s legal advice that it could tie Britain to EU rules indefinitely made the backstop unacceptable.

She has promised parliament to rework the treaty to try to put a time limit on the protocol or give Britain some other way of getting out of an arrangement which her critics say would leave the country “trapped” by the EU.

A spokesman for May called the Brussels trip “significant” as part of a process of engagement to try to agree on the changes her government says parliament needs to pass the deal.

But an aide for Juncker quoted the Commission president as saying on Tuesday evening: “I have great respect for Theresa May for her courage and her assertiveness. We will have friendly talk tomorrow but I don’t expect a breakthrough.”

EU sources aired frustration with Britain’s stance on Brexit, saying Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay brought no new proposals to the table when he was last in Brussels on Monday for talks with the bloc’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier.

On Tuesday, the EU responded to U.K. demands again: “The EU 27 will not reopen the withdrawal agreement; we cannot accept a time limit to the backstop or a unilateral exit clause,” said Margaritis Schinas, a spokesman for Juncker. “We are listening and working with the UK government … for an orderly withdrawal of the UK from the EU on March 29.”

May’s spokesman again said it was the prime minister’s intention to persuade the EU to reopen the divorce deal.

“There is a process of engagement going on. Tomorrow is obviously a significant meeting between the prime minister and President Juncker as part of that process,” he said.

Legal advice

Barclay and Britain’s Attorney General Geoffrey Cox are also due back in Brussels midweek and want to discuss “legal text” with Barnier that would give Britain enough assurances over the backstop, British sources said.

It is Cox’s advice that the backstop as it stands is indefinite, which May is  trying to see changed by obtaining new legally binding EU commitments.

May needs to convince eurosceptics in her Conservative Party that the backstop will not keep Britain indefinitely tied to the EU, but also that she is still considering a compromise idea agreed between Brexit supporters and pro-EU lawmakers.

May’s spokesman said the Commission had engaged with the ideas put forward in the so-called “Malthouse Compromise” but raised concerns about “their viability to resolve the backstop.”

The EU says the alternative technological arrangements it proposes to replace the backstop do not exist for now and so cannot be a guarantee that no border controls would return to Ireland.

Barnier told Barclay the EU could hence not agree to this proposal as it would mean not applying the bloc’s law on its own border.

Eurosceptic lawmakers said Malthouse was “alive and kicking” after meeting May on Tuesday.

May has until Feb. 27 to secure EU concessions on the backstop or face another series of Brexit votes in the House of Commons, where lawmakers want changes to the withdrawal deal.

EU and U.K. sources said London could accept other guarantees on the backstop and the bloc is proposing turning the assurances and clarifications it has already given Britain on the issue in December and January into legally binding documents.
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EU to Take Action Against Poland if Judges Harassed for Consulting ECJ

The European Commission will take action against Poland if its government is harassing judges for consulting the European Court of Justice on the legality of Polish reforms, Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans said Tuesday.

Timmermans, responsible in the Commission for making sure European Union countries observe the rule of law, was responding to a letter from Poland’s biggest judge association Iustitia, which asked him to act.

Iustitia urged Timmermans to sue the euroskeptic Polish government over the harassment of judges who question the legality of the government’s judicial reforms by asking the opinion of the ECJ.

“Every Polish judge is also a European judge, so no one should interfere with the right of a judge to pose questions to the European Court of Justice,” Timmermans told reporters on entering a meeting of EU ministers who were to discuss Poland’s observance of the rule of law.

“If that is becoming something of a structural matter, if judges are being faced with disciplinary measures because they ask questions to the court in Luxembourg, then of course the Commission will have to act,” he said, without elaborating.

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has been in conflict with the Commission over its handling of Polish courts since the start of 2016. Most EU countries back the Commission.

“The combined effect of the legislative changes could put at risk the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers in Poland,” German Minister for Europe Michael Roth and French Minister for European Affairs Nathalie Loiseau said in a joint statement at a ministerial meeting with Timmermans.

“In this context, the amendments made so far by the Polish authorities are not sufficient,” they said, according to delegation officials.

Procedure

Worried about the government flouting basic democratic standards in the country of 38 million people, the Commission has launched an unprecedented procedure on whether Poland is observing the rule of law, which serves mainly as a means of political pressure.

The procedure could lead to the loss of voting power in the EU for a government that does not observe the rule of law.

“Sadly, not much has changed and some things even have worsened,” Timmermans said.

The EU has launched a similar procedure against Hungary, where the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orban is raising concern in other EU countries. Brussels has also warned Romania to stop its push for influence over the judicial system.

Iustitia, grouping one-third of all Polish judges, wrote to Timmermans to act against repressive disciplinary steps against judges by the National Council of Judiciary, which, under changes made by the government, is now appointed by politicians from the ruling PiS parliamentary majority.

“The proceedings are usually initiated against judges who are active in the field of defending the rule of law, among others by educational actions, meetings with citizens, international activity,” Iustitia head Krystian Markiewicz wrote in the letter to Timmermans, seen by Reuters. “Therefore I appeal for referring Poland to the Court of Justice of the European Union in connection with the regulations concerning the disciplinary proceedings against judges.”
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Environmentalists Seek Tougher EU Curbs on Balkan Coal Power Plants

Environmentalists urged EU policymakers on Tuesday to take a tougher stance on air pollution from coal power plants in the Western Balkans, blaming the fumes for 3,900 deaths across Europe each year.

The 16 Communist-era plants with 8 gigawatts (GW) capacity emitted the same amount of sulphur dioxide in 2016 as 250 coal-fired plants with 30 times more capacity in the rest of the European Union, five environmentalist groups said in a report.

Lignite, the most polluting coal, is widely available in the region, providing a cheap energy resource and the major source of energy for Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro.

The countries are members of the Energy Community, which had a commitment to implement EU rules to curb pollution by 2018.

But investments in new power plants or technology to cut emissions have largely been delayed, the report said.

“Air pollution knows no borders and is still an invisible killer in Europe,” said Vlatka Matkovic Puljic, senior health and energy officer at HEAL and the report’s lead author.

“It is high time that EU policymakers step up efforts to clean up the air and decarbonize the power sector,” she said.

The report said the West Balkan power plants caused pollution across the EU and beyond that caused health care costs of up to 11.5 billion euros ($13.02 billion) a year.

The region plans to add 2.7 GW of new coal plant capacity in the next decade, mainly financed by Chinese banks, the report said, adding that most plants would not meet the EU’s pollution control rules.

Governments in the region say they need to expand coal power generation to meet rising demand and ensure energy security and say that new coal plants would emit less greenhouse gases.

The report called for stricter rules to be imposed on the Energy Community and said the European Commission should make meeting those regulations a requirement for joining the EU.

For now, the countries in the Energy Community do not face any penalties if targets are not met.

“Rather than investing in yet more outdated coal power plants, Western Balkan leaders need to … increase the share of sustainable forms of renewable energy,” said Ioana Ciuta, Energy Coordinator at CEE Bankwatch, one of the five groups behind the report.
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Britain Debates Whether Islamic State Recruits Should Be Given Second Chance

British-born Sumaiyyah Wakil was sixteen-years-old when she sneaked away to war-torn Syria, flying first to Bulgaria, then Turkey, to join the Islamic State terror group. Once in IS’s de facto capital Raqqa, she bragged, according to British court documents, about watching the public stoning of a woman, describing the killing as “so cool.”

But now her family say the British authorities should repatriate her when she re-emerges, likely soon, from IS territory as well as other British teenagers who joined the militants. Wakil’s parents and the families of IS recruits argue their offspring were manipulated by jihadist recruiters and were too young to know what they were doing when they went off to Syria.

The predicament of surviving young foreign IS recruits — especially of the women, most of whom left like Wakil as schoolgirls without family approval or prior parental knowledge — has sparked a ferocious moral, political and legal debate in Britain, as well as other European states, about whether they should be re-admitted to their birth countries, even helped to return and given a second chance. 

Opinion polls suggest most Britons don’t think they deserve the right to return. 

In Britain, the debate was triggered in earnest last week with the discovery by reporter Anthony Loyd of a pregnant nineteen-year-old British woman in a Kurdish-managed refugee camp in northeast Syria. Shamima Begum, who gave birth to her third child Sunday, joined the militant group in 2015 at the age of 15, slipping off with two school-friends, all from east London. 

One of the girls died in an airstrike in 2016; the other, Amira Abase, is still in IS territory. At least 900 Britons, an estimated 145 of them women and 50 minors, joined IS. In total an estimated 5000 Europeans joined the militant group, although some analysts say the figure is likely higher. 

Britain, like other European countries, has been reluctant to repatriate IS recruits, whether male fighters or so-called ‘jihadi brides’ as well as their children. A small number have been assisted to return to their countries of origin, but hundreds are awaiting political or legal resolution of their cases as their appeals for repatriation have largely been ignored by alarmed European governments, seeing them as security risks who betrayed their countries.

U.S. officials have been urging European governments, for more than a year,to take back surviving recruits — and prosecute them. Otherwise they will slip away, they say, from refugee and detention facilities in northeast Syria and pose a greater threat once unsupervised. On Saturday, a frustrated President Donald Trump urged the Europeans to take charge of their rogue citizens, saying the alternative is the Kurds will have to free them.

European officials say most can’t be put on trial because of the difficulty in collecting hard evidence against them for individual wrongdoing, and they worry their presence will over-tax already strained security services. More than 900 foreign jihadists and 3200 wives and children are being held by the Kurds.

Begum, whose two previous children died from malnutrition and sickness, says she wants to return to Britain, mainly because she’s worried about her baby’s health. “I think a lot of people should have, like, sympathy towards me for everything I’ve been through,” she said in a recent interview. 

But she has expressed no remorse over joining IS nor disavowed the group’s ideology.In an interview with Sky News she claimed she was “just a housewife” during her time in IS’s self-styled caliphate, where she married a young Dutch jihadist shortly after arriving. 

And asked whether she was aware of the IS beheadings and executions, she answered matter-of-factly that she’d been “okay with it.” She said: “Yeah, I knew about those things and I was okay with it. Because, you know, I started becoming religious just before I left. From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed.” In an interview with the BBC she said the 2017 terror attack on the Ariana Grande concert, in which 22 died, was justified retaliation.

Her lack of contrition has prompted public outrage with detractors saying she displays a breathtaking sense of entitlement. Her family, though, says she is brainwashed. 

Muhammad Rahman, her brother-in-law, whose married to an older sister, told reporters: “I can understand why many people in Britain do not want Shamima to be allowed back into the country after what she has done…but she went as a fifteen-year-old and I don’t know a 15-year-old can make such a decision with any responsibility. She was a minor when she left and she surely has been brainwashed.” 

Some radicalization experts have long argued that young Westerners were cleverly groomed by recruiters, in much the same way pedophiles target prey with tailored, manipulative narratives to up a false sense of kinship. In conversations with this correspondent, Mia Bloom, a security studies professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and recognized radicalization expert, highlighted, as the caliphate unfolded, how IS groomers were skillful at exploiting the vulnerabilities and confusion of disoriented Western teenagers already struggling with identity issues.

Bloom said IS matched recruiters with potential recruits in terms of age, nationality and gender. The marketing narratives would shift depending on the target’s vulnerabilities — from arguments about equality and inclusion to offers of friendship and the promise of belonging. For some, there’d be the lure of utopian adventure. Others would be manipulated by recruiters emphasizing their obligations to Islam. 

Manipulated or not, commentator Janice Turner, a columnist with The Times, says while the youth of some of the IS recruits should be taken into account, she questions, “at what point does a young person stop being a gullible victim, malleable clay moulded by older minds and dangerous ideology, and become responsible for his or her deeds?”

In Begum’s east London neighborhood of Bethnal Green there are mixed feelings, with some locals saying she might have been manipulated into going, but her lack of remorse now is alarming and suggests she remains a radicalized menace. The plight of the children of IS recruits is what pulls at most heart strings and even those adamant that the recruits should stay away, say the children can’t be left to their fates.

On the legal front, there have been calls for treason laws to be applied against IS recruits, including jihadi brides, but those laws may not be appropriate, say legal scholars. The country’s interior minister, Sajid Javid, reflected British anger last week by saying Begum and other recruits shouldn’t be readmitted, but he has had to concede he can’t block them permanently from re-entry. He could issue temporary orders excluding them from re-admission for up to two years, say some legal scholars, but would face court challenges.

Other ministers have also acknowledged their alarm, but say they can’t make people stateless, although they’re unlikely to arrange physically the return of the recruits. Returnees would be monitored, would have to enter de-radicalization programs and their children most likely would be placed in care of or with foster families, at least temporarily, say British officials. 
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Pressure Grows on Europe to Back Venezuelan Opposition Leader

Pressure is growing on the European Union to formally back Venezuela’s opposition, after three EU lawmakers were refused entry to the country — accused of having conspiratorial aims.’ The diplomatic snub has triggered calls for Brussels to take a stronger stand against the government of disputed President Nicholas Maduro. The U.S. and many allies have recognized the opposition leader, Juan Guaido, as president, after accusations of vote rigging in last year’s election. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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European Leaders Struggle with Growing Anti-Semitism

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the resurgence of anti-Semitism is a central problem for Jewish communities. Netanyahu spoke Monday, a day before the planned summit with leaders of central European countries in Jerusalem. The planned summit of four nations known as the Visegrad Group — Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — was supposed to take place Tuesday. But Poland withdrew from the meeting. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
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Pope Francis Lifts Suspension on Nicaraguan Priest, Poet

Pope Francis has lifted the suspension imposed in 1983 on Nicaraguan priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal, the Vatican’s ambassador to Nicaragua said in a statement Monday.

Nuncio Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag said in a statement that Francis removed the canonical censures following a request from the 94-year-old Cardenal, who has been hospitalized for more than a week.

Pope John Paul II suspended Cardenal from his priestly duties because he had become culture minister in the leftist Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega after the rebels toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza.

John Paul II said that priests could not assume political posts and he was irked by a movement of pro-revolutionary priests such as Cardenal accused of ignoring instructions from the more conservative hierarchy and of mixing leftist ideology into theology.

John Paul II famously criticized Cardenal publicly at Managua’s international airport during a visit in 1983. In a widely circulated photograph, Cardenal knelt and reached to kiss the pope’s hand, but John Paul pulled his hand back and pointed his finger at Cardenal.

“Father Cardenal has been suspended from exercising the ministry for 35 years due to his political militancy,” the nuncio’s statement said. “The priest accepted the canonical punishment that was imposed on him and followed it without performing any pastoral activity. Furthermore, he had abandoned many years ago all political commitments.”

Cardenal’s personal assistant Luz Marina Acosta said he was in delicate, but stable condition in a local hospital, where Sommertag joined him in celebrating Mass on Sunday.

 “It was very moving and the father was very happy,” she said.

Cardenal, like many priests in Latin America in the 1960s, felt the pull of the leftist liberation theology that focused on ministering to the poor and liberating the oppressed.

Years after the revolution, however, he was among several Sandinista leaders who distanced themselves from Ortega.

He was easily identifiable in his signature black beret and loose white peasant shirts.

Among Cardenal’s works are “Epigrams” and “Zero Hour.” He has been nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature since 2005.

The same suspension was imposed on Cardenal’s brother Fernando, who served as the Sandinista education minister and Miguel D’Escoto who was that government’s foreign minister. However, those priests had their suspensions lifted years ago.
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Kremlin Critics, Some Putin Allies Agree: Isolated Russian Web a Fantasy

Nearly a week after Russia’s lower house of parliament approved a preliminary measure aimed at safeguarding internet operations in case of a foreign cyber attack, Kremlin critics and some lawmakers seem to agree the entire enterprise is beyond the country’s technological capabilities.

The bill, which proposes the creation of “Runet,” a domestic network that would be designed to function independently of the global internet, has drawn comparisons to China’s “great firewall.”

Russian state-run media say the legislation was drafted in response to tensions with Western nations that accuse Moscow of perpetrating cyberattacks via social media platforms to wreak havoc in foreign elections.

Critics, however, call the legislation a Kremlin ploy to control domestic cyber-infrastructure, all part of a broader campaign to expand censorship and blunt online political mobilization campaigns.

The bill calls for Russian web traffic and data to be rerouted through points controlled by the state and for the creation of a domestic Domain Name System that would allow the internet to continue functioning in Russia even if it is cut off from foreign infrastructure.

During last week’s first reading, the proposed law sparked exasperation from some minority lawmakers who feared it would trigger a dysfunctional “internet Brexit,” whole others questioned how Russia would build the technical infrastructure required to support the legal provisions. By Brexit, they were drawing comparisons to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

No IT experts among MPs

“How many of you are IT experts here, raise your hand. One? Then how can we vote for a bill we don’t understand?” said Valery Gartung, a lawmaker with the Kremlin-loyal Just Russia party.

“Russia doesn’t manufacture any IT hardware except cables; maybe some people should hang themselves on them,” said MP Sergei Ivanov of the nationalist LDPR, President Vladimir Putin’s former chief of staff.

One of the bill’s authors is Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer and one of the key suspects in the 2006 murder of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in Britain. Lugovoi dismissed the critics, emphasizing the massive cyber threat he says the U.S. poses.

“This isn’t kindergarten!” he shouted at the reading. “All of the websites in Syria” have been turned off by the U.S. before.

In a 2014 interview with Wired magazine, U.S. surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged that the National Security Agency accidentally cut off Syria’s internet while attempting to infiltrate it in 2012.

Concern about US cyber aggression

Andrei Soldatov, who co-authored The Red Web, a history of internet surveillance in Russia, said concern about U.S. cyber aggression is just the latest pretext for political censorship campaigns that can be traced to the Soviet era.

“Look at the text of the legislation,” he said. “Censorship and filtering is an essential part of it. It calls for new equipment to be installed with all internet service providers” that alters or impedes traffic flows and filters content. “This has nothing to do with protection against the U.S.; I don’t buy this explanation that it’s all about protecting the Russian internet users or the Russian internet against possible U.S. aggression.”

“The government is now mostly concerned with one thing: the mobilizing capability of the internet,” he said, explaining that Kremlin-led efforts to gain control of the internet since Russia’s historic 2012 street protests have scored preciously few successes. “So they actually want to strip in the internet of this capability.” During Soviet times, he said, the idea was to seal the country completely in order to stop the spread of uncensored information.

“But today, even with the filtering we have now, if you want to get access to some sensitive information on the internet, you can get it quite easily,” he said. “The idea is to prevent social platforms and the internet as a whole from being used by political activists to start unrest.”

Although an isolated Russian net will compromise prospects for international digital commerce, Soldatov said officials aren’t likely concerned, as the country’s nearly decade-long “climate of internet uncertainty” has already forced some Russia IT companies to flee the market.

Kremlin officials long ago decided to put security before commerce, Soldatov said.

“Two years ago, Putin signed a new draft of the information security doctrine. And if you check the text, you can see the main idea there is that Russian telecommunication and IT companies should check first with Russian security services before introducing new technologies, he said. “So it’s clear that security comes first and technological progress comes second, and that’s not good for business. It means that you first have to go to the FSB and ask them whether they’re happy with this or that new technology.”

Internet freedom

Asked if it will be possible for free speech and internet freedom advocates to circumvent impending restrictions, Soldatov voiced optimism.

“Yes, absolutely. It’s already clear that this kind of system would have gaps. The system would be quite porous, because we are talking about the internet itself, and it’s a technology that by definition was designed to find a way for traffic to go,” he said.

“And this is the case for many countries, like in China, [where] entire communities of activists could find a way,” he added. “The problem is for the rest. So you sort of see an internet divided, with, say, 70 percent or 80 percent of people who live in a situation they accept, and then you have some activists who would find a way, and that’s what might happen.”

In an interview with Riga-based Meduza news outlet, Stanislav Shakirov of the digital censorship watchdog “Roskomsvoboda” said Russia, unlike China, lacks the domestic investment infrastructure to develop its own tech startups, a fact that would be likely to doom the commercial prospects for an independent Russian internet.

“Not only are Russian internet users accustomed to having their pick of Western online services, but Russia’s domestic market isn’t big enough to sustain competition in isolation, and its unfriendly business climate remains a major hindrance,” he said.

But Ekho Moskvy radio anchor Alexander Plushev, who has reported on internet freedom issues in Russia for years, says supporters of the bills aren’t concerned with security, commerce or censorship.

“I think it’s just corruption, just to get money, to build their own independent network,” he said, explaining that it is primarily Russian government contractors who stand to profit from a privatized Russian internet. “That’s the main reason for this law.”

(Some information is from AFP.)
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No Need for Shinzo Abe: Trump already nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is not saying whether or not he nominated Donald Trump for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, but the question may be moot: the U.S. president has been put forward by others for the prestigious award.

During a White House news conference on Friday, Trump said the Japanese premier had given him “the most beautiful copy” of a five-page nomination letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Since then Abe has declined to say whether he had done so.

Regardless, Trump has already been nominated by two Norwegian lawmakers.

“We have nominated him of course for the positive developments on the Korean Peninsula,” Per-Willy Amundsen, who was Justice Minister in Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s Cabinet in 2016-2018, told Reuters.

“It has been a very difficult situation and the tensions have since lowered and a lot of it is due to Trump’s unconventional diplomatic style,” he added.

Amundsen, who is a member of the rightwing Progress Party, wrote a letter to the award committee together with his parliamentary colleague Christian Tybring-Gjedde, he said.

The letter was submitted in June, immediately after a summit Trump held in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Unaimed at easing tensions and tackling Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

Tybring-Gjedde, who sits on the Norwegian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, also confirmed the joint nomination of Trump when contacted by Reuters.

“A possible award would of course depend on the talks leading to a credible disarmament deal,” he said.

A wide range of people can nominate for the Nobel Peace Prize, including members of parliaments and governments, heads of state, university professors of history, social sciences or law and past Nobel Peace Prize laureates, among others.

The deadline for nominations for the 2019 prize, which will be announced on Oct. 11., was Jan. 31.

The five-strong Norwegian Nobel Committee, which decides who wins the award, does not comment on nominations, keeping secret for 50 years the names of nominators and unsuccessful nominees.

Still, it did say earlier this month that 304 candidates were nominated for this year’s prize, of which 219 are individuals and 85 are organizations.

Last year’s prize was jointly awarded to Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad.

 
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