NGOs Promote Common Front Against Mexico's Criminalization of Protest Gloria Leticia Diaz - Proceso
go to original April 11, 2014

Tweeters, bloggers, netizens, citizens, human rights organizations and various other groups marched yesterday to defend unrestricted use of the Internet with the motto #NoMásPoderAlPoder. Read more here and see photo gallery here. (Pablo Ramos/Aristegui Noticias)

Civil organizations announced the creation of a Front for the Freedom of Expression and Social Protest, as the start of the social media campaign #QueNoTeApaguen (Don’t Shut Your Down) with the goal of making the citizens aware of their right to dissent.

In the press conference in the Augustín Center for Human Rights (Centro PRODH), representatives of the non-governmental groups released the document "Control of Public Space: Report on the Steps Backwards in Freedom of Expression and Association in the Present Government". The document analyzes 11 legislative initiatives and reforms “aimed at the restriction and the criminalization of social protest”.

Among the proposed legislations that are under scrutiny, the following laws are emphasized: the General Regulation of Public Demonstrations; the Federal Law of Telecommunications and Broadcasting; the reform initiative of the Law of Industrial Property, the Federal Author’s Rights law, and the Federal Criminal Code.

Additionally, there is the reform to article 29 of the Constitution and its statutory laws; the anti-terrorism law contained in the Federal Criminal Code, and the phone geolocalization laws set out in the National Code of Criminal Procedure.

The NGOs also looked over the initiatives for regulating demonstrations promoted in the state Congresses of San Luis Potosí, Quintana Roo, Jalisco, and the Legislative Assembly of the Federal District (ALDF).

According to the nonconformists, those initiatives and legislations don’t comply with the international standards for human rights and actually look “to inhibit and limit the rights for freedom of expression, meeting, and association”, a tendency that began to be observed since Enrique Peña Nieto became president.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Janine Rhyans



Image: Noticaribe

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