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Death Sentence for Facebook Post: America Funding Human Rights Violations
from The Daily Bell:
Ideally, America would stop giving out all foreign aid, but a good place to start would be nixing aid to countries with horrible human rights records.
For instance, Pakistan just sentenced a man to death for blasphemy. It is far from the first time someone has been sentenced to death for blasphemy, but it is the first time a death sentence has been handed down for blasphemy on social media. The 30-year-old man said derogatory things about Muhammad on Facebook.
He was tried by a counter-terrorism court for his online hate speech. This sounds eerily familiar to Theresa May’s calls to crack down on Internet freedom in an effort to counter terrorism. Pakistan shows the world one of the most extreme interpretations of government policing online discourse in the name of anti-terrorism.
At the same time, “Right groups say the harsh blasphemy laws are often used to settle personal scores.”
So basically, the more power a government has to regulate online behavior in the name of safety and security, the more power corrupt officials have to serve personal vendettas or bring politics into the court system.
And we may seem immune to that type of thing in the U.S. yet just last week an appeals court refused to give Ross Ulbricht a new trial. Ulbricht created the website the Silk Road which was used to traffic drugs and other illegal things on the dark web. He received a life sentence for his role as a “kingpin” and accessory to drug trafficking, even though all he did was create the web platform for exchange.
Two federal agents involved in the case are now behind bars for corruption. They stole from the Silk Road while investigating it, and one of their testimony was crucial to convicting Ross. The clearly untrustworthy agent had administrative access to the website that would have made it easy to frame Ulbricht, but the courts refused to allow this possibility to be explored.
The cases are different in scope and degree, but have basically the same lesson; government courts will rule the way the government wants them to rule to protect the interests of the government and government officials, regardless of right or wrong.
