Netizen Report: UN Authorities Pluck Protesters from Global Internet Conference in Brazil · Global Voices
Netizen Report Team

Demonstrators at IGF 2015 in Joao Pessoa, Brazil. Photo shared on Twitter by @NewsRevo.
Ellery Roberts Biddle, Lisa Ferguson, Hae-in Lim and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.
At the UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Brazil this week, several activists were stopped from demonstrating in support of net neutrality and against Facebook’s Internet.org application, which is now known as “Free Basics”. Civil society advocates were rattled by the incident, given that the IGF is specifically intended to focus on the protection of fundamental rights online and to welcome participation from all sectors of society.
The activists walked through the opening plenary session of the event, holding signs that read “No to Net Neutrality violation in Brazil and all the world!” and “Free Basics = Free of Basic Rights.” Multiple videos captured by conference participants show security guards and UN coordinating staff taking the signs from the demonstrators’ hands and forcibly removing them from the hall. The activists’ identification documents were briefly seized and their credentials were confiscated by organizers.
Shortly thereafter, civil society leader and Brazilian free expression advocate Joana Varon, an invited speaker at the opening session, condemned the act. In her speech, Varon addressed the urgent need for reform within UN processes that attempt to address the protection of human rights online. She connected this with the incident at hand:
[L]et's let people who cannot be on the stage also symbolically express their key questions regarding the future of Internet in front of high level panels like this. I hope in these days to come, we can discuss this and other issues further….but not only discuss really, let us also protest freely. This is also political space.
Grassroots group Marco Civil Ja, a leading supporter of Brazil’s “Bill of Rights for the Internet,” quickly issued a statement reprimanding IGF leadership for its actions. They wrote:
This kind of repression is incompatible inside an event that is precisely discussing how to protect freedom of speech [on] the Internet and how to guarantee privacy of those who use the world wide web.
The activists’ credentials were reinstated several hours after the incident.
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