The United Nations refused to approve the distribution of the above flier to avoid offending the Egyptian government! (Click on the image to enlarge.)

On World Press Freedom Day (May 3), a panel was hosted by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations that was to discuss issues related to Internet journalism, blogging as tools for free speech, and the difficulties bloggers in repressive states face. Nation/world news columnist Bridget Johnson (also the Free Kareem team’s consultant!) wrote on her experiences on that day as a moderator of the panel: Bloggers key in battle for press freedom.

I was asked to moderate a panel on the U.N. trip to bring attention to these very issues. Hosted by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations last Thursday, the panel included Jeffrey Krilla (deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the State Department), Watson Meng (founder of China’s Boxun News), Frank Xie (Boxun blogger), Egyptian blogger Nora Younis and Tala Dowlatshahi from Reporters Without Borders. Live blogging captured the presentation of various views on how to protect bloggers’ free speech around the globe.

Interestingly, the event itself faced censorship. Fliers advertising the panel featured a woman with duct tape over her mouth sitting at a laptop computer, on which was superimposed a news brief about the imprisonment of blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman – datelined, of course, Egypt.

Carolyn Vadino, deputy spokeswoman at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said that the ambassador’s office was asked by U.N. officials to remove the Egypt dateline from the image if they wanted the fliers approved for posting. So after the U.S. refused to censor the flier, U.N. officials responded they could only approve fliers for “cultural events.”

The purported reason for the initial denial was that a member state was supposedly singled out. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and throws young bloggers in prison for dissing Hosni Mubarak, though, one wonders how the usage of the country’s name could be deemed unfair.

After the U.N. event, some of us hit the road to take the panel to Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio. Here I sat down for an interview with Al-Jazeera, and was asked why American students in a small town such as this should be concerned about a blogger in danger halfway around the world.

Simple: The greatest appreciation we can show for our freedoms is the willingness to help others trying to attain the same. Many argue that the U.S. would not have won the revolution if it weren’t for the financial aid of a young, idealistic Frenchman who fought for America’s liberty, the Marquis de Lafayette. It was a cause he should have cared little about, hanging around the privileged halls of Versailles, but the fact that he saw beyond his little corner of the world shaped the course of history. “Humanity has won its battle,” Lafayette wrote shortly after the Battle of Yorktown. “Liberty now has a country.”

It’s unbelievable that the United Nations, which is viewed as a legitimate international body that embraces human rights and steps up to protect them, would be so craven to prevent the distribution of fliers that just state an absolute truth: That a blogger was jailed to four years for his views!