Irrepressible Campaign

Adj. 1) Impossible to repress or control.

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, launched a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

Find out more about this campaign

An Amnesty International delegation handed in a petition of 50,000 signatures to this pledge in November 2006 at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens, before an audience of governments and companies from across the world.

The IGF process continues and so does Amnesty's fight for freedom of expression online. Irrepressible.info will continue to collect signatures to the pledge and use them to campaign against internet repression.

"… Diplomatic posturing has achieved nothing in the 17 years since Aung San Suu Kyi was first arrested …"

This is an excerpt from: www.irrawaddy.org The site belongs to The Irrawaddy, and has been censored in Myanmar / Burma. IPG is a news site for Burmese citizens living in exile.

Undermine censorship by publishing irrepressible fragments of censored material on your own site.

Add irrepressible content to your site
If you have a website or blog, help us spread the word and undermine unwarranted censorship by publishing censored material from our database directly onto your site.

The more people take part the more we show that freedom of expression cannot be repressed.

About this campaign
The web is a great tool for sharing ideas and freedom of expression. However, efforts to try and control the Internet are growing. Internet repression is reported in countries like China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. People are persecuted and imprisoned simply for criticising their government, calling for democracy and greater press freedom, or exposing human rights abuses, online.

But Internet repression is not just about governments. IT companies have helped build the systems that enable surveillance and censorship to take place. Yahoo! have supplied email users’ private data to the Chinese authorities, helping to facilitate cases of wrongful imprisonment. Microsoft and Google have both complied with government demands to actively censor Chinese users of their services.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It is one of the most precious of all rights. We should fight to protect it.