Right now one might be wondering if I am a fascist or a communist, or some sort of enemy of the free world. No, not at all. In fact on the contrary.

Back in 2008, I wrote a post condemning Google’s nonchalant attitude towards what users do when using their services. I read a bunch of articles about this new announcement by Google, and some of them seems to me to be a bit (well, way) out of line. Particularly this one which says that “Brazil’s 3,663 data requests and 291 removal requests [...] underscores Brasília’s restriction of free speech”. According to articles like this; racism, pedophilia and cyber bullying are the same as freedom of speech (if citing Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

Funny, it have The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) right in front of me, and according to this document, the author of this article is wrong. In fact, he is full of bull. This is yet another case (as I did before) of citing Article 30 of the UDHR:

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Basically Article 30 asserts this isn’t the “world of do as you please regardless of others by saying you have the right to do so because of the UDHR”, like many people (including many at Google, as per my previous article) seem to claim.

And I am proud to see that the Brazilian government seems to be on pair with the UDHR. Is targeting pedophilia a violation of free speech? No, because paedophilia is abusing the human rights of its victims, thus it is against the UDHR. Is targeting racist websites and pages in Orkut (Google’s social platform, mostly popular in Brazil) a violation of free speech? No, because racism is against the UDHR (Articles 2, 3 and 5 just to name a few). Is targeting cyber bullying (Article 12)… You get the idea – so I hope.

Kudos to the Brazilian government for sending the right message to Google and the rest of the world. We shall defend the UDHR in its entirely (and not just what is convenient to a few) along with our constitution.

It seems that for those acting in their own disposition forget that the UDHR has 30 articles, and not 29. The 30th Article of the UDHR is perfectly clear:

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein

So how is it that sovereign states that adopt and recognise the UDHR accept the engagement of organisations, parties and other sort of entities that disregard the 30th Article?

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that instead of having extremist political groups or militants operating in the underground, is better to have them out in the open as it is easier to monitor their activities, and to expose their views. Concerning the recent decision of BBC to invite a far-right activist to a television debate, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that he believes it is a duty to expose racist and sectarian politics – which I agree – and that “anybody who listens to what they are really about will find that what they are saying is unacceptable.” Well is this last bit that I am not so sure about. Mr Brown is parting from the principle that everyone has the same opinion. And unfortunately, this is not the case. If that was the case, there wouldn’t be any racism. Particularly, the political party in question wouldn’t have its supporters – which it does, no matter how minimum they are. This is a false consensus bias.

My concern is the use of democracy and the UDHR to destroy these same principles, or to deny these principles to others. An example that is often cited as the use of democracy for the destruction of democracy is the rise of the NAZI party in Germany.

After being elected through democratic means, the NAZI party started to impose authoritarianism and ideologies that destroyed democracy and oppressed minorities, to say the least. Following the defeat of the NAZI regime and the revelation of their atrocities to the whole world, it was the overall consensus that something had to be done to prevent the same to happen in the future. With this in mind, the UDHR was adopted in 1948.

Yet we don’t need to go that far in history to see events of democracy being used to destroy democracy or to thwart the UDHR. You can see clear examples in recent events where state leaders, once elected through democratic means, are violating constitutions to impose their authority, perpetuate their rule and oppress any sort of opposition.
So I think about what Mr Brown said:

“Anybody who listens to what they are really about will find that what they are saying is unacceptable.”

And I wonder: Is there anybody listening? If so, who is listening?