November 2, 2002	Saturday	Sha’aban 26,1423

PARIS, Nov 1: The Unesco says that it is to hold an international conference on “Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace” here on Nov 15-16.

The two-day series of roundtables and colloquia comes at a most timely moment, says a spokesman for the international cultural organization, as a series of recent events has demonstrated that cyberspace is being increasingly subject to the heavy hand of the law.

This has recently taken the form of an Egyptian journalist being sentenced to a one-year prison term for having posted a poem written by his father on an Internet website.

Earlier in the year, in mid-June, Toujan el-Faisal, a Jordanian journalist, became the world’s first cyber-journalist to be imprisoned for articles she wrote on the Internet.

The conference will attempt to define “the norms” with regard to the expression of journalists and others in cyberspace, and will also tackle the thorny problems “linked to the question of human dignity, the rights of children, the right to one’s private life,” a Unesco press release said.