January 24, 2003	Friday	Ziqa’ad 20, 1423

VIENNA, Jan 23: Europe’s largest security and human rights watchdog, the OSCE, criticized the United States on Thursday for spying on book buyers and library patrons under sweeping new anti-terror laws.

Freimut Duve, the media rights monitor for the 55-nation Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said he was also looking into similar practices in Western Europe. The OSCE groups governments including the United States, Europe and Russia.

U.S. President George Bush signed sweeping anti-terror legislation, called the USA Patriot Act, into law in October 2001 in reaction to the Sept 11 attacks on the United States.

Duve said the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were using the act to monitor book buyers and readers by investigating library records, newspaper subscriptions and customers’ bookstore receipts.

“Governmental prerogatives are being used in a way that might intimidate citizens from exercising their right to freedom of expression,” Duve, a former German member of parliament, told OSCE diplomats in Vienna.

“I trust that the freedom of expression will not be allowed to be jeopardised in the country we consider the cradle of that freedom,” he added.

The U.S. rejected the criticism, saying the new law did not violate free speech rights protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“The goal of the anti-terrorism legislation in the United States is to give investigators means to uncover threats to the rule of law without intruding on the civil liberties Americans highly value,” Douglas Davidson, deputy head of the U.S. mission to the OSCE, told diplomats at the OSCE headquarters in Vienna.

Davidson said the law gave investigators limited access under judicial review to specific records on the condition that they related to people already subject of an investigation into international terrorism or spying.

“The First Amendment rights of libraries, and bookstores and their patrons, are protected under these ordinances and will not be abridged,” Davidson said.

Duve, who as OSCE representative on freedom of the media monitors freedom of the press and censorship in all member states, told reporters he became aware of the problem after public complaints by U.S. booksellers and librarians.

Duve said he had asked for clarification on the new law from Secretary of State Colin Powell, the top U.S. representative to the OSCE.—Reuters