Curtailing Free Expression, Opinion and Information Online in Southeast Asia Dictating the Internet: Curtailing Free Expression, Opinion and Information Online in Southeast Asia This report analyzes how governments in Southeast Asia have used the law to restrict and control expression and content online to the detriment of individuals’ rights to freedom of expression and information. For decades, laws which establish defamation, lesè majesté, sedition, contempt of court or “crimes against the State” as criminal offences have been promulgated and invoked to protect national security and ensure public order. In reality, States have conflated “national security” with the perceived interests of the government or other powerful interests and targeted a range of views, including critical dissent, expressed by individuals both offline and online. “Public order” has also been used as a justification to violate individuals’ rights to expression, information, privacy, bodily integrity and security. This trend of abuse continues, and in recent years has expanded to the online sphere, through the enforcement of a new generation of laws that purportedly aim to regulate information online, control the spread of disinformation online, ensure cybersecurity and sometimes permit internet shutdowns, typically on the basis of ensuring public order. The ICJ acknowledges that the spread of content that serves to harm the rights or reputations of others, including hate speech or incitement to violence online, and “cyber-attacks” are serious problems which require urgent law and policy solutions.2 In Southeast Asia, however, legislative attempts by governments to combat these challenges appear generally not to have been introduced in good faith, and certainly not in a manner consistent with human rights and the rule of law. The ICJ intends for this report to contribute to human rights-compliant policy solutions by documenting past abuses and identifying problematic aspects of existing legal frameworks with the aim of contributing in a positive and constructive manner to efforts to develop new legal frameworks that address the human rights and rule of law challenges and opportunities that new technologies bring. 2 This includes defamatory content, the spread of private personal content without consent of the owner of such content, disinformation or propaganda, within the context of elections for example, that can negatively impact upon an individual’s ability to exercise his or her other rights, such as the right to privacy, the right to vote or the rights to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information. 7