Is Online Democracy in the Eu For Professionals Only?

Many hope information technology will help create conditions for political dialogues among citizens, as well as increase their participation in community issues. Both vertical and horizontal dialogues would be possible; problems could be defined and refined collectively, citizens could construe different political positions regardless of the established political party structure, and try different arguments among each other [2].

This makes a thin democracy a bit stronger. Today we can see attempts to create such conditions for a citizen dialogue on the Internet. One crucial condition for creating virtual forums with the purpose of strengthening democratic dialogues is one of the fundamentals of democracy itself—freedom of expression. In Western democracies there are laws that protect freedom of expression. However, do we have freedom of expression in virtual forums?

In October 1995, the European Parliament issued a directive (a document directed to the member states within the European Union in order to harmonize their legislation) on protection of individuals with regard to any processing, that is, collecting, recording, organizing, storing, retrieving, and moving of personal data [1].

With this directive, the privacy of the citizens of the member states of the EU should be protected in three basic ways: First, personal data may be processed only if the data subject (the individual whose personal data is to be processed) has unambiguously given consent (with a few exceptions, for example, due to legal conditions or authority’s exercise).

Second, processing of personal data that reveals racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious, or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, health information, or sexual preferences is forbidden (with some specific exceptions, such as if the data subject has given explicit consent or if the data is needed by health-care services or to exercise or defend legal claims).

Third, transferring personal data to a country outside the EU is allowed only if this country can ensure an adequate level of protection (with exceptions similar to those mentioned earlier).

A consequence is that every time someone would like to mention a name of a physical person, this person must give explicit consent in advance. The practical problems for electronic democratic dialogues are obvious—it is almost impossible to discuss someone’s statement without at least implicitly identifying that person.

This directive is a restriction of the freedom of expression on the Internet and other virtual settings, but only for ordinary citizens. The directive excludes processing of personal data for journalistic, artistic, and literary purposes from these constraints. Thus, according to the EU parliament, enough freedom of expression in virtual forums is achived when authors, journalists, and artists are free to engage in political debates. Democratic debate then becomes a purely professional activity. This reflects a very thin democracy model.

Directives are binding for national legislators. How, then, is this directive interpreted in the member states? Sweden was first to implement this directive into a national law about personal data processing [5]. The Swedish law follows the EU directive by heart. If a Swedish citizen names a living person on a Web page without the person’s explicit consent (and without journalistic, artistic, or literary purpose), it is a violation of this law.

In Western democracies there are laws that protect freedom of expression. However, do we have freedom of expression in virtual forums?

The debate in Sweden led to a complementary addition to this law, which allows processing of personal data that is "not privacy invading," without explicitly defining the meaning of this term. Therefore, this law is still an obstacle to e-democracy. If a contribution to a political debate is perceived as not privacy invading—which a special supervisory authority decides upon—the contributor runs the risk of being reported to the supervisory authority, who might report this to a prosecutor. From Oct. 1998 through Aug. 2000, there have been 296 reports to the supervisory authority for suspicious violation of this law.

This law is not the only law in Sweden that works as an obstacle to e-democracy. In May 1998 a law came into force that regulates responsibility in bulletin board systems [4]. In short, the law states that the person who initiates a bulletin board is responsible for all its content.

The purpose of this law is to discover and prevent the publishing of illegal electronic messages, whether the content is letters or pictures. The person responsible for a bulletin board must control the flow of messages and erase contributions that violate the laws on agitation, persecution against ethnic groups, child pornography, descriptions of violence, and copyright. This does not mean the author of an illegal message is free from responsibility. Indeed, there are two kinds of responsibilities with this law: the author of an illegal message is responsible for the content, and the person in charge of the bulletin board is responsible for publishing the message in the virtual forum.

This law leads to the delicate problem of deciding if a message is agitation or to recognize persecution against ethnic groups, for example, in a political discussion about immigration. This law might prevent people with good intentions from initiating virtual forums.

Governments across the EU have shown interest in using information technology to increase citizens’ participation in community issues. In Sweden, a government proposition named "An Information Society for Everyone" [3] and a substantial government investigation named "A Sustainable Democracy" [6] both presume and suggest that information technology should be used to strengthen democracy. At the same time the Swedish parliament has decided on the laws discussed here that work as effective obstacles to electronic democracy.

As illustrated in the article by Anttiroiko in this section, democracy is not an issue in the European Information Society policy, but there are several local experiments and trials on e-democracy. If the EU member states follow the Swedish pilot example, strong, participatory forms of e-democracy are severely constrained.

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