The Convention was drafted by the Council of Europe with input from the US and other non-European countries. It is aiming for harmonisation in the laws on hacking and on-line child pornography, among other crimes.
The Standing Committee of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly has voted unanimously in favour of a Protocol that will be used to “eliminate” racist web sites from the internet and define and criminalise hate-speech on computer networks.
The Committee's recommendation states that drafters of the protocol should consider ways of preventing "illegal hosting" - a practice it describes whereby those operating racist sites locate their servers in a country with less strict regulations in order to side-step the law. The report's author, Ivar Tallo of Estonia, explained:
"For example, a racist French site aimed at a French audience, but housed on a server located in the United States, would not be able to hide behind American laws protecting freedom of speech."
He added: "The eleventh of September has shown that hate speech can become an action of horrendous magnitude. Therefore modern technology has to have safeguards and one of those is to ban hate speech on the internet." The Assembly earlier recommended that Europe's governments consider including measures to decode "terrorist messages" in the protocol.
The differences between present US and French laws caused the high profile dispute between anti-racism groups and Yahoo! over the portal’s hosting of auctions selling Nazi memorabilia on its US site which breached French laws, but not US laws. A French court ruled against Yahoo!; a US court then effectively told Yahoo! that it could ignore the French ruling.