Thursday 30 August 2018

Why can’t people in the UK access the website of the Arizona Daily Star?

Recently, someone gave me a link to a website www.tucson.com. It’s a newspaper. Wikipedia calls it “the major morning daily newspaper that serves Tucson and surrounding districts of southern Arizona in the United States.” Hardly a terrorist organization; so why should any reasonable government want to block people going to their website?

Yet when I follow that link, I get a message that says:

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact jspitz@tucson.com or call 800-695-4492.

Now I’m no admirer of the United Nations, but Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights says: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

A couple of questions from this (maybe) naïve observer:

  1. Is this not a clear breach of my (and their) human rights under Article 19?
  2. Why have EU directives and regulations like this not been rejected, or at the very least suspended, by the UK government since the Brexit vote?