It seems that regime thugs in Tunisia are giving French journalists the kind of treatment American journalists have come to expect from the Sudanese. This is from Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Information Summit: Crisis Between Tunisia & France Because of Assaults on Journalists:

On the evening of the “World Summit on the Information Society” which Tunisia is hosting tomorrow lasting through Friday, the French government demanded from the Tunisian government a guarantee of freedom of the press after a French journalist was physically accosted by unknown individuals. This comes in the context of increasingly tense relations between Tunisia on the one hand and France and human rights and freedom of the press organizations on the other, due to multiple journalists being subject to being roughed up by unknown persons before the summit which discusses the spread of information, bridging the informational breach between the developing and developed world, and the regulation of the internet. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said in a written statement yesterday, ‘I demand from the Tunisian authorities that they exert everything within their power to guarantee freedom of exchange of information and guarantee journalists the ability to do their work.’

The article doesn’t give more precise details, but Le Monde fills in the gaps on the most recent incident, reporting that it involved Christophe Boltanski of the French newspaper Liberation, and that the incident took place on Nov. 11. The article indicates that he was not hurt badly. Call it the Andrea Mitchell treatment. (For those who don’t remember, Mitchell accompanied Secretary of State Rice to the Sudan a few months ago, got roughed up after asking a tough question, and was shocked – absolutely scandalized – that the Sudan did not guarantee freedom of the press.)

This incident is especially poignant now because many are using this summit to advocate that the regulation of web access should be moved from a private company now in the United States to the United Nations, which, of course, is run by countries like Tunisia. Actually, Tunisia isn’t even all that authoritarian by UN standards. It does not have free and fair elections, and, as we see here, it has less than a totally free press, but is practically a liberal democracy in comparison to, say, China. Allowing the UN to regulate the internet is a really bad idea.

Kirk H. Sowell, Window on the Arab World