FYCA against hate speech online

The Federation of Youth Cubs of Armenia has already summed up two-day seminar “Combating hate speech online” organized on national level. The program was organized with the support of European Youth Foundation and was held in Yerevan.

The seminar was organized in the framework of "Youth combating hate speech online" comprehensive campaign (from 2013-2014) of Council of Europe, which aimed to provide the necessary knowledge and skills to the youth and to fight with joint efforts against racism and discrimination in the online forms.

The seminar brought together active young people, bloggers, lawyers, journalists, experts, and both public and political figures. Those honorable guests had speeches, represented the problems existing in the above mentioned sphere from the specific national point of view. The participants were very interested in those matters and a lot of questions were asked mainly about intolerance and hate speeches leading and being propagandized by neighbor countries in our geographical area. A lot of questions were asked also about the possible prevention of this kind of evil in the online sphere.

There was also reverberation about national matters; those are abuse of freedom of speech and expression, which sometimes turns to hate speech by the representatives of mass media due to the lack of ethics, incompetence and ignorance. With the resistive support of invited experts, participants developed the draft of the national strategy for 2013-2014 years to fight against online hate and produced their willingness and readiness to work together in the future.

At the end of the seminar a national coalition was created in order to work according to the worked up plan of the national strategy. In the coalition were included active young people, representatives from various NGO's, student unions as well as state officials, public figures and deputies.

In his closing speech the president of The Federation of Youth Clubs of Armenia, Atom Mkhitaryan fairly mentioned the importance of sustainable collaboration and that FYCA will coordinate the works of the new created coalition, by organizing occasional meetings with/for the members of coalition, as a result of which new projects and events will be held in the framework of “Combating hate speech” both in Armenia and abroad.