Subject: Re: [Mtgvenue] Merging in ideas from draft-sullivan-mtgvenue-decisions

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2017 20:28:44 -0800 (PST)

Andrew,

I would argue that your (4) could easily fall under the general label
of "always follow local laws" so that for example you are warned never
to criticize the king or indeed even discuss the monarchy in Thailand.

Otherwise, I think you have summarized the two approaches very well.

Ole

Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]> Sat, 07 January 2017 02:35 
said:

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 03:02:52PM -0800, Bob Hinden wrote:
 
> we might find that many countries have some sort of laws that don’t
> meet that.  Even if it is not enforced against visitors.

This issue keeps coming up (it's implicit in Ole's recent message to
the list too), and I think it's something that we're going to need to
face squarely as an open issue, even if we don't resolve it right now.

It seems to me that there are different approaches here, and we are
going to need to decide which we're going to pick.

Let us assume that there is some class of laws in some countries that
require differential treatment of indivuduals (the list Alissa
presented is a good one), under which some of our participants would
fall.  In all cases, of course, anyone who actually lives in the
country is already affected by the law, so I've left consideration of
that out.  There are still multiple possible cases:

    1.  The laws apply only to resident nationals of that country.  In
    this case, anyone who might visit as part of the meeting would not
    be affected.  (I do not know whether this ever happens.)

    2.  The laws are on the books, but are rarely enforced or are
    enforced selectively, and only ever against locals.  In this case,
    someone who no longer lives there and participates in the IETF
    might be negatively affected by the treatment.

    3.  The laws are on the books, but are rarely enforced or are
    enforced selectively.  In this case, any participant meeting the
    criteria might be affected.

    4.  The laws are on the books, and are regularly enforced but only
    for certain classes of attention-drawing behaviour.  (An example
    is strong speech-control laws that turn out actually to be used
    only against certain kinds of activists or something like that.
    We actually faced something like this case, except that the law
    wasn't apparently discriminatory in the way we're discussing.)  In
    this case, any participant could be subject to the law, depending
    on their behaviour.

    5.  The laws are on the books and are regularly enforced.  In this
    case, any participant in the affected class would be affected.

I _think_ people agree that (1) would be just ok and that (5) would be
unacceptable.  It seems to me that (4) would be a very difficult
question to tackle, and I hope everyone would agree that for the
sanity of the organization we would therefore not go to such a venue.
So the hard cases are (2) and (3) (which I think effectively boil down
to the same thing involving the meaning of "selective" anyway).

Some in the discussion appear to think that the answer to this must be
evaluated empirically, because it's a practical question of risk and
it is to be traded off among other risks.

Others in the discussion appear to think that the answer to this must
be evaluated in terms of the acceptability of the law in the first
place, and that if the affected class of people face any chance
(i.e. in a logical possibility sense) of prosecution under the law
then the venue is unacceptable.

I myself don't know which answer I prefer, but I hope that making this
distinction starker at least helps us to discuss the options before us
(and to make that choice plain in the draft).

Please note that all of this is _entirely different_ to the case where
there is not actually a law, but the country is manifestly selective
in its visa-approval policies and so on.  That is also a problem, but
it is different than the one of laws that remain standing.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2017 09:05:30 +1300

> Otherwise, I think you have summarized the two approaches very well.

Agreed. I don't want to appear too provocative, but suppose that the proposed

> then the venue is unacceptable.

I expect we'd say "No way."

I think we need to consider a number of test cases in order to figure out
the preferred approach.

   Brian

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