To mark World Day Against Cyber-Censorship (12 March 2015), Reporters Without Borders is launching “Operation Collateral Freedom” to unblock nine censored websites in 11 countries that are on its list of “Enemies of the Internet.”

Blocked since January in the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights site (normally found at www.gc4hr.org) can now be accessed at this address: https://gc1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

To make this and the eight other chosen sites accessible to the public in these countries, Reporters Without Borders has created mirror copies and has placed each copy with such major cloud hosting services as Amazon and Microsoft.

Entitled #CollateralFreedom, this operation takes advantage of the fact that the governments of these countries will not want to block these services although they could. Blocking Amazon or Microsoft would hurt the thousands of companies that use them every day. The economic and political cost of blocking the mirror sites would therefore be too high.

Reporters Without Borders will maintain these mirror sites for several months.

The GCHR is not welcomed in the UAE, where its website has been blocked since January 2015 or in Saudi Arabia, where it has been repeatedly blocked. It is believed that the reason for the blocking is the unconditional support that the GCHR has given to the human rights defenders, in particular Dr. Mohammed Al-Roken, Dr. Mohammed Al-Mansori, Dr. Mohammed Al-Qahtani, Waleed Abu Al-Khair and Raef Badawi and other detained human rights defenders.

The sites participating in Operation #CollateralFreedom:

1. Grani.ru, blocked in Russia, is now available at https://gr1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

2. Fergananews.com, blocked in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, is now available at https://fg1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

3. The Tibet Post, blocked in China, is now available at https://tp1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

4. Dan Lam Bao, blocked in Vietnam, is now available at https://dlb1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

5. Mingjing News, blocked in China, is now available at https://mn1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

6. Hablemos Press, blocked in Cuba, is now available at https://hp1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

7. Gooya News, blocked in Iran, is now available at https://gn1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

8. Gulf Centre for Human Rights, blocked in the United Arab Emirates is now available at https://gc1.global.ssl.fastly.net/

9. Bahrain Mirror, blocked in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, is now available at https://bahrainmirror.global.ssl.fastly.net/

This list can also be seen at the Operation #CollateralFreedom website http://12mars.rsf.org and at https://github.com/RSF-RWB/collateralfreedom

To help make freely-reported news and information available in these countries, all Internet users are invited to join in this operation by posting this list on social networks with the #CollateralFreedom hashtag.