| 
“Britain and India to see the world through similar eyes”
- While Britain is taking a strong leadership role in the world in arguing for Internet freedom, its position on the widely-debated issue was not an absolutist one, Jeremy Browne, UK Minister for Foreign affairs said
- Mr. Browne said while the UK quite emphatically stood for an open society and freedom of speech and expression, there were also areas where there could be competing freedoms such as one's right to privacy against the other's right to know.
- While the assumption that the individual is sovereign and that the State is a servant of the people and not the other way around was a core belief of an open society, there was also the potential for the ability to communicate (on the Internet) to be used in malign ways such as paedophiles misusing social media to snare children, he said.
- Mr. Browne, who felt that the Internet and social media were a great force for good, cited the Arab world where there were curbs on individual freedoms to argue that the most likely way that the people there would become free over time would be not through the intervention of the United Nations or the signing of treaties, but through millions of people using their shared knowledge at the grassroots level to bring about social change in a bottom-up rather than top-down movement.
- Stressing the need to build broad coalitions of support based on shared values in a changing world order, Mr. Browne noted that India was a strong ally in this regard, shared common ground with the UK on democracy, free speech, trade relations, wealth creation, cultural and sporting links and made it potentially possible for “Britain and India to see the world through similar eyes.”
- Britain's forthright support for a permanent seat for India in the UN Security Council stemmed from a wish to see that India was properly represented on the international stage, he said.
