FRANCE BANS HUMAN RIGHTS VIDEO ON US

"I don't see why a great power, even the greatest in the world, shouldn't
be criticised by an organisation like Amnesty International, even if the
United States is certainly not the most blameworthy country as far as human
rights are concerned," says Herve Bourges, president of France's
broadcasting watchdog, the Conseil Superieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA).

He was reacting to the decision by the Bureau de Verification de la
Publicite (BVP), a body made up of advertisers and broadcasters, which
monitors advertising standards, to ban a video put out by the French
section of Amnesty International.

This is not the first time a campaign video by the human rights
organisation has been censored in France. Earlier clips on Morocco and
China were banned. Amnesty International, which puts out a message about a
different country each year, decided to take on the US in 1999 by urging it
to show "a greater respect for basic human rights".

The 60-second video, shot for free by the advertising agency Bates France
and produced by Premiere Heure, sets out to denounce police brutality and
shameful prison conditions in the US. To blow the whistle on a situation
that "is often a far cry" from the country's reputation, the creators of
the video decided to subvert a symbol of American culture: jeans.

"In the US human rights are not always as robust as jeans," the commentary
says, while Shaun Severi's images show a man being beaten up on the ground,
a prison warder grabbing the buttocks of a prisoner and ripping open his
flies, and an electric prod stunning a struggling man.

At the end of the video viewers see the body of a prisoner, presumably the
man shown earlier, laid out in a row of corpses in a morgue. The sequence
is accompanied by the sensual voice of jazz singer Anita O'Day singing,
"April skies are in your eyes, but darling, don't be blue, don't cry".

The video is so hard-hitting that the BVP feels it could "prejudice good
relations between the two countries". However, the CSA says: "Under no
circumstances would we have intervened to prevent the video from being
broadcast."

Amnesty International told the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche: "We
always denounce state violence. If in future we're prevented from
criticising certain countries in our videos, we'll have to make do with
organising rather woolly institutional campaigns about the need for freedom
of speech."

The video has also been banned in other countries, including Britain. In
each case a self-regulatory authority has issued an unfavourable opinion.
The BVP's "recommendation" has been strictly complied with by France's two
main cinema advertising agencies, Médiavision (Gaumont and
Pathé) and Circuit A (UGC). And all the television channels appear
to have toed the line.

Only Marin Karmitz, an independent film distributor, has accepted the
controversial video, which he will screen this month in 50 cinemas as a
short before the main feature. November 2