A/55/304 for selling Nazi objects on its French site may set a legal precedent. On 11 April 2000, the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, the Union des étudiants juifs de France (French Jewish Students’ Union) and the Movement against Racism and for Friendship among Peoples (MRAP) sued Yahoo! in an attempt to have its auction site, which offers for sale over 12,000 Nazi objects (including swastikas, Nazi tracts, Schutzstaffel (SS) insignia and uniforms) barred to French Internet users. Yahoo! representatives argued that the site has its headquarters in the United States, where such operations are perfectly legal, and that the French courts therefore have no jurisdiction over it. The French judge rejected this argument on the grounds that the Yahoo!.fr site is linked to the Yahoo!.com site in the United States and ordered Yahoo! to block access from France to Nazi apologist or negationist Web pages. Yahoo! will have to inform the judge what technology it plans to use to implement that ruling. The court will issue a final verdict on 6 November 2000, thereby ruling on the delicate issue of how to compel a technology provider (access provider or host), especially one domiciled in the United States of America, to put in place the technology to block access to one of its sites when the content of that site infringes French law. 35. In Germany, a Berlin court on 8 August 2000 sentenced a former member of the Nationaldemokratischer Parti Deutschland (NPD), a negationist and openly Hitlerite movement (with a membership of some 6,000), to two years in prison without parole for incitement to racial hatred and preparation of a bombing attempt. The accused admitted to having made a lethal weapon using the instructions found on an Internet web site. According to an article in Le Figaro on 9 August 2000, the Minister of Justice, Herta Daübber-Gmelin, announced that she would take steps to prevent Internet sites from using neo-Nazi elements in their addresses, after a site had been able to use “Heil Hitler” as part of its address with complete impunity. 36. Switzerland has decided to mount a campaign against racist propaganda on the Internet by making Internet service providers criminally liable (an approach quite different from that generally taken so far in Europe) and by seeking to convince more permissive States to restrict access to racist sites to their national territories (as reported in Le Temps on 18 February 2000). IV. Measures taken by Governments A. France 37. After taking steps to regularize the status of and gradually integrate undocumented persons, the French Government, on the basis of the annual report of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, instituted a plan to combat racial discrimination by holding public hearings in March 1999 on ways to better combat the racism and xenophobia now undeniably manifest in France (in the areas of employment, training, housing, recreation and public administration): (a) A study group on discrimination was created in April 1999 to observe and analyse manifestations of discrimination in all areas of society, particularly employment, recreation and housing, and in public administration or education. The study group is composed of representatives of government offices, employers’ associations, trade unions and anti-racist and human rights organizations. Its task is to explain how racism operates and to present action proposals to the Government. It has already submitted to the Government its first report on jobs closed to foreigners; (b) A commission on access to citizenship was set up in January 1999 in each prefecture. Aside from uncovering acts of racial discrimination, the main purpose of these commissions is to help children of immigrants find a job and a place in society and to eliminate the discrimination which they suffer in hiring, housing and recreation. The commission in each department brings together, under the prefect’s auspices, representatives of government offices, public services, elected officials, unions, associations and low-cost housing (HLM) agencies; (c) Efforts to combat ordinary, everyday racial discrimination, which has now become commonplace, have been reinforced by the introduction of a free telephone number, “green number 114 against discrimination” in service since 16 May 2000, under the auspices of the study group on discrimination. The initiative has been highly successful and revealing of the extent of ordinary discrimination (nearly 2,000 calls are received per day, as reported in Le Monde on 10 August 2000, p. 5). 9