[pp.int.general] Pirate Parties and Democracy/Freedom of Speech

[Ilya Kravtsov]

Hey guys, Aeroclub from Russia here.
Here at Pirate Party Russia we are working on our platform right now. And
following the advice of our more succesful colleagues abroad, we are trying
to keep the list of issues we are working on at minimum: copyright, privacy
 and patents, of course.However, we have a major discourse now about the
proposal to add another "pillar" to these three, namely the demand of
democracy and free speech. As you know, the situation with these is pretty
bad in Russia, but the real question is whether they should be included in
the issues of a Pirate Party.
The question of censorship is pretty close to that of privacy, and the
anti-democratic measures taken by the Russian government also affect us
directly (for example, to register an political party officially, we need to
have local cells in at least the half of Russian prefectures with a minimum
number of members of 500 at each of them; that makes it totally impossible
for us to be registered officially under these rules, since only in the
major urban hubs people have access to the internet, and geographically most
of country is villages were nobody has ever seen a computer)...But are these
in the scope of the pirate movement and don't they affect the "Left-right
neutrality" conception? What do you guys think?
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