By Samantha Williams

There is yet another news of waging legal battles the promoting organizations and association of online gambling websites are engaged in, this time on the British soil.  Countries like U.S.A., Canada, Australia, Germany and U.K. where the government authorities are frowning upon the activities of online gambling sites are putting spokes and legal hurdles into their operations.  Their contention is proper code of conduct can not be enforced on these sites, simply by the enormity of the task.  So, they are using social, moral and economical platforms for their proclamation of legal fights with the promoters of these online sites.

These authorities have objection to the advertisement of these online gambling sites as a means of promotion.  Normally the practice best made use of in the Internet marketing is website promotion, without which no site can survive.  In the cyber-world every day an estimated 200 million visitors are thronging the World Wide Net.  Hundreds of thousands of websites are catering to the different needs of this mammoth population in one way or the other.  Unless a website has promotional tactics well adopted, there is no way they can attract the attention of these viewers at least for split seconds.  What is the use of floating a site online, if it is not viewed by a legitimate size of audience for whom they are there? They will become a needle lost in the hay-heap!

So crippling the advertisement choices of sites is deemed as preventing their growth by the legal enforcement agencies.  Here again, the British law authorities are making a selection of online sites and show lenience to some by “white-listing” method for making advertisements.  The criteria for being white-listed are not so transparent, as is with the case of legal jargons for enactment and enforcement of statues.

U.K.’s Gambling Commission has recently excluded the Mohawk Council of the Kahnawake in Canada from the “white-list of permitted online gambling advertisers”.  As expected reaction to this exclusion from the aggrieved side – Canadian First Nation Enclave, Montreal Canada and Kahnawake Gaming Commission – have expressed their dissatisfaction in so many words.  They have revealed their intention to take exception to this arbitrary decision on the part of authorities of the British Government and go for appropriate legal action.

The spokespersons of the Canadian side state that they have a long history of controlling and monitoring online gambling sites, hosted and associated with the Enclave and therefore the exclusion from the white-list is unwarranted.  In the same breath they are also citing the inclusion of Tasmania recently in the U.K.’s white list as discriminatory, inasmuch as Tasmania has no such history of rigid controls.

They also feel that due consideration as appropriate under the law has not been given by U.K. in processing their application for white-listing.  Another point in support of their impending legal action, according to these representatives, is the exclusion is complete violation of Article 20 of the United Nations Declaration On The Rights of Indigenous Peoples which was signed in the month of September 2007, of which U.K. is a signatory.

So the chances are the Battle Royal on legal grounds, taking recourse to Article 20 of the above Declaration, is in the offing in the Courts of Law of the British Empire.