The internet is the new frontline in the war for human rights as governments around the world battle to stamp out the voices of opposition online, Amnesty International said today.

In its annual round-up of global human rights abuses, the London-based watchdog singled out Belarus, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia as countries that tried to keep a lid on their web-users, “monitoring chat rooms, deleting blogs, restricting search engines and blocking websites”.

In addition, it said, “people have been imprisoned in China, Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan and Vietnam for posting and sharing information online".

“In an age of technology, the internet has become the new frontier in the struggle for the right to dissent,” said Irene Khan, the Amnesty International secretary-general, in her foreword to the report.

She added: “Everyone has the right to seek and receive information and to express their peaceful beliefs without fear or interference."

In China, access has been blocked to several hundred international websites while thousands of Chinese sites have been closed down, Amnesty said, citing a Tibetan weblog shut down after it questioned Beijing’s role in Tibet.

Bloggers have been sentenced to jail terms and to beatings in Iran, where access to the internet is increasingly strictly controlled, Amnesty said.

The report accuses Vietnam of seeking to strengthen its control of the internet via new rules, by getting managers of internet cafes and service providers to watch users and by filtering or blocking certain websites. It cited the example of Bloc 8406 in Vietnam, an internet-based pro-democracy movement whose backers faced harassment, restrictions on movement and confiscation of computers.

In the Gulf state of Bahrain, seven websites were banned in October, while in Burma the government has blocked numerous sites, as is the case in Syria where access has been stopped to dozens of websites, Amnesty said.

Yet for Amnesty, which was founded in 1961, the internet is a crucial element of human rights campaigning. The organisation and its national arms have organised numerous web-based campaigns including www.controlarms.com, a site to which over a million people have uploaded their photographs to push for tighter regulation of the global arms industry, and www.irrepressible.info, a campaign to push for greater internet freedom.

Last year, Amnesty International issued a report on freedom of expression in China, in which it criticised three of the world's major information technology groups - Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for their business activities in the country, including Google's launch of a censored version of its search engine.

In her foreword to today's report, Ms Khan underlined the importance of internet and similar promotional campaigns to Amnesty's campaigning efforts. "Marches, petitions, virals, blogs, t-shirts and armbands may not seem much by themselves, but by bringing people together they unleash an energy for change that should not be underestimated," she wrote.

The Amnesty International report was published as it emerged that China - contrary to reports this week - had backed away from rules demanding that bloggers use their real names and identification details when they sign up to create weblogs

The official Xinhua news agency reported yesterday that the Government was to promote a "self-discipline code" that would encourage, but not force, bloggers to use their own names. With 140 million internet users, China is the world second largest web market after the United States.

The new draft rules were posted today on the website of the Chinese Internet Association website and showed that blog service providers will have to get their users to provide not just real names but ID details and contact telephone numbers. Bloggers will, however, be able to use fake names when posting on the web.

Since 2005, China has required all website owners to register their full identity, leaving Chinese bloggers with no way to blog anonymously, except for using overseas services such as Blogger, Typepad or LiveJournal - although those sites are frequently blocked by the government.

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