Human rights impact assessment

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

Dear all,

Was good seeing people in Seoul. Sorry I wasn't able to hang out more but I
had to do a bunch of interviews with people in the South Korean web
community - most of whom hadn't really heard of ICANN - and was also
juggling some other project deadlines, which meant going back to the hotel
and working late at night.

At our meeting on Tuesday I raised with Kurt Pritz the question of whether a
human rights impact assessment might be appropriate. He asked me to e-mail
him explaining the idea, which I have done. The same info I sent him is
below. I'll leave it to our councilors and the rest of the NCSG community to
decide whether this is something people want to pursue further.

Best,
Rebecca

As gTLD's and particularly IDN gTLD's get rolled out there are tremendous
number of unknowns about what will happen. The unknowns regarding trademark
and security are much discussed. Less discussed are the unknowns regarding
free expression rights for applicants and their end registrants -
particularly dissident organizations, exiled democracy groups, or
non-mainstream groups from authoritarian countries whose governments might
seek to prevent them from operating an IDN gTLD in that country's native
script, and/or maximize their chances of failure after the application is
approved, and/or track down and persecute individual registrants of these
particular gTLDs.

Human rights impact assessments are increasingly common in other industries
like the extractive and manufacturing industries, but for the ICT sector
they are very new.  Some leading companies in the ICT sector are realizing
that they have a responsibility to make sure that the technical and
operational decisions they make don't have negative unintended consequences
- or implications that weren't sufficiently thought through in advance - for
thehuman rights of their users and customers. I am a founding member of the
Global Network Initiative (globalnetworkinitiative.org), a global
multistakeholder initiative for free expression and privacy for the ICT
industry, launched last year. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have signed on
and we're talking to a range of other companies about joining. Member
companies commit to a set of bottom-line principles, and agree to an
implentation framework which includes a commitment to doing human rights
assessments for new products and services particularly when the rollout of
said products/services includes markets where the definition of "crime" is
well known to include peaceful political speech. If ICANN were a GNI member,
the rollout of gTLD's and especially IDN gTLDs would fit the criteria for a
situation in which a human rightsassessment would be in order.

The GNI principles can be found here:
http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/principles/index.php

The Implementation Guidelines are here:
http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/implementationguidelines/index.php

The section about human rights assessments is exceprted below. Obviously it
would be modified given that ICANN's work of managing the DNS is unique, but
it gives you an idea. Given the public interest mandate of ICANN, it would
seem that commissioning an independent human rights assessment of the DAG
would boost public confidence and trust in ICANN's work. It would also help
lay to rest a lot of open questions. One would envision that such an
assessment would include specific in-depth scenarios for how the DAG's
guidelines would play out for different kinds of
vulnerable/dissident/non-mainstream groups from a range of countries.


   -

   Human Rights Impact Assessments
   Participating companies will employ human rights impact assessments to
   identify circumstances when freedom of expression and privacy may be
   jeopardized or advanced, and develop appropriate risk mitigation strategies
   when:
   - Reviewing and revising internal procedures for responding to government
      demands for user data or content restrictions in existing markets
      - Entering new markets, particularly those where freedom of expression
      and privacy are not well protected.
      - Reviewing the policies, procedures and activities of potential
      partners, investments, suppliers and other relevant related parties for
      protecting freedom of expression and privacy as part of its corporate due
      diligence process.
      - Designing and introducing new technologies, products and services.

   The human rights impact assessments will be undertaken to different
   levels of detail and scope depending on the purpose of the impact
assessment.
   However, participating companies should:
   - Prioritize the use of human rights impact assessments for markets,
      products, technologies and services that present the greatest risk to
      freedom of expression and privacy or where the potential to advance
      humanrights is at its greatest.
      - Update human rights impact assessments over time, such as when there
      are material changes to laws, regulations, markets, products,
technologies,
      or services.
      - Draw upon resources from human rights groups, government bodies,
      international organizations and materials developed as part of this
      multi-stakeholder process.
      - Include a consideration of relevant local laws in each market and
      whether the domestic legal systems conform to rule of law requirements.
      - Utilize learning from real life cases and precedents.
      - Focus on potential partners, investments, suppliers and other
      relevant related parties that are involved in the participating company’s
      business in a manner that materially affects the company’s role in
      respecting and protecting privacy and freedom of expression.
      - Incorporate the outputs of human rights impact assessments into
      other company processes, such as corporate risk assessments and due
      diligence.




-- 
IMPORTANT: My Hong Kong University e-mail (rmack at hku.hk) will stop working
in January. Please use my gmail instead (see below).

Rebecca MacKinnon
Open Society Fellow | Co-founder, GlobalVoicesOnline.org
Assistant Professor, Journalism & Media Studies Centre, University of Hong
Kong

UK: +44-7759-863406
USA: +1-617-939-3493
HK: +852-6334-8843
Mainland China: +86-13710820364

E-mail: rebecca.mackinnon at gmail.com
Blog: http://RConversation.blogs.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rmack
Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/rebeccamack
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