The United Nations, human rights and the internet

[Joy Liddicoat]

Hi all - an update (for those interested) about recent initiatives that APC
has been working on with our members and networks.

For some time APC has been working on global and national strategies for
promotion and protection of online freedom of expression and freedom of
association: http://rights.apc.org . As part of this strategy we've been
working with members and networks to promote internet related human rights
issues in the United Nations. This includes the Human Rights Council and the
Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process: www.upr-info.org



This month submissions were filed for four countries: India, Brazil, South
Africa and Ecuador. You can find more information here: http://bit.ly/t6wloJ
In each country we believe this is the first time that internet related
human rights issues have ever been raised in the UPR process.
Recommendations were made for action and follow up to be taken by each
government.   Key issues highlighted across the submissions were:

.         Internet governance: the need for human rights to be expressly
included and for multi-stakeholder processes (India, Brazil, South Africa)

.         The obligation to report on internet rights issues (all country
reports)

.         Freedom of expression and content control including privacy,
cybercrime law, and surveillance (South Africa, Brazil, and India)

.         The right to information, freedom of expression and the links to
democracy (India, South Africa, Ecuador, Brazil)

.         Access to the internet as a multi-faceted concept including
infrastructure, regulatory policy, language and content diversity (Ecuador,
India, South Africa)

.         Women's human rights: access to sexual and reproductive health
information (Brazil), the need for a rights based approach to internet
related policy (India) and access to justice and violence against women
(Philippines).



The next steps involve sending these to governments and national human
rights commissions and starting to lobby them to take up these issues. In
addition,  local "Connect Your Rights! Internet Rights are Human Rights"
campaigns will roll out in each country over the next 6 months to support
these submissions and to call on governments to take action on the
recommendations. Next week a global call will go out for contributions of
user generated content to the campaign http://rights.apc.org . These will
uploaded and distributed to build campaign momentum that will culminate at
the UPR review of each of these countries at the United Nations in May 2012.



In other developments, in March 2012 the Human Rights Council will convene
an expert panel on the internet and freedom of expression. This resulted
from an APC suggestion in HRC 17 in May, which the Swedish government
subsequently endorsed and proposed a resolution for (and which 50 countries
supported at HRC 18 in September 2011:
http://www.apc.org/en/press/governance/it039s-time-human-rights-be-centre-in
ternet-govern . APC is preparing for this panel and will be submitting
suggestions for experts and, if possible, sending human rights defenders to
attend and advocate for follow up action and concrete proposals.



We think it is vital that there is credible expertise available from the
technical community and those familiar with the roles and activities of
ICANN and related bodies.



*If you have comments or suggestions about this, please do let us know.*



If you have any other questions or comments, please don't hesitate to ask on
this list or to me directly.



Kind regards



Joy Liddicoat

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