Human Rights and PDPs

[Joy Liddicoat]

Hi all - just following up the NCUC Costa Rica meeting, some comments on
this list and some reflections we've been doing in APC .  below is a summary
of our constituency discussions and, from what I can glean, a few areas of
rough consensus that are emerging:

.         There are opportunities in ICANN's public policy development
processes to bring in human rights analyses. However, it was strongly
pointed out in the NCSG meeting in Costa Rica that ICANN cannot and must not
make human rights policy. Rather, it should be assisted to make human rights
compliant policy. Any proposal for ICANN to be a human rights policy making
body was, rightly, very firmly resisted. Reaction to the idea of human
rights impact assessments was raised at the joint GNSO GAC meeting with a
cautious but not cold reception.

Taking the idea forward

Avri noted that several years ago attempts were made to get human rights
impact analysis done at the start of every PDP. In the end, a general rights
impact analysis was included in the revised PDP guidelines which means that
for every PDP issue paper that comes out, there needs to be rights analysis,
which can include human rights.  Such papers will be released in initial
form with a comment period and this provides a chance for groups and
individuals to submit their own human rights analysis into the mix. The
objectives our strategy and related activities could be:

.         Increased understanding of different approaches to assessing human
rights and development impacts of ICANN public policy

.         Improved knowledge of how the human rights approach relates to
ICANN public policy

.         Increased number of ICANN policies that are human rights compliant

.         Support for NCUC, NCSG and improved constituency/network
relationships



Suggested next steps:

.         Identify who is interested and has time to help develop this in
NCUC - and NCSG generally

.         Choose an issue on which to make a strategic intervention - there
are at least two or three issues on the policy programme that seem to have a
strong human rights flavour:

o   WHOIS data and law enforcement requests: is there anything more that
NCUC could usefully contribute? Eg a brief issues paper with a HR
implications summary?

o   RAA negotiations to address law enforcement recommendations

o   New gTLDs - would it be useful to have an issues or position paper
outlining any human rights related public policy issues in light of
applications received?



Other ideas and comments (as well as corrections) are of course welcome







Joy Liddicoat

Project Coordinator

Internet Rights are Human Rights

www.apc.org <http://www.apc.org/>



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/attachments/20120620/17531229/attachment.html>