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Hi Rikke and all,
Rikke, thanks for taking the time to draft
this. Is it possible and/or appropriate to address the particular importance of
privacy as regards to the privacy of the vote in any electronic voting
processes?
Thanks, Saludos, Ginger
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 3:21
PM
Subject: [hr-wsis] IGF meeting
hi all
I will attend the open IGF consultations next
week, and have in consultation with Meryem drafted a statement (below) to be
submitted to the IGF on behalf of the Caucus.
Any comments you may
have are most welcome.
best
Rikke
----------------------------
Human Rights and Internet
Governance
Statement by
The WSIS Civil Society Human Rights Caucus
to the IGF open consultations
Geneva, February 16-17, 2006
We
welcome the creation of a global internet governance forum, and hope for this
forum to contribute to greater awareness of the urgent need to respect and
protect international human rights standards in a number of policy areas
related to internet. We wish to stress the importance of creating an
inclusive, non-discriminatory, and transparent discussion space, with real
means of civil society participation not least from the developing countries.
We also recognise a need for greater human rights awareness and capacity
building across the many issue-specific arenas of internet policies, which
currently exist. We wish however to remind that the tendency to address
any internet related policy aspect within the framework of Internet governance
may result in a lawless zone escaping international human rights protection
and diluting responsibility and accountability of States towards their
citizens.
Throughout the WSIS process it was time and again reaffirmed
that the information society must foster and protect human rights as
stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the vast array of
Human Rights Conventions, at international and regional level. Thus,
compliance with international human rights law as well as effective human
rights protection must be a baseline for assessing both national and
international regulation related to information society policies.
The system of human rights protection is built on citizens being able
to claim protection and enforcement of human rights by their governments, and
if this fails through the international human rights system. The fact that the
international community can hold states accountable for national human rights
protection is key to the whole system of protection. Within the trans-national
policy arena of internet regulation, it is crucial that citizens basic rights
and freedoms remain protected, and that there are concrete measures to enforce
these rights and freedoms.
We wish to point to two main areas related
to internet policies, where we are very concerned with current policy
developments:
. Privacy. As stressed in the contribution to the
Internet Governance Forum from the WSIS Civil Society Working Group on Privacy
and Security there is no international legal framework for online privacy
protection and enforcement. In the current political climate driven by the
so-called "war on terror", international human rights privacy standards are
under the strongest pressure since their adoption, and are currently being
restricted in a number of areas with little or no legal safeguards to ensure
check and balances. Another area of concern is the level of privacy protection
for user data in the Whois database, which is currently set by US domestic
standards, and thus do not comply with the level of data protection guaranteed
to citizens in i.e. Europe.
. Freedom of _expression_. It is well
documented that online freedom of _expression_ are being violated around the
globe, both in the form of outright censorship but also by more subtle
measures including privatised censorship and state measures to protect against
so-called harmful content. Areas of concern include state filtered information
access, ISP self-regulation of harm-full content, state / commercial
censorship of search terms, criminalisation of content that are fully
legitimate under international freedom of _expression_ standards including when
leading to imprisonment of online journalists and bloggers, extended copyright
regimes, etc.
We encourage the Internet Governance Forum to
address, unfold, and raise greater awareness on these issues among all
stakeholders. We call the Forum for cooperation with existing UN bodies in
charge of Human Rights issues, especially the UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, with a clear goal to strengthen human rights
protection related to internet policies, and to ensure that all internet
policies have human rights protection as their baseline. To this end, we hope
that the Internet Governance Forum will endorse the WSIS Civil Society Human
Rights Caucus proposal to establish an Independent Commission on the
Information Society and Human Rights, composed of highly qualified experts in
various relevant fields, with a broad geographical representation, to monitor
and assess relevant legislation and policies to ensure that these are
compliant with international human
standards.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
WSIS Human Rights Caucus was set up in June 2002 to ensure that human rights
are firmly placed on the information society agenda. It has more than 65
member organisations. For more information on the WSIS Human Rights Caucus
see: http://www.iris.sgdg.org/actions/smsi/hr-wsis
Contact:
Meryem Marzouki, IRIS, marzouki@ras.eu.org
Rikke Frank
Jørgensen, Danish Human Rights Institute, rfj@humanrights.dk
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