What role can human rights play in Internet policy? – WS 08 2011
31 May 2011 | 11:00-12:30
Programme overview 2011
The Internet has profound implications for human rights: it provides a new space for people to realize their human rights (most obviously the right to exercise free expression which can be exercised on a level unparalleled in history); and is a valuable tool in the fight to uphold all human rights standards. This workshop is an opportunity to discuss what role human rights should play in Internet policy discussions, and what practical steps different stakeholders can take in order to realize this vision.
People
Key Participants
- William Drake, University of Zurich
- Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Icelandic MP
- Eric Tomson, ISOC Wallonia
- Tapani Tarvainen, Electronic Frontier Finland
Moderator
- Dixie Hawtin, Global Partners and Associates
Session report
This workshop explored how to make human rights in Internet governance a reality, to ensure that these values underpin the governance processes wherever they take place. The session began with an overview of global Internet governance structures. It was noted that decisions which impact human rights on the Internet are made across a wide variety of bodies (ICANN, ITU, WIPO, WTOs, etc.) as well as by national governments, and indeed by the policies and practices of the business sector. The challenge is to include all the different levels and get everyone involved to consider human rights.
The session went on to consider some of the initiatives which have been developed over the past ten years to promote human rights in Internet Governance at WSIS and by various actors including UNESCO, APC and the Council of Europe. Initiatives by the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition (IRP), in particular the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet and the 10 Internet Rights and Principles, were placed within this general movement – as open tools for anyone to use to advocate human rights on the Internet. The Charter aims to interpret and translate existing human rights to the Internet context. The IRP took a holistic approach including not only civil and political rights but also economic, social and cultural rights, as well as technical principles such as net neutrality. The Charter is still a work in progress, and a debate began about the contents and approach of the Charter. Issues included: should we rely on existing human rights or do we need new rights? How can we promote human rights across multiple jurisdictions? Should we only focus on violations of human rights, or should we also consider what is needed to promote human rights?
Next, the group examined blocking of web content. It was noted that there are some limitations to freedom of expression, and a heated debate began about whether blocking was a legitimate response to “illegitimate content”. There seemed to be consensus in the room that blocking cannot be used for many of the purposes for which it is (or is threatened to be) used including copyright violations, gambling websites and hate speech. However there was some debate about child abuse imagery. On the one hand one participant argued that blocking can prevent people from stumbling across such content, others pointed out that child abuse imagery is very hard to find and to block it is ineffective (can easily be circumvented), dangerous (due to mission creep and abuse) and can even be said to do more harm than good if criminals are alerted to the fact that they have been spotted, and if police resort to blocking rather than to taking content down and prosecuting criminals.
Concerns were raised about limited multi-lingualism on the Internet and what this means in terms of expression and access for those whose languages are not supported. Open source software was presented as a key part of the solution.
Transcript
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> Hello, everybody. I think we should get started. We are promoting human rights on and through the Internet and it’s an open group. If you are interested in these issues please feel free to join us, although I also want to mention that not all of us are in the coalition but most of us are.
I think there are two trends that have come out over the last couple of days which give us a good background for this session. And one is that almost every panel, the idea of human rights as a kind of concept that’s very important in Internet governance has come up, either in a more general way or we have heard a lot about freedom of expression and privacy.
Another trend I have noticed is that a lot of people have been talking about how we are at a critical moment at the moment in terms of Internet governance and how there seem to be a lot of moves from different governments, particularly in terms of the G8 to try to exercise more control over the Internet. And so bringing these two trends together, I think what we’re going to try and think through and talk about in this workshop is how do we make human rights an Internet governance a reality. Rather than being something that people say lip service to and say it’s important as a concept, how do we actually make sure that human rights values underpin the governance processes wherever they take place.
Two of the initiatives that we have been working on in the coalition is the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet and the 10 internet Rights and Principles which are on the table around, but I won’t go into too much detail about that now because Meryem will talk about them later.
Now, I will take us over to our panel, first we have Bill Drake from University of Zurich who will give us an overview of Internet governance environment, because, of course, there are all sorts of different organizations where decisions are made, whether that be the ITU or ICANN or the Council of Europe and decisions and processes at each of these different forums can have an impact on whether human rights come through or not.
Then we are going to hear from Meryem, Meryem Marzouki with the European digital rights. She’s also with LIP6/CNRS, but I’m not sure what that stands for. She will let you know. She will give you an overview about the Charter and 10 Internet Rights and Principles and about some of the other initiatives that exist to promote human rights on the Internet.
Those two speakers will give us kind of a good grounding to talk about – talk about in a general way where and how we can promote human rights and Internet governance.
Then in the second half of the workshop, we will look at two issues in more detail. We will start with Tapani Tarvainen from the Electronic Frontier Finland who will be talking about filtering and blocking in Europe and then we’ll have a discussion about that and then Eric Tomson with the Wallonia chapter of ISOC will join us and we’ll have a talk about multilingualism on the Internet and whether that should be or is a human right. At the end in the last five, ten minutes, hopefully we will have time to take a step back and try and come up with some really concrete ideas and actions for specific issues that are important or specific forums that need to be engaged with more, or specific initiatives that are needed. So as you can see, we only have four panelists which is much less than some of the other workshops but that means it will be great to get as much audience participation as possible and there are lots of microphones around the room. So whenever you have a comment, please throw up your hand.
With that, I will hand over to Bill.
>> Thank you, Dixie, hello, everybody. Let me start my timer. I was told to do 10 minutes about global Internet governance, which is an interesting thing to do. Nevertheless, I think it’s important because, you know, actually, sometimes when you are trying to link two spheres of activity, it’s useful to be clear about the terminology and what we can be within the boundaries and the picket fence and what is outside.
Now, in doing this, I should point out at the outset, a major limitation on what I’m going to talk about per what she asked me to do. If you look at the range of activities on human rights, that are generally the focus of much concern in Internet discussions, I think it’s fair to say that a great deal of the attention gets focused at the national level. National level policy that restrict freedom of expression and limit people’s ability to come together and collaborate, the right to assemble and so on.
Most of the real heavy duty onerous restrictions that one talks about usually involve national level kinds of policies. National level policies are rather hard to generalize about in many bases and we could spend hours doing a topology of that. What Dixie asked me to do is talk about global Internet governance and that’s what the governance Internet forum was set up to try to talk about. That’s the level I will be addressing here.
Just to be clear about this the notion of Internet governance is one that is not really specific to particular levels of social organization. When we in the working group and Internet governance six years ago wrote a draft working definition of Internet governance, which was later adopted by the international community, at the Tuna summit of WSIS, the definition that was adopted was general. Indeed, governance activity takes place at multiple levels of social organization. Here I’m referring to those at the global or transnational sort of level.
I guess I will make two other real quick sorts of prolegomenon points. One has to do with the nature of the rights involved and the people who are on this panel are more expert on human rights than me. I don’t consider myself primarily a human rights expert at all. If you look at the range of rights that are internationally recognized in various types of international arrangements, it’s clear that some have greater political traction and it’s easier for people to – to address them because more governments in particular, governments are not the only players but they are central in this. Are more inclined to want to focus in that way than others. For example, political and social rights, such as freedom of expression tend to get a great deal of the bandwidth, but there are, of course, internationally recognized economic and social rights and people tend to in the human rights community always say that human rights are all indivisible and integral and we have to view this as a complex whole, and that’s true. But the politics is when it comes to the economic the social type rights recognized in international law, when you try to talk to governments about how those apply to the Internet, you often get very abstract kinds of responses and it’s very difficult to actually get people engaged on this.
And that can be even more so with some of the what you call third generation sorts of rights. The international meetings of United Nations that have recognized rights to development and rights to peace and so on and so forth and translating those into concrete, actionable concrete for evaluating metrics at an international level include politically contentious. The politics varies across them a bit. And it also goes to the question of whether or not one can design new types of Internet rights that are somehow separate from or go beyond traditionally recognized rights and that’s been a point of contention and I’m of the view personally that it’s best to stick to international recognized rights and their interpretation of the context of the Internet than try to de novo try to come up with entirely new rights that might be politically impossible to get any real meat behind them.
The last point I would make, just – I would distinguish this briefly between issues and governance instruments that directly affect our are a matter of rights, those that directly empower or restrict the rights of human beings to engage in certain types of activities and those that more are about facilitating the realization of rights. Now some people would disagree with that distinction and that’s fine. I tend to take a somewhat more narrow interpretation, I guess in thinking about rights than other folks in some respects.
So for example, when one talks about access issues, for example, if you look at the new report of the Special Rapporteur, Frank LaRue, he talked about infrastructure access as it relates to right. Is there human right to broadband connections of a particular speed at a particular price point? Or is there a human right to a particular type of spectrum allocation that facilitates mobile connectivity, et cetera, or do we think of those issues more as ones that are from a progressive standpoint very important to promote and highly desirable, and facilitate the realization right but are less a question of rights per se. This is a issue that we can debate. And I know Meryem and others will tell me that I completely obscured and lost my thinking on those matters.
Internet governance. Governance is a generic concept. It has to do with social steering. I think it involves human agency. It involves, in my view intentional action, the desire to sort of provide structure and social ordering in some realm of activity. And it is – does not rest necessarily in government authority. And it can arise in multiple levels of organization, and be done well or poorly by all kinds of different social actors.
The notion of the Internet governance that we put together in the WSIS which draws on the notions the international redreams and cooperation was that governance was the development and the application by governments to private sector of shares principles, norms, decision making procedures and programs that shape the evolution and the use of the Internet. Evolution the underlying infrastructure and use for communication and commerce.
I would point out in my view governance at the global level comes from three kinds of sources one is the negotiation of shared collective frameworks and harmonization through intergovernmental, private sector and or multi sector collaboration. We have another broad category, which is unilateral Internet governance. I think one can see instances where powerful states or powerful firms are able to project social ordering out into the realm of the Internet sphere. And lastly, the coordinated convergence of coordinated practices when you get major players, either firms or states that are able to essentially configure the international realm through their national actions coordinating and adopting essentially parallel processes at the national level or within firms without necessarily agreeing a formal arrangement between them, you get de facto a form of ordering which applies a great deal if not all of the Internet. Some would argue that there’s spontaneous ordering through unintentional actions, et cetera, this is a point of debate.
When you look at Internet governance, I would say you can break it down simply in the following way, infrastructure, governance, and governance of the use of Internet for information communication and commerce. On the infrastructure side, there’s – I would argue, there’s an inner circle of arrangements that have a strong and direct impact on the Internet. This includes the governance of the root service system, the zone file, et cetera, names and numbers, what’s done in ICANN, the registries, registrars and so on, technical standardization and network security. Those are the core really key parts of the infrastructure governance arrangements and in each of those cases, one can identify potential human rights linkages that are important or ways in which the decisions that are being made in those kinds of environments either facilitate or promote – or retard the realization of rights that are recognized.
And it’s very hard, often, to get people who work in those spaces to think in terms of human rights issues. When I talk to anybody in icon, I’m on the GNSO council about human rights, I get blank stares but when can imagine, it’s reasonable when we are talking about things like the morality and the public order notion for objections to new GTLD strings, whether or not countries should be able to – governments should be able to block the establishment of a new stream like .gay or .humanrights because it’s offends their sensibilities. There are other things that ICANN does as well that could be viewed from a human rights angle.
Technical standardization and so on, it gets harder to make the arguments there.
We are talking about the open, interoperable standards. There’s the matter of facilitating the rights or is that directly a rights matter. There’s an outer circle of arrangements that impact on the infrastructure as well, international telecommunications arrangements, radio frequency spectrum, trade and services and goods under the WTO and so on. We won’t talk about those.
Finally on the other side, the information, communication and commerce, there is, again, a set of instruments that’s worth thinking the rights of that have a strong and direct impact on the Internet. They include such things as, for example, the international telecommunications convention of the ITU, which gives governments the – all the sovereign right intercept or monitor, anything that they deem contrary to their morality and so on. And cybercrime has a substantial impact on the Internet and have, I think, direct human rights consequences, intellectual properties under WIPO and other schemes, WTO and plural lateral arrangements. One could argue directly impact access to knowledge and information and can have rights components.
International trade and services, again, I think the rules that apply to trade and e-commerce, broader, e-commerce, having to do with contracting and authentication and all of those kinds of questions and then an outer circle of arrangements that I think are weaker that have less direct and configurative impact on the Internet such as international arrangements pertaining to privacy, protection, consumer protection and so on where I would argue nevertheless, there can be rights, dimensions to those questions.
So the challenge to conclude in this workshop is when we think about Internet governance not only to talk about the national level and the ways in which particular government practices of restricting access to the web filter – you know, filtering and, denial of services, and stuff, and all of those fun things that governments do increasingly to securitize and territorialize the Internet may impact in a positive or negative way the human rights but the global arrangements that we have established both through governments but also more importantly in many case through non-state actors through the private sector or multi stakeholder cooperation also can have strong human rights elements either directly or second order sort of way.
So I will stop there. That’s just a background, a bit to try to help facilitate the conversation. Thanks.
>> That was a very, very thorough background. So thank you. And I think it brought up some of the really difficult issues to deal with when you are trying to promote human rights and the Internet governance. I think one thing that comes to across to me, its two separate camps. If you come from a human rights background, you have very little understanding about things to deal with domain names and on the other sides we have technologists would work in ICANN and those cases, would generally don’t know about human rights. A big part of the process is trying to bring those two groups together and think about what those values mean in these new contexts.
I also really liked your dividing it into two kind of sides. One being infrastructure and the other being uses of technology and I think that’s really useful, and I think it also highlights the fact that there’s so many different places where these decisions are made or these processes are governed that have a big impact on human rights and all sorts of little ways on the Internet so there are a lot of challenges there.
When you talk about access, which almost everyone agrees you want everyone to have access, is human rights, the right approach to use to further that or is it not, and I think I will hand over now to Meryem Marzouki, who has issues with promoting human rights.
>> Yes. Thank you. I would like to give you some input and element context to understand what is this Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet, which you have to text here, and especially why we have felt as though the dynamic on Internet rights and principle where we have started this work which is still a work in progress and you are very welcome to join us to define our new version and build upon this first draft.
First of all this charter is not a charter of Internet rights, and it’s not a charter of human rights only. It is the charter, at least this is the title that we have chosen after long, long, long discussion on our mailing list. This charter is called a Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet.
As I represent some previous initiatives, you will understand why it was important for us to choose the – to frame this issue and our work in terms of human rights for the Internet or on the Internet, and not in terms of Internet rights.
Because we have and I will get into more details later, we have a holistic view of what human rights. Bill touched a bit upon this, but I would like to insist on the fact that we are building upon the universal declaration of human rights and not only its part on civil and political rights only, but also on the part – on economic social and cultural rights and, yes yes, we have tried to include some issues related to what is called third generation rights.
We want to access to the Internet but we are discussing whether or not we should introduce this question as a right. The element of the title is the Charter of Principles for the Internet, because we also deal in this work with – with principles such as a principle of network neutrality, the neutrality of the net, and these are not such – such principles are not included in the universal declaration of human rights. We know about the principle of nondiscrimination, but not such very technical, again very technical principles such as net neutrality, but we do think that when it’s such kind of very technical principle, including the infrastructure level to be able to realize the human rights such as the right of freedom of expression but not only this rights.
So in this charter we have a very holistic vision of the human right and we have tried to articulate them. The charter has been discussed and proposed by all the members of the coalition and they think we have more than 100 members for now. Individuals, but also organizations, NGOs and some representatives of governments and of international organization, intergovernmental organizations, some representative from business, but not that much. I would say we had more the beginning of the discussion, but as things are becoming more and more detailed, more and more precise, I’m not sure they have kept the same interest.
Anyhow, we have also appointed a small, very small group of experts to try to refine what the coalition proposed in, I would say, human right language. One of the experts, he’s not present at this EuroDIG is Professor Benedict from University of Glasgow. This work, again, is inspired and this building on previous efforts and initiatives, and I would like to mention some of them first – first initiative of this kind was the association for progressive communication, which is a global civil society organization, or NGO and they were as early as 2001, 2002, on charter of Internet rights and other time it was this way of thinking, Internet rights.
It was setting up of the internet governance firm, the APC has revised its charter to take into account internet governance or issues in terms of – in view of realizing human rights.
Also this – well, this is the world summit of information society, 2003, 2005, must rely on these issues and has attracted many organizations and many initiatives who were active at this time, just like I would like to mention one, the people’s movement for human right education, which was not doing anything related to the information society or the ICTs or to the Internet but did become interested to include the human rights on the Internet as one of their issues, especially for human right to education.
And in 2003, after having gathered a group of experts on these issues, they have developed a statement which is called a statement on human right, human dignity and the information society. And it’s still, as I was saying, it’s all interesting to look at the titles of these initiatives and now you can see that human dignity issues dealing with hate speech, like they are discussing right now in another workshop entitled discrimination, et cetera. And this statement wanted to highlight this. The Council of Europe published as a result of the work of multi disciplinary group on experts in the information society a declaration on human right and the rule of law in the information society and finally we see this concept of the rule of law appearing in this context, thanks to this first effort from the Council of Europe.
When you deal with Internet governance or issue, and we will see that probably more in detail of the blocking and censorship, the rule of law and all that we call the granting rights like a right to a fair trial or a right to the presumption of innocence, the right to legal remedy, is very important in this context and it’s not only about freedom of expression and privacy.
Okay. As the civil society caucus during the WSIS this was to put human rights on the agenda of the world summit in the – on the information society to towards and information communication society which is respectful of the economic and social and cultural results of citizens and we called as early as 2002 for consistent articulation of all rights and the recognition of information and communication as public common route.
We also called for the development of mechanisms and democratic governance and the enforcement on human right. The problem with the – when we talk about Internet governance, we can have a rather narrow vision of Internet governance, dealing with only technicality and critical resources, but we can also have a very broad notion and it is this broad notion that we have adopted with the charter, just not only governance, but also what we call regulation or so-called core regulation as was discussed in the plenary session, public/private partnership.
When you include all the elements, public/private and civil society organization, you have to make sure that the discussions are really following the democratic requirement.
There were many other appeals. I think I should go back to the charter now. So we are not defining any new right, we are simply interpreting, translating, and trying to advance human rights standards in this context. The charter has 21 sections with the last one being on specific closes, affirming the importance of human rights and the arrest section are linked into a right of access, having exactly the same broad vision as the one highlighted by the report of from Frank LaRue, with the United Nations.
It’s about multilingualism and being able to use your own language is about fighting the digital divide, of course, technical access is about access to log-ons and it’s about education and discrimination. We have this whole vision. And then we have sections on freedom of assembly, and privacy and personal data protection, access to knowledge, access to education and culture. And we address the right of a vulnerable groups of people and the rights of children and the rights of disabled people.
We address democratic issues such as online participation of citizens, all the granting rights a trial and legal remedy and also we address this issue which is directly related to intergovernance. It addresses the need for international order which is in this context how we govern the Internet all together and weighing the participation of citizens in this public effort because it is relates to the public interest.
Just as a conclusion, what are the outcomes? And what is next with this initiative? So we have developed this, in short, these ten rights and principles for human rights and social justice. We are also going to define at each different level from infrastructure to protocol and services and usages and how these different human rights translate in very practical manner.
And above all, we expect that everyone will be able use this charter as the promotion of human rights, including at national and regional levels. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Meryem. We will look at a few issues in detail, but before that, I wanted to open up to the floor if you have any questions for our speakers or any comments like that, I thought it was really interesting to hear about once we had hear about the whole – how complex the governing ecosystem was, about the numerous different movements starting in different places which are all about trying to work out what human rights do mean in this new – in this new environment and how that can be done in practice, and so I was – so I want to throw it open to the audience and I have a few questions for you guys, which is like what do you think the challenges of promoting human rights in the Internet environment is. For those of you who work in business and work in some of the different forums. In your field, would you say human rights provides benefits in the field you work, are there challenges to making them real in your everyday work that you think need to be addressed? Would anyone like to talk?
Please stay your name and where you come from.
>> My name is David Williams. I’m from the UK, from England, and I’m here with a group who are doing a presentation in plenary this afternoon. We’re talking about privacy and identity assurance, so I’m sheer representing the British Computer Society which is a professional body. One of the things what Meryem said if I heard her words directly was the concept of rule of law, which I think is going to present a major challenge because as I think was already said earlier in the conference is a question of whose law and whose law is applicable is at any point in time.
I think underpinning some of what is in here depends very much on the country and the regime. I mean, obviously here we are looking at Europe, but I would contend that the Internet is worldwide and not purely European. Even if we are talking about – even communications within England, let alone within Europe, then those communications may well not only pass through but come to rest in non-European countries, the way that international telecommunications work in this day and age, do not respect international boundaries at all. So there’s a major challenge there, I think that I think – and I don’t know, you didn’t say. You talked about 100 members. The challenge, I think is to get a lot of countries and national and business representatives to actually sign up. When I think business, I’m thinking of some of the multinationals because I think as we heard also, we are dealing with the way the money flows, as well as that we would all desire. So I would suggest that is a major challenge.
I’m not suggesting you want to duck it but I think part of your question was what challenges do we see?
>> Thank you, Dixie, I’m Ginger Paque. I’m speaking for myself, as – also as a member of DiploFoundation, we work in capacity building where we do try to overcome some of these challenges but I actually have a question maybe for Meryem. I know that several years ago there was still quite a bit of controversy of whether we were looking for a new set of rights and now I see that it – it seems to be more general to definitely emphasize that we are not asking for new rights. We are asking that the universal declaration of human rights be applied to the Internet as well.
I know that there were a lot of people who disagreed and some people are not convinced whether we have cyber law or real law. Is that controversy pretty much settled or do we still have that going on. I see that as a major challenge and not – not a threat, but definitely somewhat of an obstacle: We are not. We are looking for our rights. Our own established rights. Has that been resolved.
>> My name is Sam and I’m with an organization of young journalists. I have a question that also goes in the same direction, and goes to you Mrs. Marzouki what is the legal effect of promoting human rights on the Internet, more of what you do and what is very impressive, you said that you don’t invent new human rights and new interpretations, but the interpretation of the standards that already exist, and, yeah, for example, there’s a very interesting case pending right now before the European court of human rights? Strasbourg. It’s a prisoner demanding internet access to actually enroll to university to have university education from prison. And the question for the court is whether this human right to Internet access is there. How do you influence such major decisions. And what is the legal effect of what you are promoting?
>> Good day, everyone, my name is Paul Hector and I’m with UNESCO. I have a comment and using more of an opportunity to share with you some of the work that we are doing that is related. Meryem, in your presentation, you mentioned the fact that there was a need sometimes to go into greater depth, greater details about how the rights could be actualized in the new medias. We just published a new document, actually it was launched yesterday, freedom of connection, freedom of expression, the changing legal and regulatory ecology shaping the Internet and this is basically serving as a sort of guide for helping regulators, et cetera, in understanding and also other stakeholders as well in understanding how these rights can be actualized and we have sort of broken it down. We recognize that it is not always straightforward.
The number of actors with varied interest and so as you mention in your presentation, we look at five issues, digital rights and this, for example, looks at how can various human rights, which manifest themselves in the physical world be expressed within the digital word. For example, it’s used like literacy, information literacy, our freedom of information, access to information, the right to public assembly and discussion.
We also are looking at other issues. We know we have various regulatory frameworks. There is, of course, competition, how does this impact on it and how can we mitigate this to make sure the rights are still achieved. The users also have quite a lot of power and sometimes we have some abuses which actually emanate from individual uses. So, again, this is also addressed.
And, of course, the other aspects which relate to the design of systems. I think it is very important that during the design of systems, even the programmers, they need to think of what impact the various choices, for example, the interfaces for the communication, what limitations does this impose and how does it, perhaps, maybe distort messages. Sometimes it’s not intentional, but I think it’s important to bring this out so that people can be aware of it.
And, of course, security, this is always – this is very much an issue, which is – which is out there, and which we need to also take into account.
I just have a few limited copies with me. I’m very happy to pass these on. And my colleague, Andrea Cairola, I think we have passed them.
>> They are online as well. They are on the UNESCO web site.
>> I’m with sis could. I’m also working together with you on the Swedish government and there’s more general comment on the work we are trying to work together and also the extension of work doing together with the special repertoire of freedom of expression.
First of all, I would like to encourage everyone to read the report from Frank LaRue to the human rights council because one of the things that we found in the two expert meetings that Sweden was hosting in Stockholm, which Frank points out in his report. The first thing is that we should investigate the existing human rights very carefully and see what kind of impact the Internet has on the implementation of them. I think from the Cisco point of view, it’s a little bit sad that a lot of the people that originally was asking for human right, that Internet access should be human right was not really thinking about what the human rights actually are. The human rights to make it a little bit simple are actually more or less instructions for states, what they must do and what they are forbidden to do. And some of the human rights say, of course, that people must be able to implement their – must be able to express their participation in society and all of those kind of things, which, of course, forces the government to ensure that the Internet access is open and the Internet access is available and as Frank LaRue says that any kind of blocking or hindering of Internet access will have an impact on the ability to – will have an impact on the human rights.
Similar, like for example, it will take the court case, which is certainly interesting. There are some legislation that says you can’t make a phone call without permission. How do you implement similar things for Internet access. Some of the human rights instruct states to – for example, we have the child convention to protect children. That’s why we have police and law enforcement. So there’s also some requirements that crime – that there are some tools there that makes it possible for law enforcement, actually to fight crime.
When we talk about law enforcement being able to do things on the Internet. People say, oh, wait a second that’s intrusion of privacy and integrity and it is, to some degree. So I think trying to say Internet access should be human right makes it easier for people and I think that’s what all of you have said to far makes great sense. That’s why I like this as being a really good start of trying to investigate and doing all the other work that we have done. If it’s the case that we have this new thing called the Internet, how do we try to implement the rights? What do we want countries to do.? What should other stakeholders do? And we need more work where specifically people from different stakeholder groups are. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much. I think the comment in the red tie wanted to make a comment and then Bill.
>> Well, thank you, my name is Thomas and I’m from Austria and I’m representing my country. The European court for human rights has now issued a compilation on the case law with regard to Internet issues. I think that’s very important because our 47 countries abound by the judgments of the European court for human rights and it is quite helpful that you have it now correlated and you can look to it, what has been already decided on these issues because after all, I mean, that’s forming the law and order of our countries because they have to follow these judgments and that helps a little bit in the development of human rights and Internet issues. Thank you.
>> Thanks, Bill. And then – I’m weary of time. If anybody on the panel wants to address any of those really great points and then we’ll move on to looking at a couple of issues in more detail and we will have time to come back in the end.
>> Meryem has a full plate of things to respond to. I don’t mean to aggravate the situation. Just a point of clarification, if you could explain how something works for me. I’m going to explain the – we are not creating new rights but showing how existing rights are substantiated on the interknit. I want to understand how that works. Let’s take a particular case. Your first right is the right to access the Internet from which you derive quality of service. People are entitled to a quality of service, and freedom of choice of software used.
I mean, there’s a right to freedom, I’m not asking skeptically but asking to understand how had works in the thinking of the dynamic coalition. So if you live in a place where a particular software is not available readily because a firm has not entered the market there or where it’s the price point makes it inaccessible or something like that, that is a matter of human rights? That is then somebody’s human rights are limited by the fact that they can’t purchase or use or a particular piece of software with the ease of which they want. How do you derive that from existing rights? Explain how this works.
>> Yes, I got call the questions. Let me start with your request for clarification. This is a difficult question. This is as difficult as asking me to which extent should we ensure net neutrality? Everybody seems to agree on network neutrality, but what is it? To what extent? If I cannot afford some special services in delivering any contact very quickly is that better than other people if I cannot do that. Should I pay so they have the same rights and the same – the same – I can’t find the word in English. This is the question. If your question is where do we come with this right to access on the Internet, this is derived from one main principle of the universal declaration on human right, which is the principle of nondiscrimination.
So to the greatest extent, neither myself nor the coalition is able to answer you to which extent we – we should go, but to the greatest extent, we should ensure this equality between our Internet users, also in terms of software and we can maybe – maybe we can – it would be easier for us to ensure this or to facilitate this if we insist and if we succeed in having free softwares, free Internet softwares rather than proprietary software and at least we know that they will be more affordable than some proprietary software. So this is one mean. There’s nothing on the Internet standards and Internet software, but we take this as a mean to ensure nondiscrimination.
And your question was part of the bigger question on the right to access and I think most of the questions or comments, even you are searching on the controversy is related to this right to success. Is this right? Okay.
I think we still have this controversy, but we are becoming more and more of the same line because this work is to learn how to understand each other and learn what our reference, we come from different backgrounds and we learn from each other. So we still have this kind of controversy. As I see it, personally, the main problem with a right to access with the Internet, if we view it right now, we have to be very responsible right now. If you define a concept as a human right and that everyone in the population, in all country, developed world, or developing world, everyone should benefit from this work – from this right and this right is binding for states, okay, this is binding.
So okay. It’s find that in Chile, for example, they have affirmed this right to access in their constitution, but the main problem not with writing this line in the Constitution. The main problem is to define and implement and to be able to inform public policies to realize this right to access. And we should make also the difference, such as the French – I’m French so I know the position from the French Constitution and our council, when the issue of the law was submitted to it, and the French Constitution or council has affirmed the freedom to access the Internet and not the right to access the Internet.
The freedom to access means if you have access to the Internet, then you should be free to using the government. This does very important because it does not impose on a poorer government to institute such public policies. Now, this is a very interesting case, and I will be waiting for the judgment on the European court on human right. Such demand, in most countries and certainly in countries of the Council of Europe, having access to television in prison is a right of the prisoner. So we can use this precedent and this type of jurisprudence. It is the right to be educated in prison, but I’m sure this will be balanced because this is a communication tool, not only an information tool and sometimes in prison, as Patrik said, communication is limited, using the phone is limited because you are a prisoner. It depends.
So I’m sure this ruling will be well balanced but you can use existing human rights to give arguments for your case. Is it – yeah, I got the problem with the rule of law. Actually the problem that I see very quickly, it’s not with the application of the rule of law, but the problem with the competence of jurisdiction. And we can get back then ten years earlier with the famous case, where – the case between France and the US. We don’t have the same legislation in two different countries. It is fully legitimate. The Internet is across borders so what do we do? So we have to address this issue of competency of jurisdiction.
We have to respect the rule of law and I’m sure Tapani with the blocking and filtering will address this rule of law issue. When you compel private companies or private individuals to censor some type of behavior on the Internet and you don’t provide the grantee that you should provide under the rule of law, then we have a problem and we are not even dealing with the competency of jurisdiction in just one country. So this issue is also still raised.
I think I have answered those.
>> Thank you, Meryem. Okay. Yeah. Time keeping. We will now look at two issues in more detail. We’re going to start with looking at filtering and blocking with Tapani for about 15 minutes, I hope with the presentation and general comments and then we will move over and look at multilingualism with Eric. So I will be much stricter with time. Tapani.
>> Thank you. Hello. After Bill and Meryem’s all encompassing, I will be focusing on one little detail. It’s shorter. If you look at this draft, on page 5, near the top, it says that everyone has the right to use the Internet without censorship in any form. And it clarifies freedom from censorship, includes freedom from blocking and filtering. It can not be justified, period. No caveats. No exceptions. That’s a strong, hard stance to take, but I will try to justify it.
First a little observation, freedom of expression can be associated with other rights. Nonetheless, freedom of expression is not absolute. This may be restrictions, but not all regions and not for any means – by any means. There are some means that never really acceptable.
Now, I will just pick one, perhaps a key point here. The freedom of opinion is absolute. This is acknowledged by a number of human rights instructions and instruments. All opinions are protected, and for that to have any meaning, it means that they may be articulated in public, defended at least somehow.
And this specifically applies to unpopular, disgusting, false opinions and this right cannot really be transferred to our elected people in parliament because it specifically applies to the process of electing them. So if they don’t talk about something, we can’t know their stand on certain processes. So political opinions are perhaps the most protected thing in freedom of pression.
If you think some opinion is so dangerous that you cannot allow people to form their own opinion, you are effectively saying is that democracy is not good enough for deciding it and what’s the alternative then?
However, there are quite a number of things that fall under freedom of expression, which may be restricted, child porn, false advertising, whatever, but I will argue that some means are never acceptable, specifically censorship, because it is by its very nature, non-transparent, secret. You cannot discuss it in public because you don’t know what they have been doing.
While in the Internet, the filtering, the black list cannot really be held secret. They will leak inevitably. They can be kept secret legally preventing public debate.
So that’s pretty much the principle stand. It can be argued that practical considerations override that the dangers are small enough to be overcome for practical benefits. I took a look at where and what conditions where Internet filtering and censoring could apply. There are cases where it does work and it’s effective, but probably not the way you would like it to work.
But, first, where it does not work, a short list. It does not work against child pornography or terrorism, racism and hate speech, corporate violations, gambling which are the most common reasons it’s being advocated in Europe today. I do not have the time to go into all of these in detail, so I will pick just one, the one that’s perhaps most controversial, most common today, what we have the most experience today, namely child pornography and I will argue in that specific case, network filtering is not only useless, it’s actually counterproductive. It does more harm than good.
Yes, I will argue that in trying to filter child porn from the net, it does more harm. It’s useless in that it does not have any impact on the trade. You can ask any policemen who has study the issue. They concluded it doesn’t have any impact on the pedophiles and the child porn sellers. It has a negative impact as it acts an early warning system for child porn peddlers. They notice that they have been put on a black list. They will easily know they have been black listed and they move on before they actually attack to take it off line. Taking it off the net instead of just hiding it.
It may even work for the pedophiles themselves as a form of advertising, but that’s less important. Perhaps even more annoying effect is that it’s hiding the problem. You are avoiding real actions. As the case in point, in Netherlands, after the list was leaked, as they will, it was discovered that there were some child porn sites in Netherlands. Now why did the police not go and take them away, instead black listing them, and there was a common trend that most of the sites are actually in countries where they could be easily and effectively taken offline if there was a will to do so.
Another example, in Finland after the list was, again, leaked, somebody put it online on his web site, showing that most of the stuff in it were not child porn at all. So what did the police do? They black listed his site as well. They did not argue it was illegal. If they had, it was in Finland, completely public, but, no, they just black listed it so it could not be discussed about it. It was secret that you have been black listed and you cannot discuss this. Now this has been going through the courts.
So it’s clear it does not work. Instead of trying to build these futile black lists, the police were concentrating for taking this matter offline for really, anywhere near as effectively as we are trying to attack corporate violations, it would be much better use of resources.
So, but I did say that there’s something where it does work. Where it is effective. And that is something we don’t want it to do, basically, which works for controlling public debate, political dissent in countries where freedom of speech is not all that high in the first place. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. People know how to work around filters in places like China and Saudi Arabia, but this is one case where being able to access information is not enough. If you cannot publicly debate about the stuff, then it is not so bad from the government’s point of view. All they want is to curb public discussion, public debate, keep it out of discussion and if you can know about it and not publicly tell that you know about it, it’s not very useful in that kind of context.
So I would argue that in general, filtering is useless in trying to prevent people from getting what they know they want, for stuff they want to use in private, but it’s effective in suppressing public debate for governments willing to curb it otherwise as well.
So it’s actually effective for bad purposes only, it only works for evil, like the ring of power, which is so tempting to try to use for good purposes but always perforates it and only evil.
>> Thank you. That’s the kind of thinking you have to do for human rights that was written before the internet even existed and then think how it applies to the Internet. I think Tapani made a good argument that although, yes, content can be limited under freedom of expression, perhaps blocking and filtering is – is useless and does more harm than does, and so is perhaps disproportionate reaction and I would be interested in people’s comments and views on that and please make them as short as possible so we can move on to looking at multilingualism.
Yes, please, Patrik?
>> Patrik Faltstrom from Cisco. First of all, after working with child pornography filters, I strongly disagree with the previous speaker. Secondly, I say that there should be no blocking at all is too idealistic and people don’t know what’s going on on the Internet at the moment. Thank you.
>> Thank you. Yeah.
>> David Williams from UK. A little story and I will keep it very short. I have a daughter who is trained to be a missionary. She’s training in England but they are sending missionaries out all around the world and the question I was asked was from a missionary who was training with her, or potential missionary going to Burma was the country in question, what advice can I give in terms of the use of the Internet. Obviously as we have heard today, it’s becoming a tool that certainly the younger generation use. All the ages, if I’m not careful.
But it is quite difficult to find positive advice. I mean, you can find negative advice, what with happen or what doesn’t happen. How to find positive advice is quite difficult. I’m open to other people if they can give positive advice.
>> Thank you. Would anyone else – Wolfgang? The question to Patrik, could you be a little bit more specific why you disagree with the presentation?
>> I was told to be short, but, okay, a little bit longer.
(Laughter).
First of all, the goal with – there are not enough space here for all the organized chairs. First of all, regarding the child pornography filters that are implemented in many countries, the goal is absolutely not to stop access to child pornography who have an interest in finding child pornography because that’s not what the filters solve. I agree with you on that statement. What it does is it makes it harder for recruitment of new people being interested in child pornography and the second thing is the trial conventions say very specifically that fighting child pornography and trafficking with young people is something that should be fought with all means possible.
Okay. So the question regarding for example, this filters list and the – regarding the effectiveness of the filters, I heard two different types of complaints, the first one which it would not be effective, technically effectively, which I disagree with. The second thing is that the lists are not public, and cannot be discussed. That I agree with is a problem. And this is exactly why I – or why I said in my previous statement that I think making two naive statements on that everything should be open is something that does not lead to constructive discussion. Instead, we have to acknowledge that some blocking is going on and I think no one in here really would like their ISP to let all Internet traffic to your computer.
I don’t know how many of you have put up a computer and immediately got attacked. Okay. Most of you probably don’t get attacked because your ISP filtering, is protecting you. The question is, is it, according to what Frank LaRue is sympathy specifying in his report and according to the democratic processes in the democratic, come up with a process that decide that something should be blocked. For example, according to the telecommunication director in Europe, network providers, including ISPs must filter and block traffic that are attacking their own network to ensure that people’s communication actually worked. That’s something they must do to protect themselves. That says it’s not okay anymore.
The second thing is if it is the case to have a black list with extremely few on, but once again if you follow what Frank LaRue says, what is an acceptable process for overseeing that list? How do you handle the secrets to make sure that the black list is not leaking and who is implementing that blocking so it minimizes the harm for the third parties. That’s something to interesting to discuss. Not to say that there should be no blocking.
>> I will give it back to you Tapani, one minute as I know we will go to multilingualism.
>> I will be very brief. Luring more people to child porn, and just I have seen no convincing argument that people who are not interested into it in the first place could be turned into pedophiles by seeing it. As for technical aspects that doesn’t really fall within our definition here. It says that the systems which aim to prevent access to content. Prevent it, trying to block attacks would disable network would not fall into that category and they don’t need to be kept secret.
I will leave it at that.
>> I know it’s lunch in five minutes but we started a few minutes late. I promise not to keep you, too, too late. Please, Eric.
>> I got a message. We talk about multilingualism. I will do the rest in English. Okay.
What does this guy coming from a country without a government will tell us about governing the Internet. Nothing. Actually, I came just to talk about language, culture, and alphabets.
So by the way, I didn’t come to give answers but to raise questions, as you will see. What about freedom of expression and freedom of access if you can’t express yourself in your own language. What about using your own language if you can’t write it in the right alphabet?
What about using your alphabet if you can’t find a computer or a web site or software supporting it? Those are questions. I don’t expect an answer right now. As I told, I came here to raise questions. But I’ve got a presentation. I will use slides to help me during the presentation. So we talk about multilingualism on the Internet as a human right.
First topic, we can see the Internet is the next frontier. Everybody, the web with documentations and obstacles, and we can see the Internet as a common good. Multilingualism, there are, according to the different sources from 3,000 to 7,000 living languages, modern languages. Own 1% of languages are spoken by 94% of mankind, which means 99% of languages are spoken by 6% of mankind.
Those figures are not the same on the Internet. We can see nowadays the expansion of dominant languages while others are dying and disappearing. And talking about alphabets, there are around 65 different alphabets. So there’s not only Latin, but it’s not yet the case on the Internet.
Less spoken languages are simply absent from the web. And I truly think that the fight for multilingualism should help to bridge the digital divide what is the digital divide? It’s the increasing gap between countries or people having access, having computers and countries or people don’t have access or a computer. This is a graph showing computers per 100 people all over the world.
As you can see in east – or western rich countries we all have a computer and access to the net. It’s not the case in sub-Saharan Africa, by example.
This graph, just to show you the ten most used languages on earth, there’s – there are always discussions about which one is the first, the second, the third, but generally, we can see mandarin Chinese, Hindu, Spanish, English as the main languages on earth. It’s not the case on the Internet. At the beginning, only English was used. And recently it was still more than 50% English used on the net. There are a couple of existing laws and conventions, as we talked about some of them today to protect multilingualism. There’s the U.N. relating to the linguistic minorities dating from 1992. The framework convention for the nation of minorities, the charter for regional or minority languages from the Council of Europe, and the UNESCO, the universal declaration of cultural diversity dating from 2001. Is it enough?
Is it efficient? It’s just a question.
During the World Summit on Information Society in November of 2005, there was a commitment of several articles and I just want to point out two articles. 14 recognizes that in addition to building ICT infrastructure, they should be adequate in phases on developing human capacity and creating ICT applications and digital content in local language.
Where are we now? Article 32 states promote all peoples through the development and the use of local and for indigenous languages in ICTs and to continue the efforts to products and promote cultural diversity, as well as cultural identities within the information society. Once again, where are we now?
So in reality, today the progress of diversity and of multilingualism online is slow. Why? I might give some parts of answers. First technology is not neutral, and there’s still a predominant dominance of Latin script, which means the Latin characters on the net. There may be difficult to use IT, due to lack of knowledge of code languages. Also difficult to adapt technology to local context.
Regarding standards we have unicodes on one side, and ISO on the other side other standards other coding systems. There’s no direct link between the coding and the scripts used on the net. It’s two different things. Another limitation is that domain names are restricted to 63 characters. Some alphabets have even more characters than this limitation. And the rest is for technical guys regarding codes, which is the algorithm that translates the non-ASCII characters into ASCII characters. By the way, by doing so, you actually enlarge the domain name when translating it.
So, once again, we have this limitation to 63 characters, which doesn’t help.
Other obstacles to multilingualism online are the fact that applications are extremely limited and you know that nowadays the mobile systems have more and more success. Some standards, like keyboard layouts still hampers multilingualism. We don’t have a keyboard layout in all possible alphabets. There are few software tools that are truly multilingualism. There’s a lack of economic inventive for software developers to develop tools in multilanguages. We have the open source community where you can choose quite any language on earth, think to Linux and open source software.
So what are other questions? What are the next steps to progress towards multilingualism cyberspace? The issue and this is also a part of an answer, it looks like an answer. The issue should probably be tackled with interdisciplinary approach, because it’s not only limited to ICT. We should also talk about linguistic tools and certainly the production and the distribution of content, but also economy and law are involved and we talked about rights, laws, regulations.
So can I possibly give some recommendations? So it looks like answers, but first, we could improve multilingualism. We should improve multilingualism in new technological applications, such as mobile platforms, because of their success. But also, still, the most basic ways to access the net. All search engines. We should promote the use of a universal common standard agreed by international communities like the ISO-8859 from the year international organization for standardization.
Develop the creation and use of online content also in minority languages. Could you tell, okay, it’s up to them to put their own language on the Internet. The rights related to multilingualism in cyberspace should be identified, granted and protected.
We should talk also about the use of alternative in mitigation – the white board, which is one of the providers of dispute resolution situations as promoted by ICANN. There are others. We should have multilingualism diversity on the web, as a major issue on the international agenda. That’s why we are here, by the way. We count on everybody in this room and outside to do so.
Why not imagine a treaty. A list of rules, recommendations. So that’s it with my presentation, because I think it’s up to you all now. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Eric. So it’s a really, really interesting issue that covers also so many human rights in terms of access and freedom of expression and cultural rights and all sorts of things and you also brought up the controversial issue of whether new rights are needed which is an ongoing debate.
We are way past lunchtime so I wanted to check, does anyone have any comments they would like to make? Oh, yes, we do have a hand in the corner, I believe.
>> Good day. Paul Hector from UNESCO. I think one of the things that’s important to bear in mind, why do languages sometimes disappear. If we look at today’s globalizing world, I think attitudes and values also play a large part. There is a very big emphasis, for example, on economic development and sometimes there is a perception that some languages are quote/unquote not useful what happens in that case is people want to use other languages or sometimes people don’t attribute value to some languages, and, of course, that leads to a decline. It’s not only on the Internet where we need to have these languages supported. We need to see it in newspaper, radio and television.
Now in terms of operationalizing this, of course, literally has a big role to play. We know, for example, that some languages are predominantly oral. Of course, we have the possibility of let’s say multimedia, but if people don’t have that intrinsic value, they don’t place the intrinsic value in promoting the language, using the language, not only at home, but also in public sphere, in the business sector, in school, et cetera. Then, of course, those tools will not be developed.
Just to tell you – of course when we have the literacy, then the tools can come in. If we have the tools right, people will invest time in this. If we talk about multimedia, then we can think of multiple literacies. Just to name a number of things that UNESCO is involved in. We talk about content creation this, of course, brings in its user own intellectual property rights and this is something which is quite – quite a challenge.
We’ve also been doing some very practical work, one of the challenges for some languages, some languages as – as the presenter mentioned, they use non-Latin scripts. Some of them – well, they call them complex scripts because they are very difficult to deal with. We have, for example, developed scripts for the Burmese language, and worked with groups in Indonesia and Bali and Mozilla. We have the script in Burmese and Bali languages in Mozilla. I think one of the key things is there are many groups doing work, many interesting work but sometimes these groups are not connected. So I think we also need to use the power of the web to link all of these different initiatives so that we can have that sort of critical mass and also provide ideas for inspiring those who wish to support this type of work. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you. It’s really great to hear that, the work that UNESCO is doing.
Okay. Go to lunch. And these – these debates could go on for years and years and they will go on for years and years so you can get engaged with them in all sorts of places wherever you like. Thank you.