Digital Freedom of Expression and Human Rights
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
2008 marks a year-long celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Rick Weiss wrote Monday about scientific work in genetics, forensics, and satellite imaging that has helped nongovernmental organizations combat genocide and human rights abuses and bring war criminals to justice. This week also brings news from the tech sphere about an initiative to ensure the human rights to freedom of expression and privacy.
The “big three” Internet companies, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, have come together in a group called the “Global Network Initiative,” which has outlined a framework for doing business in countries that restrict the free speech and impinge the privacy of their citizens. You can get coverage at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Mashable asks if business practices will vary from country to country and TechCrunch has info on other possible European signatories.
While it’s great that these companies are thinking hard about human rights issues and synchronizing their guidelines, some advocates argue that the corporations could go further. For instance, the WSJ reports that the director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA said that “More serious questions have to be asked about these company’s legal obligations.” One of the groups that worked to broker the principles and is a member of the coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also expressed concerns on its blog about missing guidelines on information handling.
But it is also worth pointing out that the tools made available by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have greatly expanded the ability of advocacy groups and individual citizens–in countries with repressive regimes and in countries with expansive freedoms–to fight for human rights, circulate coverage of abuses, and share information. As a recent Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report notes:
Blogs, e-mail, and search engines have allowed people all over the world to communicate and shine light on inappropriate action from unrepresentative governments. The recent protests over the repressive ruling junta in Burma were far less violent than in 1988, and one of the reasons suggested is that, unlike the 1988 protests, the more recent demonstrations were all over the Internet and people across the globe could watch how the military treated protestors. In the information age, repressive governments are finding it harder and harder to hide behind national boundaries.
While technology corporations certainly have a role to play in ensuring freedom of expression wherever they do business, the federal government should take a leading role in standing up to human rights abuses. Admittedly, that’s easy to forget given the dismal record of the Bush administration on human rights. But one possibility is for the next administration to incorporate enforceable free expression guarantees into trade agreements–something that can also work for labor rights. (It also wouldn’t hurt to lead by example and review some of the flaws with our own country’s domestic surveillance policies.)
But as Weiss also points out, “because research relating to human rights violations does not fit cleanly into the primary funding silos through which federal grant money flows, there is no obvious source of support for scientific studies of human rights issues.” Supporting research that considers rights in the digital realm in a wider funding framework is another positive opportunity, particularly because freedom of expression is one of the first lines of defense against graver human rights abuses.
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