FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES – ENHANCING MULTI-STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
24 OCTOBER 2013
14:30
FOCUS SESSION (OPENNESS): HUMAN RIGHTS, FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET
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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.
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>> MARKUS KUMMER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Please be seated. We would like to get started. I am Markus Kummer. I chaired the preparatory process. And before getting started, I would like to make a few comments on the organisation of the preparatory process.
We took the Working Group on IGF Improvement very seriously. As you may recall or may not, through the renewal of the mandate of IGF, it was decided to set up a Working Group to discuss possible improvements for the IGF, and one improvement they suggested was that each session should focus on two or three policy questions. And those were organised -- they came up with questions, and we also asked for community input, and what we received from the community, these questions are now available on our website, and the Secretariat will put them up on our screen. But you can look at them on your computer. It does not mean that this session is expected to answer all of these questions, but nevertheless, we think they provide a useful input into the discussions.
And another related announcement, many of the questions you will discuss here this afternoon will be revisited tomorrow morning. We have a session from 9:30 till 12:30 on Internet surveillance, and there we will also have questions. This was under emerging issues, and we decided this week to extend the sessions to leave more room for discussion, as this is an issue participants are very interested in.
So with that, I hand over to the chair of this session, Mr. Moedjiono, also a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group.
>> S. MOEDJIONO: I open this afternoon's Focus Session on Openness: Expression and Free Flow on the Internet. I am right now here to replace Professor Dr. Harkristuti Harkrisnowo, the Director General of Human Rights, Ministry of Law and Human Rights, because he has to go to Parliament, so he asked me to replace him as Chairman.
I am looking forward to our discussion about these important issues. This session will offer a multistakeholder of the current status of human rights, freedom of expression, free flow of information on the Internet.
Many of the key issues that have been held in workshops prior to this session and will give us an equal platform to address related to human rights and the Internet to find points of consensus, points of convergence, and points of further other inclusion or actors if appropriate. I am convinced that all of us would be able to learn a lot from each other with regard to this issue.
I believe here we start from the same platform, i.e., recognizing that the existence of the Internet has greatly affected the life of all people, regardless of age, nationality, gender, social status, et cetera. Indeed, it is an unprecedented revolution in technology, bringing out a very significant influence to our daily life. Our lifestyle, the business world, including the government services to its people.
Naturally, such advancement in technology also has some impact on the issue of human rights in particular. The issue of freedom of expression. Briefly, Internet has become a more and more important tool in the world, not only to fulfill all human rights, but also to do away with unjustices, to accelerate the development and promotion of humans' quality of life, hence the issue of human rights becomes prominent in this session.
From the national human rights perspective, it is suffice it to say this freedom of information, freedom of expression, mainly stems from Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which all of you have certainly learned it by heart. To strengthen it, there are also stipulations of this freedom, which is found in many international human rights institutions, such as the International Government on Civil and Political Rights, Conference on the Rights of the Child, and International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
For your information, ratified all the above human rights instruments. These human rights instruments are continuously developed into international and regional -- freedom of expression.
Having about 340 million population in Asia, a country that has also more than 15,000 islands, has been placed as the eighth biggest Internet user as the world and the fourth in Asia. (Speaking non-English language) -- that is Indonesia international service provider, reported at the end of 2012 the number of Internet users reached 63 million, an increase of 14.3% compared to 2011, and increase in 1.26% compared to 1998 rate.
In addition, our data revealed that Indonesian Internet users are also avid users of other media, such as blog, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. With more than 50 million Facebook users, more than 20 million active Twitter accounts, and more than 5 million blogs, Indonesia is certainly a land of blossoming freedom of information.
With such status, understandably, Indonesia has various concerns with the issue of Internet and freedom of expression. This is reflected in the incorporation of Freedom in our Constitution, in particular through the Second Amendment in 2001. Article 28-E of the Constitution stipulates freedom of expression as one of the rights to which everybody is entitled to. While Article 20-F asserts everyone's right to communicate and to obtain permission for the development of one's self and social environment and finally impart information by using all accessible media.
As an embodiment of the aspirations of all people in Indonesia, the constitution serves as the law of the land that must be obeyed by awe. Hence, the stipulations are followed up by a number of laws and declarations to ensure freedom of expression and information. Nonetheless, I would not mislead you all to think that all is wine and roses in my country. Similar to other countries, we do have challenges in the implementation of such stipulations ranging from the law enforcement officers to the misperception of some groups in our Internet Society who misconstrue freedom of expression as an absolute protection for everybody to say anything regardless of its legal consequences.
Capacity building, awareness raising constitute important messages that we shall continuously strive for. An important pillar to our full-fledged democracy, rise to information has also been reflected in our increasing use of virtual media for government services so that the people have access to all kinds of information with regard to public services.
The transformation of cost takes time, and the government regime is continuously developed to ensure the implementation of good government principles. A smarter public accountability measure, all government units are obligated to develop its website with real-time data, to provide information on this process to the public.
According to global ranking published by the Internet technicians in 2010, Indonesia's rank is a little below the world average, i.e., number 109 out of 193 countries. Acknowledging this predicament, our government has been asserted its effort to improve the condition. As a result of these efforts, the 2012 report on global eliteness ranking put Indonesia at the 97th place. A slight but quite promising increase. Furthermore, our law on freedom of information is adopted to further serve the stipulation in the constitution, in particular to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, accountability, and access to the public services.
Finally, ladies and gentlemen, it is my greatest hope that our interaction today would contribute to the betterment of our global society for the full enjoyment of human rights, in particular freedom of expression.
In this discussion, I think also we have to -- so concerning the Tunis Agenda for Information Society in 2005, Point 42 that expresses also the freedom of expression are also human rights.
Now I would like to introduce a moderator for this event, for this session. First Ms. Anja Kovacs on my left, Internet Democracy Project; and Mr. Johan Hallenborg, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Stockholm, supported by Anriette Esterhuysen, APC.
Next I would like to turn this session to the moderators. Thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you very much. I am going to briefly stand. I know this room is very, very big. We've tried to make the format a little bit more interactive. I hope it's okay, I would really like to encourage people who are sitting in the back to move more to the front. There's still lots of seats this side as well.
>> A. ESTERHUYSEN: There actually are espresso machines under the seats back here, so anybody who moves to here, you'll find a fired-up espresso machine under your seat.
>> A. KOVACS: We realise that you might want to move the session in between. It's a long session. That's okay. We still think it's better if you sit a little closer to the stage. So my name is Anja Kovacs. I work with the Internet Democracy Project in India and will be moderating together Johan Hallenborg from the Swedish government and supported by Anriette from APC.
We have people keeping an eye on the Twitter stream for us, so you are welcome to encourage people to tweet.
At the remote participation on that side, and we are very grateful for their support as well.
I am very happy to welcome you here today at what I think is a historic session. For eight long years I think a lot of people have worked very hard to get a Focus Session for human rights at the IGF, and this is the first year that it has finally happened. We've seen some important landmark events happening in the past few years. I think the resolutions on online freedom and offline freedom should be the same at the Human Rights Council, one example of such an achievement.
We have also seen challenges. I think the past year surveillance has really come on to the agenda. It will no doubt cast a shadow on this session. We do want to deal with it, but as Marcus already pointed out, there is a focus session on surveillance tomorrow as well, and we think there are many other really important human rights issues that we do still need to address as well. So we want to maintain that balance, and I hope that's okay with everybody.
Just very briefly, the rules of the game. We have a fairly long list of people who have been asked beforehand to speak. Could those people perhaps raise their hands? Can all of you just -- I can see there's some people back there in the audience. Can you just make sure that you're at least close to a microphone? And if not, please move so that you are. Thank you.
Despite having a number of predesignated speakers, we want to make this as interactive as possible. For that reason, we ask you not to exceed three minutes in your intervention. Anriette is going to help us with time keeping. We will give you a yellow card when you've reached the time limit and a red card when we are going to cut you off within ten seconds. That's really harsh, but because this is an important session, we really feel it's important to get many perspectives out.
You are also encouraged, apart from making your points briefly but strongly, to engage as much as possible with others, and though there have been a lot of predesignated people asked to speak, we will try and make this as interactive as possible.
Finally, just for Twitter, the hashtag is hash HR. I think that was all we needed to say by way of introduction for now. Let's start with the session.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much, Anja. My name is Johan Hallenborg, and I work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm, and I work on human rights issues in relation to the Internet and our Internet freedom programme.
We will kick off this session by having some input from the regional perspectives, the regional developments over the last year. We are kindly asking for some highlights from the respective six regional Rapporteurs in the relationship to the enjoyment of human rights online. We would like to ask you for three main issues, be they good or bad, challenges or success stories. So it's a pretty easy outline. It's three topics, three things, and you have three minutes.
So let's kick off and see where this ends. So let's start with Jochai from Access.
>> J. BEN-AVIE: It's always hard to be the first person to speak. I am not sure what to do. My name is Jochai Ben-Avie. I am the Policy Director at Access, accessnow.org. We are an international NGO that extends the rights of users at risk around the world. I am going to try to summarize. There's a lot to say about what's going on in it's United States right now. I think we are all very familiar with the revelations and scandals that have come out this summer.
As much as it's been scary, if not terrifying, to learn about the gross invasions of user privacy, of due process, an extent to which the NSA, the UK's GCHQ, and other intelligence agencies have invaded the network, I do think that we are starting to see some progress within the U.S. context. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has actually been formalized. It has a full board, has actually gotten funding recently, and they did a call for comment. Best Bits, a network of human rights organisations that has been meeting here in Bali and elsewhere, has been working on this and sent a letter that really stressed that protections need to be extended not just to U.S. citizens but to international users as well, and I think that's been really crucially missing in many parts of this debate within the U.S. context.
At the same time, I would say that what we're hearing from our colleagues who work in Washington is that international pressure from folks outside the United States is really having a difference, particularly on the companies, the U.S. companies that are holding most of this data. The companies have joined with many of the large Internet platforms, I should say, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and so forth, Microsoft, have joined with a number of civil society organisations with investors, with trade associations, with the We Need to Know Coalition to push for greater transparency around requests for access to user data. And I think with that, we're also seeing some legislative movement in the United States, transparency, again, being a big focus. In terms of substantive reform, there are a few bills, but I think the one that's most likely to move has yet to be introduced. That's the Leahy Congress incentive bill that would end bulk collection for metadata under PRISM and other programmes.
I really think we are in a crucial moment in the United States, and the more we can keep the pressure on here and moving forward, the better, and this is really the moment for action.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you. That was very short and to the point. Thank you very much.
Let's move to Asia and hear from Gayathry.
>> G. VENKITESWARAN: I represent a network of media focus groups. In relation to the issue, I would like to share two things that I think are quite developments of concern and two that I think would bring about some positive impact.
The first is actually in relation to a recent adoption of the Human Rights Declaration within the ASEAN context, so it's the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. Unfortunately, the Declaration itself falls below minimum standards in reference to international standards, and one of the victims of that compromise has been freedom of expression. So Article 23 of the Declaration, which talks about freedom of expression, takes everything from Article 19 except the point about across frontiers. So you have freedom of expression, but not across frontiers. At a time when we have already entered digital age, Indonesia is hosting IGF, ASEAN has adopted a declaration that removes that right. So I think that is of serious concern. Primarily because in the last few years we have seen great violations of expression online.
That is the first one at the regional level. The second is that in countries within the region, there is really a move back towards more regressive policies and regulations, particularly because of the wide use of online spaces for free expression. So we have seen the enactment of legislations that include more criminal defamation and also a lot more content regulation. So instead of actually moving back, it's actually moving forward -- moving forward, it's actually moving back. So that's two that I think we see as policy concerns for Southeast Asia.
However, having said that, there is this bad legislations coming forward, we have seen civil society in some of the nations actually doing very effective push-back. So for example, the introduction of the Cybercrime Prevention Act in the Philippines. There was a push-back from civil society. So that's actually a temporary restraining order, so to prevent the implementation of the law. So that's actually been a very, very positive action itself, a strategy that maybe the others can also follow suit.
The second thing is that we have seen also with the growth of the online spaces for news media, one of the issues is ethics, and we have seen a number of media organisations and communities developing self-regulation online, and I think that is a very interesting concurrent development in terms of regulation, so it's not official regulation, but it's self-regulation.
Thank you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you so much, Gayathry. Thank you so much.
We will now turn to Eduardo Bertoni from Argentina and hear what he has to say. Thank you. The floor is yours.
>> E. BERTONI: Thank you, Johan. I am Eduardo Bertoni, CELE at Palermo University.
There are many, many Latin American colleagues here, so what I am going to say now could be expend -- expanded or complemented by my fellow colleagues who are here.
Just three issues, and to talk for just three minutes, very complicated for a Latin American guy, but I will try.
The three issues, cybercrime laws, online content control, framed under the title, and privacy issues.
Cybercrime laws we experienced in the last year, but to be frank, it doesn't start in 2013. Many countries passing new cybercrime laws, specific cybercrime laws, reforms of the criminal codes in general that include cybercrimes. Many of those new laws are very vague and not very well drafted, and that could create problems for freedom of expression and privacy.
Online content control, the main issue in the region, in my view, is liability, and also some legislation related to cyberbullying or anti-child pornography laws, which is okay, but the problem is that in some situations, the provisions could affect freedom of expression of the people online.
We have examples of that in Argentina, in terms of intermediary liability. We have other examples in Peru in case of new legislation that has been proposed. And we have the case in Brazil that is not this year, where the Director of Google was detained in a case of intermediary liability.
Finally, privacy. Many countries are moving to new data protection laws, and the other thing, the other problem is related to surveillance. Data protection laws are under discussion as far as I understand in Chile, Brazil, and other countries and could be complicated if they are not very well drafted. And surveillance is still an issue because there are some surveillance systems implemented in some countries in Latin America, Ecuador, Brazil, and others that are or could affect privacy.
That's all.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you, Eduardo. Very excellent.
We take a jump across to Africa and turn to Fadlah Adams from the South African Human Rights Commission. Please, the floor is yours.
>> F. ADAMS: Thank you so much. Hi. Good afternoon. As mentioned, I am Fadlah Adams from the South African Human Rights Commission, but I will be speaking from Africa as a whole, the continent. Before my three minutes commence, I just want to throw to the floor, he recall earlier this week in day zero, human rights discussion, we were asked to remember the first time the -- that we engaged online, that we assembled or associated online. That led me thinking within the African context. I want you to take a few seconds as I go through the three points on Africa to think about the first time you switched on a light, and bam, there was electricity. The first time you opened a tap and water came running out. I'll take it one step further -- the first time you flushed a toilet. Now, that's what we face in Africa, and I am not saying it's all doom and gloom, but that's the reality of the African context.
So take a moment, whilst many of us can remember our first online experience, many people, the most vulnerable, the poorest of the poor that we find in Africa, have never experienced the luxuries that we take for granted, something as basic as flushing a toilet, which is -- we have several, several reports speaking to this, even within South Africa, surprisingly.
But I'll go on, and whilst you digest that bombshell, to speak about the main challenges in Africa, and I think that there's been a lot of discussion over the last few days about human rights, about access, about privacy, about security, about freedom of expression, and that all finds application within the African context, but we must understand the great disparity in Africa between rich and poor and I think very importantly look at it from a rights-based perspective.
And I have gotten into debates with the technical people because, yeah, rights and technology, and often it's trying to find that we both speak the same language. The question begs do we then prioritize Africa access? Do we prioritize security? Do we prioritize including privacy? Do we prioritize basic services? Or do we use the Internet as a platform to enable those other rights as well? So if you go out into a community and you ask what would you rather have? Internet or electricity? Oh, no, electricity. Oh, fine, the Internet is a by-product of that. But let's have education initiatives running as well.
Just to get into the three main points before my time is up, access -- this I mean broadly both in terms of infrastructure, equipment, access in the narrow sense as well to persons that have disability, older persons, vulnerable persons such as women -- technically I don't like the term "vulnerable" too much, but let's say those who have been previously or largely discriminated against, unfairly so -- and also children. And of course, security is a major challenge in Africa. And when I speak to this, I am speaking about those countries that are a bit more advanced in terms of the Internet technology and access. So there's definitely been a high degree of Internet freedoms being limited and -- yellow card -- legislative developments seen on the continent over the last year or two that there's been move for restricting online rights, enabling interception of communications, monitoring, all of which obstruct free speech.
Two -- one last point is that I want to say on the brighter side that in Africa, we developed a telemedicine campaign in East Africa, as well as in Southern Africa, and mobile platform where you can voice your concerns around service delivery, which is quite a big deal in African sense.
Thank you so much. No red card.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. Very good.
Lee, are you ready? I'd like to leave the floor to Mr. Lee Hibbard from the Council of Europe to give a few comments on the situation in Europe.
>> L. HIBBARD: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Johan. I think we have to bear in mind when we think about human rights in general -- closer -- in general is that they grew up over 60 years ago because of abuse and misuse of people. So machineries were put in place, declarations were put in place to make sure that was never the case again.
So I think that the first contextual point is that we're talking about trust. We are trying to build trust between the government, between authorities, and maybe now companies and people. In that context, everyone says it's the question of surveillance -- lawful surveillance. Let's be clear in many respects. And whistleblowers and the thing about human rights defenders or traitor is -- was a very prevalent discussion in Europe.
Who is watching the watchers? Do we need more democratic oversight and transparency? Are the laws overly broad? Are they too vague? Can we trust those people who conduct surveillance? That trust element is, for me, key. And now with the Human Rights Resolution, which says that human rights must be protected offline and online, that involves trust online.
My first major point is about -- it's about privacy, but it's about self-determination on the Internet, human rights, the right to private life and self-determination, what you do on the Internet. And Bruce mentioned in one of the documents in the delegate packs here about everybody in the middle, and their ability to take control of their data. The question of consent is key in Europe, and it's being worked out now in the Council of Europe and in the European Union what is consent, explicit consent, and are there really effective remedies in that context when it goes wrong?
So you see data protection authorities fighting certain companies, taking them to court. The law is being used more and more now to try to work out the private lives of people in terms of service, et cetera. That's a very key point.
Then, of course, freedom of expression and access to information is key. There's been a lot of discussion about the use of social media and hate speech and defamation and how do you work that out, and certain countries have been looking at how defamation works out and criminal definition is something that Frank LaRue mentioned, which you shouldn't -- the decriminalization, of course.
Another point about takedown of content without due process and without proper safeguards. The question of safeguards and process is key. It remains key. Is the courts being used to take down content enough? People are saying no.
The question of access to information brings me to a very important case of the Court of Human Rights, which said that you cannot blanket block access to sites because if you do, this can be a violation of your freedom of expression, and the court found that in a case in December last year. That was very -- that was key.
So now we have the first case which says that, you know, rights can be violated online in a European context.
I think my last point, which is about access, is about the discussion on net neutrality, and net neutrality is a technical discussion. It's about the open Internet. But the interference with an open Internet and the concern that do we want an Internet which becomes a shopping mall, which -- a shopping mall, which is, you know -- just doesn't provide for freedom and openness and an equal playing field for people and for services.
Thank you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much, and we will return to the issue of net neutrality a little later.
Finally, let's -- turn to Moez and hear what he has to say from a North Africa perspective and I assume also Middle East.
The floor is yours. Sorry, Moez. You will have to introduce yourself.
>> M. CHAKCHOUK: Thank you. Thank you, Johan.
I will speak about the situation in Tunisia. You know -- yeah, like this.
So the Tunisia situation has so much in these recent years. You know very well how we moved and how beyond everything we didn't have very good regulation.
The government actually is looking forward to have cybercrime law, and they consider it a draft project that was prepared before the revolution. So it was something that is very bad because in that draft programme, they said that it is based on the Budapest Convention, but at the same time, we look on this Convention, and we see that there is censorship, there is a lot of issues that has drafted on that project. Hopefully we catch up after the revolution and we did a lot of things on these issues, and now they're still drafting. I am not sure that it can be published soon because now with a lot of changes, and you know very well how things now are still moving forward. But I want to stress the importance of those conventions, again -- and I know my colleagues here from the Council of Europe are hearing me. It's very important to have a better understanding of those conventions for a developing world.
We can use those as a basis, but this could be also used for a bad situation, and without respecting all our upholding human rights. So I want to highlight because I thought that's why working with other stakeholders in my country that there is a lot of misunderstanding about those conventions. So a lot of things need to be done there, capacity building, about privacy, and about what is the principles when you did some national cybercrime laws.
I think this is something that I want to highlight at first, but also I want to highlight the thing about the role of the society and of the community. Actually, you know very well the situation, there is no constitution, there is nothing, so it's really important to raise those issues inside the community. The only safeguards, for example, today online and to prevent censorship, we have been -- if something is blocked in the net, you can hear a lot of voices everywhere in the country saying, oh, there's censorship again. And if people are still waiting to say no, we need to explain this. There's no censorship.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you so much, Moez.
>> A. ESTERHUYSEN: Can I just explain? When I show the yellow card, you actually still have 30 seconds. Okay? It seems to work better that way. And then red is when you have to stop.
>> J. HALLENBORG: So Moez, you have another 30 seconds.
>> A. ESTERHUYSEN: I used it for you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much, Moez. I know you have been critical to the developments of online freedom in your country, so thanks very much for sharing this with us.
Before we leave the floor for two comments or questions, so you can start thinking of them right now, I'd like to revisit our host from the IGF last year. They have asked for the floor to give a little bit of their perspectives of the developments in Azerbaijan compared to last year. I'm not quite sure where you are seated. Could you please identify yourself or show yourselves? Person from Azerbaijan who asked for the floor? Who is this? No?
All right. Okay. So if they turn up, we'll give them the floor. No one? No? Okay. Then the floor is open for two interventions regarding this very broad, broad account of what has happened globally in this arena. Please don't hesitate. But come with comments. Please introduce yourself as well. Thank you.
>> Hi. This is not the intervention that I wanted to make. This is just on the topics that have arisen. I wanted to just touch upon the point of the cybercrime. He is absolutely right. You know what ends up happening? Our governments -- I am from Pakistan. They did this. This legislation is based on the Budapest Convention. That is why we are doing this. And they had a provision called cyberstalking and censorship. Guess what. When I read the Convention, it turns out that wasn't the case.
So it is absolutely right that we are being misled by our government, oh, there is a commitment out there. That's why we need to do that. So the capacity building exercise is needed to understand what is essential. Otherwise, we are going to find repressive laws coming everywhere.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Seems to be a common theme in many parts of the world, and quality of legislation.
Anyone else would like to make an intervention at this point on the regional developments since last year? The floor is open.
Right. If not -- oh, sorry. Where? Great. A mic. We have people running around with mics? No? Okay. Great. Sorry.
>> I am working with the international campaign for human rights in Iran. Since last year until now, we had presidential election, and now fortunately, we have a moderate president, and he promised something to change something about the Internet, including increasing the speed of Internet in Iran and also allowing social media. So we want to follow it and to remember him to keep his promise in that regard. So this is very good chance to encourage you and to suggest Iranian government to host other events like IGF in the country to see a lot of progress in the country as well.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. We will now give the final word in this part of the session to Amin Hussena from Azerbaijan. You have a few words to say about the development from last year.
>> I am from Azerbaijan. One year ago, Azerbaijan was host country for IGF 2012. But what we have after one year? I am very sad, but I don't have any good news for Internet freedom in our country. Our IGF, government changed the law, arrested new online activists. Right now we have nine journalists in the prison, three bloggers, two human rights defenders, and lots of human rights activists.
But also, government does not only change our law. Before we have defamation in print media and radio broadcast. Right now we have defamation -- it's possible for you to be arrested for three years if you make any notes for your personal Facebook account or Twitter. Government continued to block some critical Internet websites, but we don't have the same situation which has for example China or others. But right now we have partly free Internet.
And my thing is why is Azerbaijan not realising their promises made before IGF? I think IGF and IGF Secretariat and UN needs to organise monitoring after IGF. If we organise -- if you organise this big event in a country like Azerbaijan, you don't need to monitor just only before this event. You need to continue strong monitoring and make recommendations and give other feedback for net freedom in IGF host country.
Thanks for your attention. We present special report, and this is why I don't have lots of time, but we prepared a special report about what we have changed in Internet sphere. We published this, have print and PDF copies. Thanks for your attention. Thanks.
(Applause)
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you, Amin, for that very strong statement.
The gentleman over there, I will give the final word to you, please. The floor is yours. Please present yourself.
>> Thank you. I wasn't planning on speaking. First of all, my name is Khaled Fattal, Group Chairman of the Multilingual Internet Group. I wasn't planning on speaking, but I think Hazad's comment instigated a point that is relevant to this conversation, this debate, about how the misinformation at local level and how much capacity building we really have to make, and it goes to the question about other efforts that have taken place in the past.
Let me share this with you. In 2012, my group conducted a major study of the Internet usability in emerging markets, and we focused to start with on Arabic language community, Farsi language community, and Udu language community. We conducted surveys in multiple languages aimed at these communities. I actually flew into many capitals, did seminars, and we actually met with the regulatory heads of many of these countries.
Let me share with you how much of a challenge it is to actually do the capacity building we are take -- talking about. Majority of people do not know who ICANN is, let alone what is new gTLDs, let alone what is freedom of expression and how they can implement it. Majority of users in those markets are happy to be on Facebook and they think they are speaking or they are doing illegal downloads. So this is a huge gap in how Internet can become this tool of empowerment to make them step into that space so they become Internet citizens and do what we want them to do so that they can do what Zaed is saying.
Fundamentally, this is a huge challenge. As much as we like to hear our own voices and we are doing what we are doing, we are still a close club. We need to find a way of taking this conversation to the masses in emerging markets. So on a separate subject, we are trying to do some of that as well. Last month we announced the series of summits that we are doing around emerging markets around the seismic change of the Internet and the birth of the Internet. Subject matter needs to be relevant to the local community to see how we can participate. You make it purely legal, you lose most of them. You make it purely technical, most don't understand technology. They all understand like we all walk into our houses, we flip the switch, lights come on, that's how they relate to the Internet.
They do not see it as something that can empower them. This is how I can we -- I think we need to tweak the mechanisms we take to them. Huge challenge, but definitely something we need to engage in. Thank you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you for the intervention.
We will now move on in the session to the next part, which Anja will moderate. We will give you the chance to comment also on regional developments further on, but I think we are now moving into a session which deals more with topical issues, and we have decided to divide them into three different sections.
Please, Anja, explain more
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Johan.
I think let us start with what some people have called the big elephant in the room, the whole surveillance question. And I would like to start perhaps by asking Nicolas Seidler from ISOC a question. We hear a lot about why surveillance is a privacy issue, but why would you say it is a freedom of expression issue as well?
>> N. SEIDLER: Thanks a lot. It's a pleasure to be here. So actually, I think that from a technical community perspective -- should I -- okay. So from a technical community perspective, if we actually look at open Internet standards, the goal of these standards is really to allow different decentralized networks to talk to each other. In a way, open standards are the language of the Internet, and by extension, they also allow people to communicate and to share information and ideas. So that's the first thing I wanted to emphasize, the strong relationship between the technical design of the Internet and freedom of expression.
Now, the reality is not so idyllic, of course, and often, like many other technologies, the open Internet can be double edged and can be used also in ways that undermine fundamental rights, and we have seen that with pervasive surveillance.
So surveillance is a great area of concern for the technical community, for the engineers, namely those who work on technical standouts. After all, when you look back at the Internet pioneers, they created a network which was supposed to facilitate communication and not to be used as a tool to do global surveillance.
So one last word very concretely, again, to give that technical community perspective and what the tech community is doing regarding surveillance. This is not a new concern for the engineers, but the -- surveillance events have clearly generated -- to address longstanding challenges.
At the opening of the IGF, I was listening careful to the Chair of the ITF, and I think he shared some very noteworthy and very strong visions from a technical perspective. One was that we should move from an Internet which is insecure by default to an Internet which is secure by default, and I think that these communities are also working on very ambitious targets to have more encrypted Web traffic, again by default. And at another meeting, he also said we should make it more costly, not only in terms of financial costs, but also getting caught when you do surveillance and being embarrassed. When you have an open Internet, it's more difficult to do secret surveillance.
But there are limits to what technology can fix. I just wanted to mention three, and then I'll conclude. While technology cannot change the political context -- so if a country makes encryption legal, there is not much that you can do -- technology can -- standouts also can help change the implementation of standouts, and there I am referring to, for example, commercial software that are based on those standards.
And finally, technology cannot help if users don't communicate with trusted peers, and that they don't themselves secure communications. So in a nutshell, that's what I with a share on the technical community perspective on privacy for expression and the link to those technical developments.
>> A. KOVACS: Thanks a lot, Nicolas.
I wanted to move to Mishi Chaudhry from the software freedom law centre. I can't see. Mishi, can you just -- I think she might have left the room. She is here. It seems we have an immediate response. Let us just take that, and Mishi, we'll come back to you after that. Sorry.
Nnenna, go ahead.
>> N. NWAKANMA: Quickly, before I run away, I just wanted to draw our attention to the Web Index. The Web Index which is measuring the health of the Internet, the open Internet in about 80 countries, which -- oh, I am sorry. I was talking about the Web Index. I am trying to tweet at the same time, so people can follow online. The Web Index is an initiative of the Web Foundation which is measuring the health of the open and free Internet across 80 countries. The Web Index 2013 will be launched during the ICTD in South Africa in December, and I do hope we will make good use of it.
The other capital information I would like to give is the one of the World Wide Web Foundation's initiative called Web We Want has established grants for organisations that are advocating for freedom on the Web and human rights. So those are two opportunities that I would like to share with us on behalf of the Web Foundation before I step out. Thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thanks, Nnenna, for that contribution. Let us move back to the surveillance question, then. Mishi, what I wanted to ask you -- Mishi is from the Software Law Center in India. What I wanted to ask you is we've seen a lot of uproar about surveillance as a global issue now. I think it has gotten increasing recognition for that. Is it a national issue as well? And I think there is a mic behind you if you don't have.
Okay.
>> M. CHOUDHURY: When you say national issue, are you referring specifically to India, or are you just saying that is it a national issue for every other nation involved?
>> A. KOVACS: You are very welcome to share the experience of India, but you can also comment broader if you want.
>> M. CHOUDHURY: I think it's twofold. One is surveillance is the national issues. All the local or national security agencies are going to be listening and surveilling and indulging in things which they have already been doing for years. Technology has made things a little more efficient. However, the issue is that at the national level, where the issue is subject to the rule of law, and how this relates to the global level is whether the national governments, do they have any duty towards their citizens to protect them from the foreign surveillance or spying?
So I think that's a twofold issue. In India's context, we have something which is more sophisticated than various programmes coming out of GCHQ or U.S. Government-sponsored, it seems like, but it's a black hole, so we don't have a lot of information. We have central monitoring system. India does not have a privacy law or a legislation or a data protection law. We have a right to privacy as implicit in Article 21, and the central monitoring system is being rolled out; however, there is no parliamentary discussion, and there is not much information out there. Whatever we have is things which have been either leaked out in the media and it says it's a centralized system, people will have real-time access to the various interactions online. Nine of India's agencies would also have access, all of them have got nothing to do with national security but are also agencies which are tax related, which are like the tax authorities of the country.
So we don't have much official information. We have some information here and there. And I don't have time to talk about that in detail.
Thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you very much, Mishi. I think Pranesh Prakash from the Information Society in India wants to add something to that.
>> P. PRAKASH: Yes, I want to make two quick points. One about how what we are seeing now in terms of surveillance and how it affects free speech is not a continuance of just what used to be because digital technologies have fundamentally altered that equation. They are fundamentally allowing for mass surveillance of a sort now that was never in human history possible. Sure, intelligence gathering, spying and espionage has always existed, and interception of communications has always existed. Bugging and actually places people to listen in has always existed. It's on a scale -- it's the change in scale that really puts freedom of speech at a threat that it didn't earlier. That one point.
The second quick point, to an example, an illustration of this. There is -- there was -- a Minister called Haren Pandya in Gujarat. He was murdered in 2003, and his murderers still have not been brought to book. He was -- it is widely suspected, though never proven that he was murdered because he was the Minister who actually deposed before a citizens tribunal that was going into the Gujarat riots of 2002.
How was he found out? Well, it was a secret meeting, but he had been using a friend's SIM card. It was not even registered under his name; it was registered under a friend's name. And because the police -- and he was, at that time, the Minister. Because the police were able to get access to the call records of his phone, it is suspected that they were able to track him as the Minister who actually spoke out about the riots, and that led to his death.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Pranesh. Kind of taking off of that comment you made, I want to move to Meryem Merzouki from European Digital Rights and civil rights society. Is that okay?
The point that surveillance has gone to a completely different scale will obviously also have an impact on the relationship between privacy and freedom of expression. How do you see that relationship now, and perhaps also with all these revelations, are we today better off than six months ago because at least we have a better sense of what is going on?
>> M. MERZOUKI: Yeah, thank you, Anja.
Actually, you used again the metaphor of the elephant in the room, and then keeping hearing this. But I would like to insist that also at the same time you can see the forest from the trees. And we shouldn't discuss this issue of surveillance and other violations of the right to privacy throw the sole NSA PRISM.
First of all, government server alliance shouldn't let us forget about corporate firms' online tracking of users. And this also can have a chilling effect on freedom of expression, on the expression of Internet users. These corporate firms includes telecom operators, providers, and online service providers.
So this collection and tracking of users is also used to profile citizens, and we have seen with the NSA scandal that there is a convergence between objectives of governments for surveillance, be it for intelligence or law enforcement purposes, and also the tracking of the corporate firms for commercial users.
Second, we shouldn't forget -- I would like to get back to the issue of the national surveillance because this is very important. Most governments, if not all around the world, have adopted at the national level laws allowing them to conduct massive and systematic collection of communication and traffic data. For instance, through data retention laws. And we have a lot of them in Europe because this is the European Union legislation now. And we have to be conscious that these are not simple technical data, but this data also allows the mapping, a true cartography of citizens, their activities, their online activities, and their personal relationships. So this also has a strong impact on freedom of expression because it will lead to self-censorship of users. So there is an obvious link between privacy, personal protection, and freedom of expression.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you. I see several hands. Earlier, Sanja wanted to comment. I think you are also reporting back from a workshop; right? I know John has also been in a workshop that looks at these issues. So let's perhaps take these two reports now. We'll come back to you, sir, later. Sanja, why don't you go ahead first.
>> S. KELLY: Just to directly address the issue on how surveillance might affect freedom of expression -- and by the way, my name is Sanja Kelly, and I work at Freedom House.
One thing that we've seen in our research is that surveillance leads to self-censorship, and that's one direct link. What we have seen in many countries around the world is that when there is broad surveillance of citizens, particularly in countries where rule of law is lacking, then people start being careful what and how they say things online.
We have seen in particular the effect of this in authoritarian states where very often political activists or even everyday users find the police knocking on their door because the authorities were able to monitor those citizens and things that they say online.
One thing that we've seen more generally is that surveillance, particularly on the national level, has been on the increase, and I know that a lot of people want -- are focusing right now on what's happening in the United States and how that affects the broader global community, but what they've seen -- at least in our research -- and I am from Bosnia, but what we've seen in our research is that when you talk to a person in Bahrain, when you talk to a person in Russia, they are not really afraid and they are not self-censoring because of the NSA surveillance, but they are actually afraid what their national security agencies are going to do to them if they criticize the authorities.
So I think that's really the bottom line, and that's something that we really need to focus on in addition to what's happening in the United States.
If you would like me to, I can also mention a couple of additional conclusions from the workshop or we can get to that later.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Sanja.
John, maybe you can also add some perspectives from your workshop. EEOC
>> J. KAMPFNER: Yeah, I was going to be very brief. It came up in that particular workshop as well, freedom online, but also the one that I was chairing on behalf of the GNI yesterday. And that is the political forum policy side of freedom of expression promotion and that its relationship with surveillance and the PRISM story. And it's a self-evident point, but it's one that I can't see institutions yet, such as this or others, being able to grapple with, which is the credibility of the genuinely held prselytization of freedom of expression by online countries and others around the world, how that reconciles with the double standards, accusation with regard to surveillance. That came up in a number of interventions, both on the panel and from the floor, most notably from those who were in the room yesterday from a Chinese delegate who started haranguing the U.S.
delegate saying, you know, you have nothing to teach us about freedom of expression.
Now, beyond the rhetoric and the point scoring, there's a fundamental question for policymakers, but for institutions such as here that seems to have come out a lot this week and I am sure will come out in the surveillance Open Forum tomorrow, which is how the -- to most people, certainly to my eyes -- the positive and quite effective hitherto foreign policy side of freedom of expression promotion can be reconciled to what's going on.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, John, for these important reminders. Rather than perhaps focusing on governments, I think that duplicity is something that businesses have also been accused of. So following on Meryem's important reminder that surveillance also happens by businesses, not only by governments, let me maybe turn to LaJeunesse from Google. Let me take your comment in the back, and after that comment, I will come back to check if there are any comments from remote participants or from Twitter. But first let's hear Ross.
>> R. LAJEUNESSE: So I am supposed to respond to the accusation that companies are surveilling their users? Is that it?
>> A. KOVACS: You can respond to the question what are businesses going to do to repair the trust of users that's very, very, very obviously broken?
>> R. LAJEUNESSE: Yes. We're very, very, very aware of that.
We -- as you said, we care very much about the relationship we have with our users, so we've always prided ourselves on putting our user first and thinking that all else will follow. And so the revelations, the Snowden revelations we are very aware did damage to the faith that many users have in us as a company, and we have been working very hard to assure our users that they can continue to trust us with their information and continue to use our services.
I am actually very proud of the role that Google has always played when it comes to issues like protecting our users and especially on the issue of transparency, where for three years we've been recognizing the fact that our users have a right to know what governments are seeking from them, what information and the requests that governments are making to platforms like us for user data. It's not something that we've come to recently because we want to save our, you know, reputation with our users. We've been doing this for years and years.
We spent almost two years secretly negotiating with the U.S. Government, for example, to allow us to reveal the numbers of national security letter requests that we get at a time when we weren't even legally allowed to talk about that. We were, nevertheless, doing that behind the scenes because we thought it was important.
We are really happy to see that a number of companies have joined us in doing their own transparency reports. And it's not to say that transparency is the answer to any of this, but you can't really have a debate about these issues when you don't even know the facts, and that's still the situation we are in. The Snowden revelations, you know, have given us some information, but they haven't given us the information we really need to have a constructive debate about this stuff, which is why we sued the U.S. Government, along with some other companies, to try and force them to allow us to even talk about this in the way that we want to.
>> A. KOVACS: Thanks, Ross.
Sir in the back, there is a microphone here. We will take one more comment from the floor, but after this comment, I'll first come to Twitter and remote.
>> Yeah, thank you. Actually, I want to ask someone from Turkey if available here to tell us a story about how the Ottoman Empire made the wrong mistake when they found out Gutenberg, which is like the Internet of today, they banned it for a hundred years instead of, you know, making it to the benefit of the people.
But what I want to suggest here is another thing is I think if you look at this surveillance and freedom of speech, I look at other way, which is sometimes the unfairness is if there is surveillance, especially by commercial world, is that because the people under surveillance did not really aware of these things? And was taken advantage of? So what about if I suggest something maybe a bit controversial? Is -- if there is any surveillance at all, then the information gathered by the surveillance should be accessible to public. So for instance, you know, when I carry my iPad everywhere, Apple knows where I am and where I go at a certain time. So Apple would be -- have to give this information to the public. Therefore, everybody quickly will be aware what kind of surveillance is done under them, so they can take message, and this awareness will increase so rapidly, so people know, if they don't want to be known, then they should leave their smartphone behind or something like that.
So only a very limited institution for a clear danger to society that is allowed to keep the information of the surveillance only to themselves. This unfairness to those who have all this information about millions and millions of people, and millions of people who are not even aware that they are being surveilled. So make it more open, put it all there so we can all see.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you. Perhaps this is also the right time to refer to a website and a set of principles called necessaryandproportionate.org, which actually is a list of principles that, among other things, highlight precisely that, the need to be transparent, but also to make sure that surveillance only happens when it is really, really needed and only to the extent that it's absolutely required.
So thank you for that important reminder.
I'll go to check, are there any questions from remote? No? Nothing from remote?
Anything from Twitter? Our Twitter moderators would like to report back on?
Okay. It seems that the questions that were asked have been answered by the room, so you have been very proactive.
Were there any other workshops that would like to report back on this particular segment? No? Then maybe we have time for one or two more comments. I see one here and one there. Why don't you go first, sir. Let's go ahead with this one first.
>> Yes. Walid Al-Saqaf, I research online censorship. I have come to know and understand that surveillance, as mentioned before, obviously a violation of freedom of expression because of cases of self-censorship, but what is even more dangerous is when people do not know that they are surveilled. So that's even much more catastrophic because the moment that feedback, for example, says all right -- or Google -- your information would be used for marketing purposes, the consent of the user is, in itself, one way of him or her to understand the risk.
But cases of unethical or, perhaps, dramatic proportions when the person himself does not understand that he or she is surveilled, that's much more serious. That's why the scandals are much more serious than anything that had ever been revealed so far.
And a proposal -- obviously, the issue of the NSA scandal is something that governments need to deal on a policy level, but for companies such as Google, for example, one often proposal that we hear from activists is that why not allow by default the ability to have end-to-end encryption, something that could be embedded on an email client level, something similar could perhaps be innovative. Technicians and geeks can always find a way, if there is a will within companies, to enable interface-to-interface encryption. So if you were on a browser and sending a private feedback message, this message would be encrypted on the client level and then arrive to the particular person on his or her computer based on encryption on the client level, and so it would enable only the two persons to understand what's been transferred.
So I understand that there are certain marketing implications, but trust of users is much more important at this stage.
>> A. KOVACS: Thanks. We'll take Brett's comment first, then move to you, and then move on to the next session.
Just by way of information, I think a group of people in Iceland among others is trying to develop a secure email client that's still Web based.
Brett Solomon.
>> B. SOLOMON: Thanks very much. I just wanted to report from a session as a feed-in to this, which was also on surveillance. It was one of the flash sessions from yesterday looking at the necessary and proportionate principles which have been signed by, I think, 280 organisations around the world. And it looks as if there is a set of 13 issues around legality, legitimate aim, proportionality, et cetera.
I think we are starting to see state adoption. The principles are addressed to states. We saw at the Seoul conference last week, the Foreign Minister from Sweden, using the principles as the basis of his presentation to the other Ministers in the room. I think we are starting to see some normative development around the application of international human rights to communication surveillance.
>> A. KOVACS: Thanks, Brett.
Please, go ahead.
>> Hi. Mike Harris from Index on Censorship.
It's really important we talk about PRISM. It's really important we talk about NSA surveillance. But we also need to make sure we don't take our eye off the ball with the very real threats, the physical threats happening to human rights defenders and online activists across the world today.
This report from the IFRS on Internet freedom in Azerbaijan after the IGF is a solitary reminder that our previous hosts have renegged on all of their promises to uphold online freedom of expression. They have engaged in physical attacks against human rights defenders. They have engaged in serious and systematic surveillance against human rights defenders. And I think while we must make sure that we uphold the highest standards in western democracies, I think if we totally ignore what authoritarian states are doing and buy into their narrative, which is you are all the same, you are all hypocrites, we very, very easily forget that right now, today, across the globe, net citizens are being physically attacked and imprisoned and often murdered for standing up and speaking out, and we mustn't forget that.
(Applause)
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you very much for that reminder. It's actually a very nice lead into the next block, you could say, from this afternoon, which will look specifically at freedom of expression issues in the way we do this more traditionally.
Rose, I just wanted to check with you whether you perhaps wanted to respond to the comment or request from Google perspective.
>> R. LAJEUNESSE: We certainly recognize that our users benefit by encryption, which is why we do search by encryption in all cases.
And with our Chrome browser, there's encryption available on that. But I can't say that it's perfect or that all of our services are perfect. But we recognize the importance of that, and we're working toward it.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you. Thank you, Ross. Shall we move into the next session, then, Johan?
>> J. HALLENBORG: Absolutely. Whereas we're trying to define what constitutes a proper human rights in the real space, some people are trying to understand how human rights apply in the cyberspace or in the online environment. And particularly freedom of expression has come to the forefront in recent years, and maybe to dwell a little bit on freedom of expression online, we've asked first Mr. Guy Berger from UNESCO. What do you think, Guy, is speech online, is it more threatened than speech offline? And is there any normative work that that could defend free speech online?
>> G. BERGER: Thank you, Johan. So I think the position in the UN is certainly that all the rights that exist offline should exist online, and those include the right to freedom of expression.
And of course, what happens in the one sphere can have impact in the other sphere, forwards and backwards.
I think what's important in the freedom of expression, though, that we understand that in terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's not only the freedom to express in the sense of sending messages; it's also the freedom to seek and receive. So the UN Declaration of Human Rights has the two-sided dimension, two sides of the same coin, and that becomes very important because, of course, if you only have one, you could only express yourself but people are not able to hear you or receive you, it's not much point. On the other hand, if people can receive but there's a limit on expression, again, it's not the full freedom.
So I think what's important about this is that it brings you to understanding the significance of blocking and filtering as impacting on that side of the right to freedom of expression, the side of accessing information, and of course, we often speak about access but not always about the right to access, but in terms of the freedom of expression, concept, it includes both.
I think, then, what becomes important also is in the same way that one could say that it's not surveillance per se that's a problem but inappropriate -- but illegitimate surveillance. The same with blocking. In the same way one would say what are the legitimate limitations for expression, what are the legitimate limitations that could take the form of blocking and filtering? And certainly, the UN position, as articulated by Frank LaRue, is that the norm is the freedom and the limitations are the exception. And the limitations themselves have to be limited, and people have now referred with respect to the surveillance limitations, 13 principles proposed by civil society that would make surveillance legitimate.
If surveillance took place according to those 13 principles, civil society would say that's a legitimate limitation in the interest to other rights, the right to security, privacy, and so on. It would be a balance. They would say, civil society, surveillance in that case is not a violation of rights; it's a limitation of rights. It's a legitimate limitation.
So when you come back to this question of blocking and filtering on the Internet, which is still a huge thing and maybe we've lost a bit of sight of it in the recent time, in the post-modern era, blocking and filtering needs to be considered from the point of what is legitimate blocking and filtering.
And an interesting exercise is to what extent the same principles that have been proposed by the civil society people that are in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a version of which has been articulated by Karl Boltz recently, to what extent are those principles also applicable to blocking and filtering, which as I said, is a key part of the freedom of expression. Thank you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: So basically the same principles that are possible to limit freedom of expression in the real world are the same we use for the online environment.
>> The norm in both environments are the same restrictions. If they are only legitimate in the interest of protecting other rights, transparency, legitimacy, et cetera.
>> J. HALLENBORG: In some countries, working with particular issues that deal with perceived as particularly sensitive, but surely they are more restrictive than others, at least that's my picture, and I'd like to ask -- I would like to go to Bishakha Datta from India. You are a sexual rights activist, and I would like to know your perspective of freedom of expression online. What is your experience in your work?
>> B. DATTA: Okay. So what I would like to say -- sorry. What I'd like to say from the perspective of gender and sexual rights is I think as we all know, one of the main purposes for which the Internet has been used quite legitimately, in my opinion, is actually for activities related to sex or sexuality. And while most people think that that means viewing porn, I would actually argue there is a much wider range of activity. Very quick five examples. Think of an HIV-positive person who looks up how to wear a condom online. Think of a lesbian woman who can't safely, you know, associate offline uses the online space. Think of a disabled woman who, you know, maybe looks up porn online. Think of migrant workers having cybersex, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of things that happen.
What I wanted to say is that unfortunately, all of these get clubbed under sexual content, which is seen sort of intrinsically as harmful content. And the problem then becomes that we end up with attempts to ban all sexual content, which is sort of lumped under pornography. Right?
So I think from a rights perspective, we need to really start all of us live in countries where there are guarantees of freedom of expression, and under that freedom or the right to free expression, I think we should start making the right to sexual expression far more explicit. The time has come when it needs to be named and sort of protected. Otherwise, it just goes into a different zone altogether. That's one.
The second thing I think is that because there's been such a big sort of morality discourse at policy levels around pornography and sort of a harm discourse, the key thing that affects women as well as, you know, sexuality groups, et cetera, is getting completely left out of the policy picture, and that, in my opinion, is consent.
One example. When a woman -- in India, we have a very famous case many years ago where a boy and a girl were having sex, this was filmed on a cell phone, and it was circulated. It went viral.
The issue was everybody started saying oh, my God, this is terrible, dirty, and immoral, but that is completely irrelevant. The point was that she agreed to something, she consented to something for private use. She did not consent to something for public use. But the entire consent thing was just sort of completely dismissed; right?
And the final point, in 30 seconds, Anriette, is that, you know, as gender and sexual rights groups, we sometimes look for protection under things like hate speech, so there is a proposal to sort of put gender as a specific category under hate speech require and I am sympathetic to that, but what I think we need to keep in mind is that hate speech is understood very differently in the public sphere than it is in the policy sphere and that we don't want, like, a situation where every time someone says, you know, the word "bitch," which I loathe, I loathe the word, that's not the point. We don't want every single thing to be sort of loosely put under hate speech because then you end up with nothing that is specifically protected as hate speech and a generation of Internet users who think like any word that causes discomfort is sort of this giant hate speech violation, and that, I think, actually, takes away freedom of expression as well.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you. We are moving into an area now where it's about several rights that come into play. One person's dignity versus another person's right to free speech. And I'd like to turn now to Beryl Aidi. Beryl, where are you? You are there. You belong to the Kenyan Human Rights Commission; right? And what are your experiences from Kenya? It's been a turbulent few years, and also on free expression, I suppose, in the political life. What is your experience in this regard?
>> B. AIDI: Well, Kenya is relatively free as far as freedom of expression is concerned. Most people are able to express themselves freely without much restriction. However, with regard to political expression, sometimes there's been restrictions where individuals express -- or, rather, exercise self-censorship, and this is in response to threats by the regulatory body, which is the Communication Commission of Kenya, that has threatened to institute legal proceedings on people who are caught propagating dangerous speech. And this is mainly in light of hate speech and inciting violence.
However, as far as individual rights are concerned and defamation, there's also been cases where individuals have been taken to court by others because of defamation, and the laws they have been relying on are the laws that existed before the promulgation of the new constitution that still remain in place, the defamation laws, the libel laws. So these ones are still very much in place. And a few individuals have relied on them. They've sued other individuals and also sued news agencies and media houses.
Now, as far as individual cases are concerned, we really haven't seen any case coming to conclusion. So at the moment, I will just say there's still a number of cases that are in court. And then also, as far as the media houses are concerned, you find that while there is a lot of press freedom and sufficient enough to allow people to say as much as what they want to say, individuals have also found themselves victims of defamation by the media as far as certain issues of concern.
Now, there's a very thin line between defamation and speaking the truth because sometimes cases that have been reported are actually the truth, and in such cases, you find that the individuals concerned have remained silent.
A classic case is an example of a former high-ranking government official's wife who was caught in compromising situations in an affair, and that case made a lot of media coverage and a lot of online discussion, but the couple concerned have not responded in any way.
Finally, I just want to say Kenyans have also reacted in a certain way that has made the media be careful about what they say. This is the Kenyan public. And especially as far as Kenyan politics are concerned and with the relation with foreign media, I find that Kenyans on Twitter have become very militant sometimes and have defended the country in a way that has made the foreign media a little bit sensitive regarding what they report.
Thank you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. Is that something that you think will continue? Will that be a continuing trend in your country?
>> B. AIDI: Which one? One of Kenyans taking -- I think it's a trend, but then again, it's usually something that takes place maybe for a day or two, and then they go silent again. And it's not just taking on the media, but taking on anyone who seems to attack Kenyans. Kenyans are very peculiar. They seem to come together when one of them -- one of their own is attacked. But then they are also quite readily -- they are ready to attack themselves online as well. So you find occasionally hashtags like someone tell Nigeria, someone tell Botswana, someone tell CNN, someone tell France 24, just individuals beginning such hash tags to set the record straight, which most of the cases have been really true.
>> J. HALLENBORG: I'd like to now pick up on a trend that our friend from Index on Censorship mentioned a little while ago, that it's quite common also to suppress speech through intimidation and persecution after one has exercised your freedom of speech online. Is this something that we're seeing more of or less of? And I'd like to turn to Ramiro Alvarez Ugarte. Where are you? There. Could you comment on this from your perspective, and please also tell us where you are from and what you do.
>> R. ALVAREZ UGARTE: Thank you very much. I am Ramiro Alvarez from Association for Civil Rights, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I think the first question you asked about the difference between online and offline freedom of speech is a very important question, and to an extent, it is related to the one you asked me because I believe that what we begin to see in Latin America -- and obviously I know more of cases in Argentina, but also -- also in other countries, is that as the Internet is increasingly used and the debate that takes place there is seen as increasingly relevant, the attention of public officials, especially, towards the importance of the expressions that take place on the Internet grows a lot. In some countries of Latin America, for instance, we have seen the growing number of suits and criminal charges against people who express themselves in Twitter or in Facebook. That's discouraging trend. We, as Eduardo could tell you in detail, in Latin America, we have fought for many, many years to get criminal libel laws out of our law books. We have fought to eliminate all those kinds of crimes that would, to an extent, affect freedom of expression.
And what we've seen now, for instance, in Argentina, just a couple of weeks ago, there has been a threat of a civil suit of libel suit against a person who expressed himself on Twitter, who is not famous, who is not -- who just takes part in public debate using Twitter. I think that's a problem, obviously, because to a journalist, to establish journalism or establish media outlets, a threat of criminal libel or even civil libel might not be as bad or could not have such a chilling effect. But in the case of people who express themselves on Twitter, that chilling effect might be much, much worse.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. I also know in the room we have Ellery Biddle from Global Voices. Perhaps you would like to comment also on this particular issue on netizens and the risk they face in connection with the use of free expression online. I know this is something you work a lot with.
>> E. BIDDLE: Sure. Thank you. My name is Ellery Biddle, and I am from the United States. I am the editor of a project within the Global Voices Citizen Media Network that is dedicated to covering threats to bloggers and what I've started to call online speakers' rights, both online and off, so whether it's online censorship or actually direct threats to individuals who are expressing themselves online, that that is what we cover. We've got writers in many different parts of the world, and one thing that's kind of interesting about our network and that I think can be valuable in these kinds of discussions is that we have -- our writers are both telling stories about people under threat in their own countries, and then they also often become protagonists in those stories. And it puts us into a sort of a difficult situation where we're both trying to cover news and at the same time actually actively help our colleagues who might be facing a legal threat, just, you know, like a suit like Ramiro just mentioned or who are actually arrested or, you know, put in -- we had an author in Bahrain who was detained for about eight weeks. It was difficult to know if he was formally charged. His attorney was arrested a week after he was and essentially forbidden from defending him. And we sort of found ourselves in a situation where we are kind of desperate for help from our colleagues in kind of the higher-level policy community. What do we do with a person who is in a country with a government where try to go just intervene as an attorney might, in a place where there's real due process, wasn't going to work. We are really lucky he's been released on bail and we are not sure what's going to happen next, but this is a situation that we're encountering all the time and that we're kind of working to prepare ourselves for better as a community by being more connected to people in the sort of policy and legal spaces and also with networks like the committee to protect journalists and other groups that can do emergency assistance.
But it's something that I think just here at IGF is super important is that there's a lot of discussion about human rights, but often not, I think, enough focus on human beings, on individuals and the actual challenges that they are facing that are developing and changing all the time.
So thank you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. We have heard now the stories about limitations on free expression, what it means to certain kind of activists. We heard what it means to certain professional groups. We heard what it means to activists, online and offline. Does anyone want to make some comments here, and then we'll have some comments from the workshop people as well? We'll start there, and then the lady in green, and then Nicolas.
>> Thank you. My name is Shehla Rashid. I work on Internet policy in India. And if anyone who followed the discussions around free speech in India in the past one year would know how every discussion on free speech would basically turn into a debate between new media and traditional media.
And while the traditional journalists complain that Internet users do not have any regulation, they do not have to go through editorial controls, they can post whatever they want without any responsibility, and whenever the government regulates anything, the regulation applies to traditional media but not to new media.
While the new media users are, let's say, citizen journalists or bloggers who allege that media houses offer more protection to journalists, and we don't enjoy that kind of protection. And this is an unending debate, and there can be different perspectives and different situations. But what I really want to say is that the need is to draw more solidarity from one another's causes because right now I see a lot of debate between what is -- whether there's more -- whether there are more free speech guarantees offline or whether there are more free speech guarantees online, but I think this is something we are doing wrong. We really need to draw solidarity from one another's causes.
So for example, in India right now, the judiciary is one of our -- one of those institutions that we trust with protecting our rights, to protect our rights, and right now the appointment of the Supreme Court judges, the government does not have any say in it as of now. The appointment of judges is done by people who are -- by the former Supreme Court judges. So there is a collegiate system.
But now the government wants to have a say in the appointment of judges as well, and that is a free speech concern for online, offline, anyone. That's a free speech concern for pretty much anyone. And there is a need to draw solidarity from the traditional women's movement, the traditional free speech movement, and not pit them against one another. That's briefly what I wanted to say.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. We have the lady in the green shirt, please.
>> Hi. Good afternoon. I'm Erica Smith. I work with the APC in Mexico on a project that's mapping tech-related violence against women, and I'm really interested in the many intersections that I'm hearing.
Mexico, as many of you know, is a place where it's very difficult and dangerous to be a journalist. You may also know that central American/Mexico region is a very difficult place to be a woman human rights defender. These are both professions that will get you killed. And I think that when we look at those people who are exercising a profession of defense, of investigation, of speaking out, we always know these people face special vulnerabilities, but frequently we are not looking into the vulnerability that, from a gender lens.
Examples can be that it is very effective to call women sluts, talk about their sexual behavior, get access to their private information, and journalists who are being paraded in a sexual fashion who are women are then discredited. They can no longer practice their profession with the same professionalism. And the worst thing is this isolates them from many of their male and female colleagues.
And I think in other sessions people have talked about, well, if you are a formal journalist, you'll have the backing of your paper. But I'm not quite sure in which country that is. Most of the journalists that I know don't have the backing of a paper. They are freelancers. They are working for many papers. And the precariousness of the profession makes this triply difficult for women.
So once they're isolated, once they've been sexualized and victimized in this way, where they just can't take the total attack, then a lot of times that's when the death threats roll in in private emails. And that's when they realise how out there they are thanks to the triangularization of private data. And this is the reality for women human rights defenders, and it's been documented. We are not talking about that really famous, amazing national reporter. Yeah, she's under threat, and so is he, but we're talking about the women human rights defenders and journalists who are in local communities, who are facing such terrible threats, and a lot of them can be tracked.
So it's a connection with surveillance. It's a connection with privacy. But it's also a really important need to look at this from a gender point of view. Because what happens, the attacks are dismissed. That's just, you know, violent speech. It's not a for real thing. Don't worry about it. But when you live in a rape culture, when you live in that reality and someone is putting that Google street view picture of your home or where your child goes to school, the fear factor is incredible. So of course there is self-censorship. Of course there's complete interruption into your personal life.
The other facet of this -- and I think it's really important -- is that there's a lot of fear -- fear mongering about the need for cyber grooming laws or cyberbullying legislation. So we are beginning to see knee-jerk legislation in many of our states and countries that is absolutely violating civil rights, children's, youth rights, and people's access to information about sex, for example. And that local-level control is determining Internet Governance.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much.
Nicolas, the floor is yours.
>> N. SEIDLER: Thanks a lot. I just wanted to get back very briefly to the issue of blocking and filtering and stress that even if an order of filtering and blocking content comes from a legitimate source, it is still a very effective way to remove content for several reasons. First of all, it doesn't actually remove the content. If you know the IP address to a certain webpage, you can still access it. And secondly, it's a very indiscriminate measure. So basically, if you remove a domain name, you might both prevent people from accessing both illegal and legal content. So actually, usually a better approach if, again, there is a legitimate order about content, is to remove that content at the source rather than to block a domain name.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you. It's a wide array of issues related to freedom of expression.
I would also like to have some feedback from the workshops. I know that Guy would like to say a few words about the workshops he's been involved in.
Guy Berger, the floor is yours.
>> G. BERGER: Thank you. I think it would be interesting for people here to hear briefly about two workshops. The one yesterday was on the future of independent journalism, so that was really concerned with the users of freedom of expression who use that right to do journalism, whether it's formal journalism or whether it's more an informal contribution to public discourse.
Generally speaking, this workshop pointed out the value to society of journalism becoming open journalism involving a lot more contributors than used to be the case. But at the same time, they pointed out that this use of freedom of expression does need somebody to pay for it. And in this sense, the kind of full-time journalists are complimented rather than by journalists just doing it on a voluntary basis.
So the discussion looked at the different business models that are coming out to try and support proper in-depth, well-researched, et cetera, journalism, looking at various kinds of things, including subsidies from the tech world, such as Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.
This is based on research by the World Economic Forum which presented in this workshop, that Global Voices and their volunteer network and the possibility for them to develop paid participants of media was interesting.
Then the discussion went on to say it's great to have this use of freedom of expression, it's great if you can get a business model, but it also needs safety. So some issues were attached on there, and I will move in quickly to the second workshop.
Safety, the UN has this UN Plan of Action on Safety of Journalists which is now looking at indicators for digital safety, including are journalists aware of digital dangers? Are they taking measures to deal with them? Are they trained? Do they have access to software and equipment?
ISPs, what is their position of protecting freedom of expression online in terms of security of data. They have transparency, reporting on attempts to compromise freedom of expression.
And further on this question of safety, there's a research project that UNESCO is actually doing, and it's identified -- identifies about seven different areas of digital dangers that journalists are facing through their use of freedom of expression.
The point was very much made that the same protections that tend to apply to formal journalists should apply to bloggers, the right to protect sources, guarantees of safety, and there are increasing uses of lawsuits against bloggers who don't get enough support. Legal security is very important, particularly in terms of defamation cases, and the point was made that citizen documentation of key events, such as the Brazilian protests, is really becoming important in a context where mainstream media is not able to cover those issues substantially. That's it.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Sanja, did you want to take the floor to talk about the workshop you had, Sanja, then Jack, I think, who is beside. Yeah.
>> S. KELLY: I am reporting on the workshop number 220, Human Rights Online. And one of the main themes of the workshop is that human rights online have been undergoing threat in recent years, and those threats come from various arenas.
One of the key things that we highlighted is that blocking, filtering of unwanted content has been on a great increase in recent years. And this blocking and filtering is not only of individual pages, but what we have seen in recent years is that whole applications or entire social media platforms are being blocked, and these are some of the key platforms that people use to express themselves.
Among other things identified are physical attacks, and it seems like more and more users who post things online that are critical of the government or that expose corruption or other issues are not only being harassed, but in more extreme cases, they are being killed.
We touched upon the issue of surveillance, which is a growing problem throughout the world, and I'm not going to speak more about that, but also things like intermediary liability and data localization were found to be issues from the human rights perspective as well as -- as well because in the grand scheme of things, they do limit free flow of information.
Finally, one thing that was apparent is many governments do not really practice what they preach. So in these multistakeholder environments, it seems like everyone is in favor of the principle of multistakeholderism, but what we found and what was said during the workshop is that most governments, when they go back home and when they create these new laws and practices, they really don't consult various stakeholders, and this is something that really needs to be on the agenda.
And finally, one of the greatest problems was the proliferation of new laws and policies, many of which are extremely restrictive when it comes to freedom of expression online, and the conclusion was that this was really the critical moment in history when most countries are looking to pass new legislation on how to regulate content, so it is extremely important to set examples of best practices and for these governments to really understand what the basis guidelines of international laws are when it comes to freedom of expression and human rights online.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you. Excellent report. Thank you, Sanja.
Could you please hand the mic over to Jack? I think you wanted also? All right. The mic is gone. The mic is back. Great.
>> Actually, I don't know if I am reporting back. Maybe I will report back just on the section that relates to freedom of expression from the workshop report, which is workshop 171 on gender and Internet Governance roundtable.
The thing that we discussed a lot is about the Internet as a kind of like a public space, so even as more women and discriminated and disadvantaged people enter into this space as -- to exercise their right to public participation, there are different kinds of strategies to limit this, including violence, including -- sorry -- including -- sorry, sorry. Let me just backtrack because I am trying to do too many things.
So just focusing on violence as a way to sort of limit public participation into this space, which is the Internet. So how do these forms of violence look like?
I think earlier there was discussion around harassment, around extortion, around privacy violation and responses to that, which is self-censorship -- self-censorship, which can also be a form of harm, which, in turn, impacts a woman's right to freedom of expression as well.
That's from the workshop.
This is my own comment, which is around legitimate limitations to freedom of expression, which is a question raised earlier, what is a legitimate limitation? And one of the legitimate limitations is public morality. And I think this is what actually provides states with the legitimacy to enter into this sphere of regulating online content because it is the state's duty to regulate public morality.
Public morality is one of these things which is very vague and is very unclear. And once you put this on the table, you realise that there's a lot of things that can enter into the conversation. And the people who are most impacted by legislation and by measures which regulate expression and information online on the basis of public morality are those who are already disadvantaged in society anyway. So who am I talking about? I am talking about women. I am talking about young people. I am talking about those who are sexually diverse.
So I will give you some examples. For example, on women's bodies, Google ads don't allow for advertisements on abortion, whether or not it is legal in the country. For example, in Malaysia, abortion is not illegal, but advertisements on abortion is not allowed on Google ads.
In Indonesia itself, LGBT sites are being blocked under the anti-pornography act. So one of the sites that has recently been blocked is the site called ourvoice, which is a site for LGBT communities to exercise their voice, you know, to participate in public associations and assemblies.
And I think I will stop there.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thanks very much. You will get another chance if you want to later on.
Let's turn to Joy, a few words on the workshop that you did.
>> J. LIDDICOAT: Thank you. I just wanted to report back from two workshops, actually. One was workshop 134, Connecting Our Rights, Strategies, and Progress. And also workshop 99, Charting the Charter on Internet Rights and Principles Online. And to pick up a couple of points that haven't been raised yet.
One is that not only are these issues impacting in relation to litigation and government as has been mentioned, but that also they're raising issues for national human rights institutions. For example, we've had the Chair of the Indonesian Human Rights Commission here at this IGF, and I believe that's the highest-ranking national institution's representative that's ever been at an IGF, trying to understand how these issues impact on the mandate they have and how they respond to freedom of expression issues in their context.
And also how they can support taking up these issues at the global level, for example, in the United Nations Human Rights Council. So I think that's an important aspect to take into account.
The other thing was to note that while there was discussion about principles and these new necessary and proportionate principles that referred to earlier, these are very much seen as guidance for how to apply existing standards rather than the creation of new standards. And particularly, as governments are considering new legislation, more than they have before, that these are the things that the Internet community can offer -- and particularly the Internet Governance community -- in terms of how to apply existing standards to these issues online. I just wanted to add those other two points.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. We have now Brett Solomon, who is going to report back on one, and then we will take a few comments.
Brett, please.
>> B. SOLOMON: Yeah. So there was a session the day before yesterday on telecoms and network shutdown. And I think in the context of surveillance, people aren't spending much time thinking about that issue.
We actually looked at a number of different case studies, the most recent of which was in September 25 and 26 in Sudan four telecos shut down the Internet during a series of protests in Khartoum, and we looked at the human rights implications of that particular shutdown. We had a representative from the industry dialogue, which is ten of the world's largest telecos, who have put out a series of guiding principles, and we actually had a really interesting discussion and came to the conclusion that there is never a justification for an Internet shutdown, including from the industry dialogue, civil society, and government. So it was great. It was actually very, very good, and it was also good to see that kind of norm development happening here at the IGF.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Good. Congratulations.
Now, Gry, the floor is yours.
>> Thank you. I am Gry Lapenta from the Danish Media Council for Children and Young People and the European Safe Network.
Our workshop was number 308 on Privacy and Innovation, and I am more than giving a report. I am going to give a comment on the results from this workshop or in general the whole point of having a workshop like this. Since that privacy and innovation and many business and governmental discussions, policymaking discussions, tend to collide. But for the sake of innovation, I will suggest that we urgently need real investments, and I am going to come back to what I mean with that in privacy and in these free spaces where creativity and free innovation actually can thrive.
Of course, the reason why we held this workshop is that you can actually see it as a societal investment that is not just for the benefit of the individual citizen, but also for society as a whole. So rather than seeing privacy as an obstacle to innovation, it should be seen as a basis for innovation and an area of opportunity.
So this is what we did with the workshop. We had five young people there, and the reason we had them present what they are actually asking for when they ask for control. Users are in general increasingly asking for transparency and control of the contexts of the interactions online. They ask to trust -- and we heard this a lot today -- to trust services they use; to have a choice in their interactions. As we also heard today in the workshop, there is a rise of privacy, consumer advocacy movements, one of our panelists calls it green movements, as one panelist said.
So this needs to be, of course, this need for control of context needs to be addressed and included in business development.
In today's panel, trust has been shaken tremendously, and I can only repeat what has been said before is that it needs to be rebuilt, and these strategies to rebuild trust includes new innovative technological privacy solutions, also different business model and innovation in privacy regulations and policymaking.
So this means a new way of addressing privacy as an area worth investing in, and I mean this very concretely, not just addressing it as a green movement idiosyncrasy. So there's presently a huge imbalance in the investments in innovation and surveillance, technologies in innovations and big data, compared to what society as a whole actually invests in innovating and privacy, and this means new technologies policies, policies that can actually respond to a digital environment. And this weight balance actually needs to be tipped on all accounts because presently, as it looks, the control that users are asking for -- and I am asking -- I am actually basing this on my nine years of working with young people -- they are increasingly asking for control and to trust the services they use, but this is not addressed adequately in the trust is diminishing, as we have seen.
We need to invest in privacy and safeguarding in general. This was the whole point of workshop.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you. Do we have any other workshops on the freedom of expression that would like to say a few words at this point? Otherwise, I am going to draw the line here, actually, and go on.
Moez, you have the floor.
>> M. CHAKCHOUK: Thank you. I would like to highlight the Open Forum on online coalition. We had this morning Freedom Online Coalition for Open Forum.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Mic closer.
>> M. CHAKCHOUK: I want to highlight the Freedom Online Coalition Open Forum we had this morning, and it's very important to highlight because it's also an Open Forum for all of us, including the government and multistakeholder and the civil society and all the private sector to be present and to highlight how it is important to keep the debate with those issues.
That's it. Of course, there will be a meeting in Estonia, so the next will be 27 and 28 of April.
>> J. HALLENBORG: We have one more here. Okay. The mic is on its way.
>> Thank you. I am Zahra Dean from the Developing Centre for Cybercrime in Pakistan, and I would like to mention regarding proliferation of legislation which many participants have talked about. That's helpful and that's a good thing, as long as legislation is modeled in line with best practices, especially with regard to surveillance in the criminal justice field. As long as best practices are open platforms and provide minimum standards and a baseline. This will allow consistency and will allow work and cooperation with other countries across the globe.
Considering that the Internet is borderless, this is very important. So proliferation of legislation is not a negative thing, as long as harmonization also occurs.
Additionally, legislation should also ensure that mechanisms for those who sell technology which promote human rights violations should be banned and should be locked down.
Thank you.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Right. Do we have any more workshops on free expression issues that would like to say something now? No? In that case, we are running a little bit behind schedule now, so I am eager to continue, actually.
Marianne, do you want it now? Sorry.
>> (Speaker off mic)
>> J. HALLENBORG: Great. We haven't forgotten you.
Okay. All right. So we'll continue, I think, and try to find space for everyone to speak.
Anja, please continue.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Johan.
The third block of the issue-based sections today will basically look at openness on the Internet and its relation to freedom of expression. And openness, of course, has many different aspects to it. The first one -- and I'll ask Claudio Ruiz a question about that first -- a whole bunch of issues that have to do with free flow of information, access to knowledge, and intellectual property rights.
A few years ago suddenly we had a lot of attention for these issues when, in the U.S., the whole campaign against SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA came up to speed and also that campaign also spread to Europe. But as in developing countries, both before and after that, these issues have always been a concern
So Claudio, what do you think? Where are we today on this topic?
Can somebody get a mic to Claudio?
>> C. RUIZ: Thank you. I was supposed to be censored. Okay.
Well, thank you very much, Anja. I would like to highlight a couple of ideas related with the access to knowledge movement, and especially about the relationship between copyright and freedom of expression. At the end, especially when we're talking about the digital realm.
When Eduardo said at the beginning the threats that have been faced into the region, Latin America, I would add a complement, the case of copyright.
We have a couple of very bad examples in the region that I really wanted to highlight, and in the case of Argentina and Brazil, for instance, are quite interesting. In the way that these two very important countries into the region doesn't have any special provision over libraries, for instance, related with copyright. So they are in the hall of shame, if we want to put it in those words, of the copyright situation when we are talking about balance and when we're talking about access to knowledge in general.
And there's another issue that I think is important and which is related to what we are talking about now. It's the situation of Latin America when we are talking about international copyright legislation. In this matter, we like to say two things. The first one, it's that Latin America has been facing in the last years a very strong push, especially from the United States, over to have a more strict or strong corporate provisions. And this is especially related to the sign of the FDA, so free trade agreements, which are somehow driven the internal agenda over copyright issues.
And suddenly, all the stakeholders which are related with the discussion, even in the national situation or in the regional situation, are not civil organisations, are just private, and there's groups coming from the United States which are not necessarily related with or concerned with about the freedom of expression issues neither access to knowledge.
So I think the second thing that I am going to highlight is related with this and how Latin America has become some part for some commenters the piracy paradise in some part. So this is pushing a lot of important agenda over a lot more restrictive copyright legislation. The discussion over the TTP, right now, for instance, has been a very important thing over the region because Chile, Mexico, and Peru, the three very important countries in the region, which are nowadays part of the negotiations of a treaty which, first of all, nobody knows exactly what is the specific issues that they have been discussing because it's secret; and secondly because the only information that we have is about the leaks of the United States proposal over this in February of 2011. And there's a very, very sudden news when we are seeing that information closely.
So I think it's important to highlight the state's position over these, which is quite different when we're talking about the Internet freedom agenda that the States has, which is a whole different story when you are comparing with the USD.
There is a very critical and important point there that I think the States need to highlight. And when we are talking about developing countries, Chile, and within the region, I think it's a very important thing, very important, a huge elephant that is in the room, and we can't leave it like that.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Claudio. I do think this is a concern for many civil society activists, at least.
I wanted to call next on Nick Ashton-Hart, who I know wears several hats but I think today is representing the International Digital Economy Alliance, and Nick, part of the reason I want to call on you next is because I'm wondering if you can solve some controversy here, and better you will disagree with Claudio or agree.
>> N. ASHTON-HART: Well, I don't know how controversial it will be. I think that we see increasingly content --
>> A. KOVACS: You will have to speak a little louder.
>> N. ASHTON-HART: I think we increasingly see sort of a scapegoating of content and that there's an increasing use of tools to remove material that relates to other public policy priorities, whether it's IP or speech or the like, and that the techniques that are used are increasingly disruptive in aggregate to the Internet in general, which you know, I think we have a shared interest that the Internet provides the best service for the largest number of people at the least cost, and the more -- and the more there is a perception that there is risk in providing access to material or that certain countries may or may not allow material to transit their country or that the Domain Name System or parts of the naming system would be used to prevent access to material, it makes the Internet -- it's disruptive at a fairly fundamental level.
And I think there's -- my experience in Geneva is certainly that there's really not much understanding amongst policymakers, either the ones who visit Geneva or the ones who are based there, on how the Internet works and what the choices that are made relating to content that sound easy and convenient to accomplish a near-term end actually mean in the longer-term.
The death of a thousand cuts is a phrase that gets used in this sort of thing. And so I think we all have a job to do to explain better to policymakers where the -- why the Internet works well, the miracle that it is, the ability to and on almost endlessly to its edges without asking anyone's permission, but that that really -- that miracle really depends on restraint and on ensuring that acts which are taken for public policy reasons inside a country are not taken in such a way that undermines the overall network and its ability to provide service. Especially given that we are only 40% of the way to connecting everyone.
So I think that's -- that's my sort of overall concern is there seem to be more and more reasons to interfere with what people can see, find, say, and a lack of awareness of the impacts of continuing down that path.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Nick. Not controversial, but very useful contribution nevertheless. Thank you for that.
I next want to turn to Stuart Hamilton from the International Federation of Library Associations. Stuart, what is the benefit of open access online to scientific knowledge in particular? Is that something we require? And if so, why?
>> S. HAMILTON: Well, I think in my intervention I'm going to concentrate just a little bit on sort of the IP problems that we're facing, but when it comes to open access to scientific knowledge, we are very much in favor of that, and I think that it will become to be recognized as a right of people to be able to access information that they've paid for through their tax dollars, for example.
But when we talk about libraries, I think it's important to remember that every day hundreds of millions of people use public, academic, research, and school libraries to access information. So we are talking about a very large number of people here who can be affected by the frameworks which have been discussed by the two previous speakers.
For us, and consequently for our users, we are suffering the effects of the unbalanced copyright frameworks that have just been described. What's happened is that they haven't really been updated for the digital age in a way that enables libraries to do their jobs, the sort of fundamental things we do, preservation of cultural heritage and making that available, access to journal articles and being able to transfer them between libraries to remote and rural areas, for example. Even lending of materials. The digital age, the copyright frameworks we have now just isn't letting us do that. Instead, we are being pushed more and more into a licensing system, which imposes restrictions on what we can do with our material. It imposes restrictions on what our users can do with the material in terms of maybe not being able to print it, maybe not being able to quote from it, maybe having to come a very long distance into the library to get it, which kind of defeats the purpose of the Internet somewhat.
And that's doubled sometimes with digital rights management, which really locks up what we can do so the consequences of that are not only that librarians can't do their jobs, but in more and more cases we can't choose the information that our community wants based on their needs, and in fact, the choices about what we get are being sort of coming from publishers, large rights holders. Lots of things are bundled up. We get, let's say, lesser quality journals with better ones.
The implication is the information that is available is what we can afford to pay for, and of course, that's going to be great if you are in the U.S. in a nice university library, you've got a lot of money, but perhaps less effective if you are in Malawi in a university there.
To sum up, if we don't get a copyright framework that enables us to do our jobs, it's the users that are going to suffer.
I am pleased to say we are working on that on WIPO, International Copyright Treaty for Exceptions and Limitations, but in the moment these issues are not perhaps in the foreground, but I think we will all notice in 20 or 30 years' time when your cultural heritage material from your own countries which you think should be available online just isn't there.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you very much, Stuart. I think we had three very strong perspectives here that kind of highlight the very high cost, actually, that current copyright regimes have for access to information.
Pranesh, I want to turn to you now, Pranesh Prakash from The Centre for Internet and Society. Why, if we turn it around and look at it from the other side, then, why is openness important? How can openness actually support our rights? What will it do for that?
>> P. PRAKASH: Thank you, Anja.
The Internet is seen as a global public good. It's seen as a public space. But does it -- is it currently structured to support that?
Right now, we are living in a world of private laws of contracts, private property and technological enforcement rather than public law.
Digital rights management and technological protection measures, which Stuart touched upon, which are now being baked into HTML 5, ensure that private enforcement through technologies which do not respect the exceptions contained in copyright laws around the world become the norm.
In India we have exceptions for copyright law, but the DRMs being baked into the Web right now won't allow for them to be used. We are right now in danger of turning the open World Wide Web into walled copyright gardens. We need law to ensure that technologies and contracts cannot override protections provided by the law. And this is something that the technology community, which is currently making the standards, such as HTML 5, have to realise.
Another problem, for instance, domain name seizures for copyright reasons which happened in the U.S. show that there's a fundamental misuse of the DNS system that currently there is no place to address. The Internet Governance Forum should be that place. Yet this year, there were no sessions that actually addressed this issue. Access to knowledge issues were kept to a minimum at the IGF, and I'd like to know why. Many laws around the world make it easy to have copyright infringement to remove legitimate content.
The largest number of Web sites blocked in India is not for national security reasons or communal harmony; it is for copyright reasons. And the problem is that for some reason, copyright is not seen as a free speech issue. So the standards of protection in terms of making sure that the other party is represented in court cases, et cetera, are greatly diminished when it comes to copyright-related issues, and complaints are seen as enough to make accusations real.
So what happened in India was one general order was gotten from a court. Under a general order, lots of legitimate websites, which did not host copyrighted content, were locked. It took a long while for the court to actually realise that the order was being misused. But these kinds of misuse of the legal process is still continuing.
When you are talking about free flow of information, I'd like to bring to light the case of a friend and a person I respected a great lot, Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this year because of a witch hunt that was launched against him and a prosecution launched against him for downloading too much from JSTOR. Now, he had legal access to this website, but he just downloaded too many articles from this website, and that was the cause for the witchhunt that was launched against him.
Denial of service attacks launched by some activists, people who are using the online medium for protests, often get sentences of multiple years; whereas, people picketing on private property or trespass don't. People who are -- who were involved in the London riots, for instance, and were protesting, they don't get multiple years as sentences. They are still able to engage in political protests and not spend years behind jail; whereas, political protesters of today aren't able to do so, and there's a great problem in this.
So -- so nonproprietary, free open source libre software is important to prevent softwares that allow for surveillance and prevent the free access of speech.
Public domain material have no part in the discussion of Internet Governance anymore; whereas at one point there was a proposal to have separate GLT for public domain materials, which didn't get any traction.
And the one good thing at the end of this dark, dark tunnel is that now crossborder exchange of accessible books, books that are copyrighted but are accessible for persons who are blind, is becoming possible thanks to a new UN Treaty that was concluded in Marrakech earlier this year, and that's pretty much the only good trend that I know of. Thanks.
(Applause)
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Pranesh, for that passionate plea.
If I can just add a small point myself, I think we also increasingly in developing countries see the treatment of copyright offline, for example, in Delhi University, there is a tiny little photocopy shop that has been sued by three big academic publishers for millions by preparing course extracts for students that have extracts of books, not full books.
This is something we never would have seen years ago. It's an outcome of how the enforcement of copyright becomes stricter and stricter and is pushed through more harshly all the time. So I think the effects are much broader than just about the Internet.
There are other important issues of course related to openness. Perhaps before we continue, though, is there another comment from the floor? I think we should be able to take one in between if there are any.
Yes, the gentleman over there.
>> C. WILSON: Hi. My name is Chris Wilson. I am from the United States. I work for actually one of the world's major media companies, Time Warner, so I thought I was just simply here to observe today's discussion, but obviously a lot's been side about openness and copyright.
I won't belabour some of these points that have been made. I will simply suggest that I believe the argument that copyright protections and openness and freedom of speech, et cetera, are at opposite purposes, I think, is a false dichotomy, quite frankly.
To be sure, there are abuses that occur, and I won't speak to certain countries. I am not privy to what goes on in India on a daily basis, but I can certainly suggest that I believe I know Time Warner and a variety of other major companies that produce some of the world's highest-quality content out there, including, you know, something like CNN that is out there, you know, reporting on what takes place across the world, believes in the freedom of speech, believes in free expression, and is not at cross-purposes with that.
So I just wanted to throw that out there, that there are other points of view on that work, and there's certainly work to be done with those that, in my line of work, and those in your line of work, and forums like today are important discussions, and I think hopefully they will continue in further IGFs and other venues. But simply wanted to say that we are not at cross-purposes, that we are -- that for all intents and purposes, we actually believe strongly in the same beliefs and freedoms. Sometimes it might come down to implementations, but at its heart, we are on the same playing field.
So thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you for that note. I think Claudio has a quick response.
>> C. RUIZ: Of course. The fact that there is a lot of child pornography regulation that we are against, that doesn't mean that we are in favor of child pornography. And at the same time -- the same thing happened with the copyright. The realm of the fundamental rights are obvious all the time intention. There's always a tension between freedom of expression and privacy. There's always a tension between a lot of human rights. The human rights are not something in communities we can see actually on the table. There's always intentionally movement.
So therefore, the fact that we are facing here, a lot of issues and serious issues, as said recently, around freedom of expression and copyright, that doesn't mean that the companies like Time Warner or others or Disney or whatever doesn't support freedom of expression. The policies that they have been driving and the policies that they have been driving internally in the States and externally via the USDR are damaging freedom of expression, damaging public domain, damaging Internet at the end.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Claudio.
We will move on for now. I am sure we won't settle the debate here today, but I think these were very valuable contributions.
I just wanted to point out also behind us -- or behind me on the screen and in front of you are a number of questions that were collected through the public consultation process that was done in the IGF. I am not sure we will be able to address all of them, but I wanted to turn to Luca Belli from the Dynamic Coalition on Net Neutrality, and perhaps, Luca, about question number 4, which says what enablers need to be recognized by all policymakers to support the free flow of information on the Internet globally, regionally, and locally? Is network neutrality search an enabler, and why, how does that work?
>> L. BELLI: Yes, thank you. I will also say that I am currently serving as net neutrality expert for Council of Europe, so I have several hats. I work at several -- in Paris. I would like to report briefly on the workshop on network neutrality we had yesterday that deals explicitly with this topic. Also, I would like to report on this because we managed to reach some draft consensus on network neutrality, which is quite difficult.
First of all, we agreed on the fact that openness and neutrality are essential features of the Internet, and they should -- they have to be Fostered and ensured to foster the free flow of information. We have agreed that both openness and neutrality are the features that make the Internet a key driver for innovation, and also a great human rights enabler, and that enables also the free flow of information. It fosters creativity. And we have agreed also that at present, there are some traffic management techniques that can jeopardize this open and neutral architecture and then can have negative effects on human rights, and so the second -- this leads us to the second point of rough consensus that is that net neutrality should not be considered just from a competition perspective, but also from a human rights perspective, because it is a human right issue. It is a consumer rights issue. It is an issue that has obvious consequence on the right to freely impart and receive information within the Internet and through the Internet. It is an issue that has obvious consequences on the capacity of end user to be an active participant of the Internet and share their information on the Internet. And this leads us to the third point of agreement; that is that we need to preserve network neutrality and to frame traffic management techniques according to human rights standards. So some regulatory tool is needed, not a random regulatory tool, but a good regulation, an evidence-based regulation, a regulation that fosters creativity, innovation, and human rights, and then fosters the free flow of information online. It needs to be efficient. And in order to elaborate, this regulation, an open, transparent process should be adopted. And this sort of process has been adopted also to elaborate a model framework that -- whose elaboration has been initiated within -- thanks to the Council of Europe at the multistakeholder dialogue on network and human rights and has been developed by the Dynamic Coalition on network neutrality that has transposed the IETF standards-making process to policymaking to elaborate a standard and how to protect net neutrality in an open manner. Thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you. Can you maybe very briefly explain the basics of the model? Can you very briefly explain the basics of the model you are just referring to?
>> L. BELLI: The model will be presented tomorrow morning at the meeting of the Dynamic Coalition and then will be communicated to the committee of ministers at the Council of Europe in December. So if you want, I can explain some basic points, but I will ruin the surprise.
(Laughter)
>> A. KOVACS: Right. We don't want to do that. Perhaps let me turn, then, to Paul Mitchell from Microsoft U.S. If somebody can get the microphone to Paul. Thank you.
Paul, what Luca mentioned was we need to -- we need traffic management tools that protect human rights, network neutrality is crucial in that sense. Can we solve that with national frameworks, or do we need global frameworks for these kind of issues?
>> P. MITCHELL First let me say I have very little to disagree with what he just said as far as overall network neutrality issues, but I would divide them into two categories. The first is the social or political net neutrality issues, and the second is commercial. And I think the fix is different between the two.
In both cases, you ultimately have a technical fix, and I will get to answering your specific question in a minute, but in both cases you'll have a specific technical fix around defining what types of traffic management tools can be used. But in the commercial case, you are really talking about how an entity chooses to advantage itself versus the consumers or its competition, and that is a competition law issue.
In the former, you are talking about social engineering, restriction of freedom of expression, restriction of access to content, providing economic harm to citizens, depriving them of access to education, to information, and to global discourse.
And unfortunately, the fixes to that are not technical. Most of those fixes are in the political realm. And it's, therefore, incumbent upon the companies and the entities that operate the global infrastructure to effectively act in the interest of the broader human rights objectives and interests of society.
And so when you have a net -- net neutrality issues are at large, the principles really need to be widely touted, widely embraced, and widely communicated by all of the actors involved. And increasingly that's happening at least in the developed western world. Not so much in other parts of the world, but hopefully it can be -- have a spillover effect.
Your question was can this be handled from a local perspective or can it be handled globally or locally? And I think the answer really is both. It takes a global pressure and a global idea in order to address the political and the social side. But on the actual implementation on the ground, it is going to take local regulation and local implementation of networks of traffic management systems and of monitoring systems to enable compliance.
And I'll stop there.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Paul.
I can see the argumentation of splitting the social political aspects on the one hand and the competition aspects on the other hand from the perspective of businesses, but of course, in this session, I can't help but wonder whether that would have a negative impact on freedom of expression nevertheless.
Luca, you had a comment.
>> L. BELLI: Maybe I wasn't speaking clearly. It does also competition law aspects. What I was saying, it is fundamentally wrong to think that it has only competition law. So we agree on this. We have reached draft consensus.
>> A. KOVACS: But is there no free speech concern in actually splitting the competition law aspects from the social and --
>> L. BELLI: The issue is openness and neutral, non-discriminatory traffic management at the same time facilitates freedom of expression and freedom of innovation. When you facilitate freedom of innovation, you let end users participate in the Internet and share their creativity. The best innovation, the most disruptive innovations on the Internet were produced by end user that one day shared their innovation for free on the Internet, and then it went viral.
>> A. KOVACS: Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that. I guess sometimes what users are concerned about is that the competition law aspects are used to actually throttle in various ways content online, in ways that business might argue don't affect freedom of expression, but users often argue that they do. That was the point I was trying to get at.
>> L. BELLI: In this case, if you are interested, we have developed not all but several human rights-related aspects of net neutrality in the report of the Dynamic Coalition, which will also be discussed tomorrow morning in the meeting.
>> A. KOVACS: 9:00?
>> L. BELLI: At 9:00.
>> A. KOVACS: Is this your moment? 9:00, the Network Neutrality Dynamic Coalition meeting promises to be very interesting. Highly recommended.
I would like to move next to Malcolm Hutty. Malcolm, you will have to help me. LINX. He represents LINX. But I must admit I am not fully sure what the abbreviation stands for, from London.
I wanted to come to you about intermediary liability. There is a question about that on the list as well, which is very general in terms of what's the effect on freedom of expression, but I think we actually had quite a lot of attention for this over the past few years for a while, and slowly it seems to have moved more to the background of the agenda. Does that mean we've actually made progress on intermediary liability? We don't have to be as concerned anymore?
>> M. HUTTY: Let me see if I can bring back up the agenda for you, then because I think it's actually key.
I work with LINX -- my name is Malcolm Hutty --
>> A. KOVACS: Can you keep the microphone a bit closer?
>> M. HUTTY: Sorry. My name is Malcolm Hutty, LINX, the London Internet Exchanges, also the European providers organisation and the Chairman of a committee. The companies I represent, they are companies. And sometimes they have -- they are challenged by this community for not doing more to stand up for human rights. Some of those do quite a lot, actually, I think. Some have particular legal advocacy skills and resources to do so.
Smaller companies are actually vulnerable. But I would like to suggest to this community that companies in some ways are even more vulnerable than a journalist or a campaigner or an individual can be when it comes to freedom of expression violations. Sometimes those who might otherwise seek to infringe human rights and freedom of expression would forebear because they don't want to make the campaigner some sort of celebrity. Companies don't generally have the kind of sympathy, the public sympathy that is needed to make that happen, and so the forbearance doesn't exist in that case.
When the penalty might be a financial penalty, we know that the company has money, which individuals often don't, so there's a good reason to go after the company then as well.
When it comes to questions of defamation, the person who is saying something knows why he is saying it. He might know that it's true. The company that is an intermediary doesn't necessarily know that the defamation complaint isn't justified. When it comes to offensive and unpopular speech that is otherwise a legitimate part of discourse, the company may not agree with it. The company may not like it. So they become quite vulnerable to a complaint that says do you really want to be complicit with this?
So I would content that intermediary liability protection is vital if users are going to actually enjoy the human rights and freedom of expression that they've been granted in theory.
Now, European law provides some quite good protections, but it's not complete, and in the United Kingdom, we see a clear correlation between those areas where it is weakest and where the behavior is most challengeable, most potentially problematic.
So for example, the European law protects intermediaries against financial liability in most cases, but does not protect them against being instructed to block access to material. And so we see in the United Kingdom blocking orders being given, and often being given by judges when things being blocked have not had judicial examination as to whether or not it is actually a violation, but it's claimed, oh, it's a copyright violation. We haven't looked at whether it is, but we know that we block copyright-infringing sites, so we will do that.
It's not clear that Internet domain registries have the protection that hosting providers have. So we have seen our national domain registry has been required by police to suspend domain names. It's been threatened that if it doesn't do so, that it will have liability for the definitely legal material that is being published if the police allegation is correct, but in circumstances where it has never been justified in court.
So given that we see this correlation, I would like to suggest to you, as a closing remark, that as we come to the looking at the principles that we establish -- that we may well be establishing on the global level in the next months and years, is it really best to be focusing on general but qualified principles of freedom of expression, which already exist in a general context, and if we establish them again for the Internet, we risk further qualifying them, or might it be more effective to ensure that users have the practical opportunity to enjoy the rights that they already have by establishing the strongest protections that are achievable for the intermediaries on which they rely to exercise those rights?
Thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you, Malcolm.
We are, unfortunately, fast running out of time. I had two more people on my list who we would very briefly like to give the floor, and then if there's some very urgent closing remarks anybody else wants to make, we will try and fit those in, but that might not be possible. So I am giving you advance warning.
We might have to cut you a little bit short. If you can just -- two minutes. One minute.
>> One minute. Okay. Let me start by saying I am going to describe a situation by -- a local situation that has international connections, so it might take a little more than a minute.
There was a question about intermediary liability legislation in Pakistan. You know about the situation where Facebook and YouTube had been taken down. This is something that a lot of people have talked about. But this led to criminal cases in court. The high courts and others started criminal cases where what is interesting to note here, the person who put up the content wasn't the target of this. It was the businesses and the platform and service providers who became the employees, who became the target of these sort of actions.
First of all, good on them not to cow down, number one. That was business.
Number two, what did that result in? Well, somebody went to court and said well, let's try and see if we can sort this out. The court instead turned around and said let's try to look into intermediary liability law. And it started affecting a cybercrime legislation that we have in Pakistan where we have a pretty decent intermediary liability protection clause already built in, and suddenly they come in with this ITU, and this is where I want to talk about irresponsibility probably at the international level, the collision that we had. And ITU model law called HIPCAR. I don't know how many people have actually heard of this model Convention. I heard the Budapest Convention, other things, but I don't know about these other model laws. There are three of them, one for the Caribbean, one for the Pacific, and one for the Sub-Saharan region.
It's interesting to see what it does, and I am going to link it with liability.
It says that religious crimes are cybercrimes. Blasphemy is a cybercrime. This is an ITU model law. After having said that, it goes on to start defining interesting items, well, search engine providers is a definition. I don't know. It's interesting. Then there is a definition of hosting provider, access providing, caching providers. Goodness, my laptop is it. And hyperlink providers. And what it says about those different providers is that basically liability -- starts with liability and says, well, you are not liable, et cetera, only if it's criminal -- so it only gives you criminal protection -- but all that is gone if there's a court order. Sorry. No criteria. No list of what actually has to be done to prove that basically you were liable.
Just that there's a court order, suddenly you are liable.
That's the kind of international best practice that is being sent down to national countries. We had to fight it on the ground. The draft came to us and we were like no, our clause is much better. What's going on? No. This is an international provision, from the ITU. These three model laws are fantastic. We must implement them. And it actually started becoming an aggressive practice. I am happy to tell you we did not follow the ITU laws on that.
I just want to give you an example. One, look at one business that stood by the principles we are all talking about, freedom of expression. International engagement -- yes, I'll stop. One other last point. Get Guess funded that ITU model or process? The European Union. The question is is it a violation of ECHR, maybe, to promote blasphemy and those sort of religious acts as cybercrimes? Question. Thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you. That's a very poignant question.
I am very sorry to all the people, we are all very sorry to all the people who didn't get to speak, but Venkit, I want to give you very briefly the final remarks before we turn to our Rapporteur before we summarize the session.
>> Thank you. Earlier in the week, the Nigerian telecom regulator had a full-page advert in one of the leading Nigerian papers -- actually, more than one -- and it basically said that anybody who basically operates a cybercafe in Nigeria at the moment has to -- I mean, normally you are supposed to know your customers; right -- but has to know their criminal, so know your criminal, KYC. The idea is everybody who walks into a public cafe has to be registered before they can use computers. It's not just write your name and all that. Your name, your address, your identity card, and all. And all this is mostly around the issue of intermediary liability.
And so now, the irony, by the way, is the fact that most of the cybercafes are dead anyway because of the cost of access and the cost of power supply. But this is an example of how the intermediary is liable, and it has not just in terms of the freedom of expression, but also economic, you know, consequences as far as, you know, the issues are concerned.
I thought I should just raise that within one minute.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you. That's really appreciated, the contribution, of course, as well first of all.
We are going to have two final very brief one-minute interventions, one from Marianne Franklin from the Dynamic Coalition on Internet rights and principles, among many other hats, and one from Guy Berger.
Marianne, why don't you go first.
>> M. FRANKLIN: Yes. Thank you. There is only one minute remaining, so I will say one thing. I would like to endorse this and support it whole hearted to have a focus session on human rights. I think it's extremely important. I would like to thank the organisers for pushing it and for advocating it for years. I think this is a real piece of progress.
This is an output. Could we please acknowledge this as an output?
Secondly, two other outputs, the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet that is embedded in the IGF multistakeholder process is out in hard copy old-school form, and it stresses this is not a question of human rights or principles; it is a question of human rights and principles. They are delineated, they are distinct, but they are not inseparable.
And the third point is this has been taken very seriously by the Council of Europe in their Guide to Existing Rights of Internet Users, which is being launched tomorrow. So we have the Charter of Human Rights and principles for the Internet in concrete booklet form. Old school still works. The Guide from the Council of Europe. And we have this forum. And I hope we can extend our multistakeholder practice to have sessions in which everybody can speak as freely as possible. I think we've done very well to keep this going this long. Thank you very much for allowing me finally to speak. Thank you.
>> A. KOVACS: Thank you very, very much, Marianne.
Finally, Guy Berger.
>> G. BERGER: Thank you. I just wanted to bring to people's attention the Post-2015 Development Agenda process. You may know that Ban Ki-moon appointed a high level panel to look at this question, what will replace the MDGs after 2015. The panel included the chair of Indonesia amongst others. And actually, for the first time, really, freedom of expression has been recognized as a critical part of the development agenda by this High Level Panel. For example, they say there that the rule of law, freedom of speech in the media, et cetera, et cetera, help to drive development and have their own intrinsic value. They are both a means to an end and an end in themselves. And they actually have a special goal, number 10, which says people should enjoy freedom of speech. They elaborate that as saying that they should be vibrant, diverse, independent media.
So this is actually very important development, and it raises the possibility that the MDG process and the WSIS review process may actually find some common ground and some intersection around freedom of expression.
So this is by no means the final at this stage, but I think people should know if they are interested in freedom of expression issues at IGF and on the Internet, they are also being parallelled in some ways in this 2015 MGD review process.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much, Guy. We have reached now, unfortunately, the end of the substantive session, and Joy, I will ask you kindly to wrap up. Please go ahead. You have five minutes.
>> J. LIDDICOAT: Thank you. I thought I would wrap up by structuring the summary and reflections back to you in relation to the policy questions that were asked in this session and which I think have been richly discussed.
So for example, the first one is what are and have been the main things at the nexus of the Internet in human rights in the last year, and I think we've seen that there are a huge array of issues from every region, whether it's Latin America, Asia, the African region, Europe and Pacific. The complexity and depth of issues is comprehensive. And some of the key primary points have been in relation to privacy, mass surveillance, free expression, blocking, filtering, network shutdowns, so not only the range of forms of violations, but also those particular groups who are affected, whether those are journalists, human rights defenders, woman's human rights defenders, sexual rights activists. So we are seeing a complexity that this isn't just an issue for only a narrow range of those who are rights holders.
And in terms of the main concerns, and questions about what is working well in promoting human rights and freedom of expression and what are the challenges, I think a number of you have mentioned, a number of speakers have talked about the enormous variety of ways in which governments have responded with legislation. A huge variation in quality, some referring to the Budapest Convention, for example, others with no data protection laws, and we see a huge disparity from your discussions and the types of regulation.
At the same time, a number of you talked about the issues of how to strategize for new regulations where there hasn't been before.
Also, in relation to the policy question with access to the Internet as a human right, we've seen, for example, in Europe new case law specifically referring to blocking of entire platforms being an interference with human rights. So new jurisprudence, new case law, new norms, specifically focused on the Internet also emerging.
A number of interventions have also pointed to this conflict between rights, whether it's the conflict of intellectual property and free expression or the rights of disabled users and access to content, and the need for better understanding of how these rights can be balanced against each other.
We've also had discussion of how there are new tools emerging for forms of violations we've never seen before, mass surveillance has been mentioned in relation to that in particular. And forefronting how as an Internet Governance community has been responded to in a variety of ways.
We also had a high degree, I think, of analysis of human rights issues and whether it's in relation to Africa, Latin America, new forms of defamation, and so on, I think the strategies for responding to those has also been under discussion with some depth.
In terms of the nexus -- one of the other policy questions was what are the nexus between fundamental rights and standards development? I think this was a Heim that was common in your discussions was how to connect openness in relation to Internet standards with this desire for reasonable limitations online -- that limitations on rights are permissible and, in fact, they are necessary, but how does this relate to the openness standards, and perhaps some leadership in new areas such as on network neutrality, maybe new ways in which technical standards can be articulated to ensure human rights compliance, human rights by design, if you like, and -- in some of these issues.
I think those are possibly some of the main points I had in summary.
>> J. HALLENBORG: Thank you very much, Joy. In our planning we hoped we would have 20 minutes or half an hour to discuss possible outcomes from this session, possible messages or device from this session as some kind of IGF conclusions or IGF advice to the follow-up of this session, but unfortunately, we've run out of time, so I'd like to extend my deep apologies to a handful of people who have prepared already, and you have prepared your advice. Can I please ask you to email to us, and if you feel it's okay, also tweet them. We will see what happens.
To everyone, I think, in the room, if you have any ideas on how to bring this discussion on human rights further sort of in the IGF setting, or if the IGF could give any kind of advice to, I don't know, Human Rights Council, maybe, or other places on how to take this issue forward, please don't hesitate. Send them to us, and we will try to integrate them.
Thank you. You have been a very patient and very qualified audience. Thank you so much for listening the entire afternoon. On behalf of Karl and Joy and Anja and myself, thank you very much. Thank you for the remote moderators as well. It wasn't much from there, it wasn't much on Twitter either, but they're probably busy doing other stuff.
Thank you very much for listening and participating. So Mr. Chairman, that will conclude for me.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: May I pop in here and say as a conclusion, can we conclude that we agree to continue the dialogue here, Mr. Chairman?
>> HR session at every IGF, I hope.
>> I believe we have had a good session this afternoon on the discussion in the focus session of the openness, human rights, freedom of expression, and free flow of information on the Internet, which we are discussing how to solve the problem in the real cyberproblem, including around 50 speakers interventions.
If we discuss considering this openness, never-ending discussion, and will give innovations and also everybody wants to get access to information everywhere, anytime, and by anything. To elaborate their wealthiness, to speed up the reach of Millennium Development Goals by way of multistakeholder collaboration or utilizing the international or national authorization.
Thank you. Good evening.
(Applause)
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