[IRP] FW: Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet

[Lisa Horner]

Hi all

Comments on the Charter from Olivier below.

Thanks,
Lisa



Commenting on your discussion-annotated document:

L1: do we want to call it the Internet or use the broader term digital communications

I think that these principles only apply to the Internet. I just cannot see corporations running their own Global Virtual Private Network (VPN) abiding by this charter. What they do on their private network is their own choice and a lot of  articles would therefore not apply.

L2: if you start referring to each regional human rights bodies, you might miss some out who might take offence. Keeping "United Nations" only is fine.

L4: this is a charter of rights. I don't think that it should defer itself for national laws.

L5. I would steer well away from anything undermining equality before the law. Lack of equality brings discrimination by definition. I would be interested in hearing more about your question here, because I can't quite catch it.
That said, I'd rather have "All Internet users" instead of "All Internet stakeholders".
Also - replace "internet" with "Internet". The "Internet" as we know it has an upper-case initial. internet with a lowercase i is any kind of inter-networking which includes the use of corporate intranets & private networks not connected to the Internet.

L6. I think that the context of digital identity here points definitely to a privacy issue. Whilst one aspect of privacy is the right to keep information about oneself private, the protection of digital identity deals with identity theft which, in my opinion, is one of the biggest case of privacy breach.
I also wonder whether this section should include a "right to be forgotten/deleted" - ie. if you wish all information about you to be deleted from your favourite social networking site, you may do so with a clear, simple procedure - and will be assured that all information pertaining to yourself, which you control in your social networking account, will be deleted. This issue is becoming very significant with young people publishing all sorts of details and possibly incriminating pictures on their social networking sites, and companies looking for such information prior to hiring - this is a gross privacy problem.

L7. I like the way the freedom from defamation is explained. It is left as an open statement and I am concerned that any attempt to focus it further would indeed open a can of worms. Here, I interpret the statement to say: online defamation is the same as real world defamation - and I think that's fine.

L8. Good point - I frankly do not know how to word this to make it sound right.

L9. I would indeed remove "freedom of movement" from the list since this is out of scope. That said, you'd also need to remove "movement" from the "concerned right" column where appropriate.

Point of detail: the default spell check for parts of the document is English (UK) and part of it is English (United States) - I suggest choosing either one or the other for the whole document.

The rest of your comments notes amendments which you have made & I agree with all of them.

Now for comments on parts of the text itself:

Preamble (Page 4)
"The Charter is addressed to all stake-holders of internet governance"
Suggestion to add: "The Charter is addressed to all actors and stake-holders of Internet governance"
I find stakeholders to be too restrictive - you can be an actor without having a stake in the process.

14.b. (page 13)
Sentence: "Workers and employees should have internet access at their workplace."
I have a problem with this sentence because this is impossible in an industry that's totally unrelated to the Internet. I cannot imagine a farm worker having the right to Internet access at their workplace, or a builder, or a bus driver for example.
I suggest removing this sentence and keeping the rest of this paragraph as is.

Last but not least, I'd like to really congratulate the expert group - this work is breaking new ground and I am absolutely thrilled with it. Well done!

Kindest regards,

Olivier



--

Olivier MJ Cr?pin-Leblond, PhD

http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

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