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

Fri Aug 13 12:29:15 EEST 2010

Hi

In terms of clarification on the comment that I myself had put in tracked changes in the word doc for section 4a on "Equality before the law":

Point for discussion:  In classic liberal rights language, this wording has been an obstacle to future possible implementation of affirmative action policies compatible with the idea of equality as non-exclusion of groups or non-subordination of groups. We may want to be less restrictive, particularly if we think that internet is a space where diversity is a value.  How do we deal with this point?

 This was a point made by Roberto, the expert in Latin America.  He was actually talking about "equality" being manipulated in some contexts to imply that we don't need affirmative action to ensure that minority groups have equal voices...ie that the private media sector can regulate itself and we don't need action such as subsidised community radio or public media. (Roberto - please correct me if I'm wrong!).

But it's also good to continue discussion about the use of the word "users".  Michael suggested we use citizens, and Parminder suggests people or human beings.  I agree with the points about rights deriving from our humanity and not from the technology, but the idea of the Charter was to translate rights standards to apply to the internet.  So I think we need to reference the internet somewhere.  Maybe we need something like:

"All people are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.  This applies online as well as offline."

Best,
Lisa

From: irp-bounces at lists.internetrightsandprinciples.org [mailto:irp-bounces at lists.internetrightsandprinciples.org] On Behalf Of parminder
Sent: 13 August 2010 10:12
To: irp at lists.internetrightsandprinciples.org
Subject: Re: [IRP] FW: Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet

My response to what appears to be Oliver's notes on my comments
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".

My objection was to saying all stakeholders - which seem to included businesses - are equal before law. I dont think citizens/ people and businesses are equal before law.

And to that extent, your subsequent comment about using 'all internet users' instead of 'all internet stakeholders' does partly address that issue. Though, as I said in my last email I have issues with use of 'Internet users' term as well, and would prefer 'people'

A couple of reasons (and some overlap with my last email)

Many parts of a charter of rights vis a vis the Internet will apply to non-users as well, for instance personal information, defamation etc....

also I am  never sure with the fast changing world if the user is always a human being :), and hope in a few years in an era of Internet of things, we would not like to give 'things' the same rights as Internet users.

So best to say 'all people' or 'all human beings', the traditional subject of human rights.

Parminder

On Friday 13 August 2010 01:57 PM, Lisa Horner wrote:
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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