The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 December 2017. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition meeting. We have just 55 minutes. This is a live meeting. What we have for you is we're going to be introducing our new project which is the Educational Resource Guide to Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet. We will call it the Resource Guide, and this Resource Guide builds on the work that is contained in this Charter, which has 21 articles in total, and it also includes Rights and Principles.
And the idea for the Resource Guide I'll talk about in a minute, but I'd just like to talk very briefly about the work of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition and its work with the Charter for anyone who is here for the first time which I know is a number of people. The Internet Rights and Principles Coalition is one of the oldest Dynamic Coalitions of the Internet Governance Forum. We date back -- please correct me, people in the room who were there -- we date back to 2008, roughly speaking. Sorry, I haven't got the mic on, sorry. We date back to 2008, where we were a combination of some initial Dynamic Coalitions focusing on the intersection of human rights, law and norms and the emerging digital online environment.
Back then it was not obvious how existing human rights law may relate to technical standards or policy making around the Internet in its broadest definition so the Coalition got going and by 2009‑2010, the idea of trying to articulate the connections between how the Internet is designed, the way people access it, the way people use it, the content that is produced and how to circulate it. We realized very quickly to say these must be related to human rights was not enough so in fact the Charter of Human Rights and Principles was a sort of policy hacking if you like.
We base it on the Universal Declaration of human rights and subsequent treaties and covenants which many term the UN Bill of Rights and we use the format of the Universal Declaration to make a Charter that did not try to reinvent the wheel but rather to articulate existing law and norms around civil and economic rights, social rights and human rights in the broadest spectrum as they were being ‑‑ as they were being either put forward or hindered with the emerging online environment. This was an extraordinary exercise. There was a lot of people involved and we released and launched the full Charter in 2011.
It has been in the public domain since then. As many of you know in the room many wonderful initiatives have developed specific rights based declarations, rights based projects, and in the meantime the Charter itself has been translated into 8 languages. We have here 6 of them which are currently in booklet form. We have English. We have Turkish. We have Portuguese. We have Arabic. We have Spanish and we also have German. Any French speakers here, we would love to see a French edition of the Charter. In fact, we consider that very important given where we are now sitting.
And the other two that have yet to reach booklet form are Farsi and Mandarin. So we have the Charter translated in all the world's major languages. We are very, very proud of this work.
The Charter is in itself based on international norms. Our next step has been to develop a Resource Guide so that we can take each specific Article of which there are 20, 21 if you count our last Article, and have a look at how each of these articles call up specific issues that relate to specific regions, communities, countries. For instance in the Middle East and Northern African region which we'll hear about shortly there are specific issues around law or lack of law, specific issues about what is seen as a right in the south Pacific for instance there are issues around media freedoms and diversity that relate directly to very fundamental rights and freedoms we take for granted in other parts of the world so there are many, many places in the world where people are doing very important ground breaking work with judges, with law makers, with technical communities, whether that be in Nepal or Fiji or Tunis or Casablanca, and each region has its own issues to con fraught. But at the same time there are no international law or norms. The principle and the theory and the law and the standard are one thing, but every day practice may indeed be another.
And it's that field between the two we want to articulate in more detail through the Resource Guide. The Resource Guide began in a Law School two years ago in Syracuse. Kevin Ritzer on our Steering Committee put together the first version. It includes a lot of case study material jurisprudence from the North American region. We were only allowed 5 pages so we condensed 45 pages into 5 ideas and the idea has been very, very kind to create a wiki version you can comment on now, so you can access each Article that is your Article that you think important and add cases, ideas, things we have bring into a classroom, things we can take to judiciaries.
We're still trying to figure out how they'll rule in a court of law around a digital issue they may not quite understand the connection between, how we might want to speak to community groups, how we might want to speak to policymakers in the Council of Europe and European Union, to our own members of our own Parliaments, to our own Ministers, to our own teachers perhaps, or to our students.
So this educational part is not just for classroom use. It's a very important aspect, but it's also to help people see the relevance of the Charter in all its detail, but bring it down to ground level.
This has been an important object of the Charter project from the very, very first hour. We're very excited to be able to bring this new project into fruition with your help. So I just want to show you where you can go. If we could have the second tab, please. If you go to the top, you'll see this is the interactive link. Now, you can get to the interactive link by going to ‑‑ if you'd go to the first tab please.
If you go to Home, and you can access that directly ‑‑ just bear with us ‑‑ here. The Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet Resource Guide, that's a PDF. Okay, thank you.
If you go back quickly again. If you go to the link here in the Internet Governance Review Platform just below, click ‑‑ no, yes ‑‑ if you click there, you go straight to the live comments, wiki platform. So if you have access to the IGF site, if you've registered ‑‑ if you could just scroll down to the very first. Keep going. Keep going. It's a bit of a maze. Keep going.
Then we go to number 1, right to access the Internet. What international human rights law is there? But when we first did the Charter we realized without access you haven't got much else when it comes to the online environment so there's lots of interesting debate we can create from around the world. That's how you can get on to that right now. Feel free to add a comment, a case, an example, a question because then we can start to think about how we're going to deploy these things into various educational and outreach scenarios.
We're actually here at the start of a new project, Phase 2. We've been waiting a long time for phase 2 because it takes time for these things to become part of our vocabulary and part of our lexicon and there's so much amazing work being done around the world, and whilst human rights have now been officially recognized at the IGF but also by the UN human rights Council it's become almost a truism to say that human rights apply online as well as offline but all of us working in this field in any area in any Sector know that it's a lot harder to figure out how those rights ever hold but particularly specific rights, particularly of later generations of human rights norms to development, gender, the right to children, how these call up a number of very complex legal, technical and often political issues and what's so wonderful about education is we're there to help people ask questions and help people answer the questions in their own way. So we're not here to prescribe. We're here to guide and we need your help with content so it's a truly international undertaking.
At least with the 8 languages we have but add your information in your language if you wish. Thank you very much. That's the introductory comments. Just to show you how this has actually been working on the ground I'd like to introduce my co‑chair of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition, Hanane Boujemi, who is our leading light in getting the Charter translated into Arabic, Farsi, and also the 10 principles also translated into Kurdish.
And Hanane has done a lot of work in exactly this outreach, education, information about the guide ‑‑ about the Charter in its entirety, in the Middle East and North African region. So Hanane can speak to that briefly. Then we'll do a breakout session of some form to get ideas together for the rest of the time. Hanane, thank you very much.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Thank you, Marianne. I think it was specifically presented at the genesis of the RPC Coalition. Let me know if you can't hear me properly. I think this session is very unique, because I have never been to an IGF working session where actually there is some practical steps to curate and crowdsource content from all around the world about specific principles.
As you can imagine, our work is very challenging because we need a lot of input from different people, because the principles are standardized according to the point of view of a specific group of people who developed them. It's a background work that is being taken by various organizations to do different things with them. I might say it's a core that anybody can build on to do something specific. I think getting in on the documents is probably challenging for everybody.
Our suggestions to Marianne, plus you adding comments on the link when you find it, maybe we can have also a little discussions about specific principles. I know that you maybe are familiar with the 10 principles which are kind of the summarized version of the Charter. They are more or less standard. I'm not sure you know how to help us curate maybe examples, case studies. The guide that was done by University students from Syracuse is very legal, it's heavy in terms of jargon.
But we're trying to reach out to the grassroots and people that I used to work with in the past five years representing this community from ‑‑ Civil Society is represented, activists, human rights activists and what we're trying to do is to, first of all, enlighten this community from the Middle East about these principles, what are they? What do they mean exactly? And how they can maybe lobby in their local context to convince the Governments that anything or any regulation related to the Internet needs to be bound by these principles.
So the project in itself is not pushing enough to influence policy, but we took the educational approach, which is more of a way that Governments are receptive in the context of the Middle East. So we took the principles and we tried to build the campaign around them in a very simplified way, to outreach to people from the Middle East, to teach them about the importance of principles, but also to, you know, give them some kind of raw material or background of how they can maybe negotiate instilling human rights values in the local legislation specific to the Internet.
So this is a very practical project, and the way we measured our impact is to see how many number of people we outreach. We tried to present the work to Government officials, especially in Governmental institutions like the League of Arab States which is the equivalent of the European Union, and we just did the work to say how the Middle East is, to what extent it is ready to be receptive to this kind of globally made set of principles.
We understand that each local context is different, and that's why I think case law, case studies, are very important to us, and the only way we can do it really is if we have a base of people from all around the world helping us. And I can see this room is, you know, quite diverse, and I just hope, you know, we have the opportunities to capture the intention of people, because I think the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition is maybe one of the oldest Coalitions of the IGF. We do have some battles to fight, to kind of do the work that we want to do.
Most of the activities are around the IGF itself, because most of us are actually engaged in various activities, and I do invite you actually to be members of the Coalition to see if the principles can help you do your work better, or if you see that the Charter itself is relevant to your local context and can help you push, like, policy making forward as it happens in various contexts, I know that the Charter was a base document for the Parliament in Italy to adopt principles, Council of Europe.
You know, the work that we did is well referenced, but it's also pointed to in major UN reports or even policy making processes in different countries. So I can assure you the job is ‑‑ the impact of the Coalition is not a full‑time job. It's just linking directly to the work that you already do on a daily basis, so I think there is definitely a lot of work to be done, and I think we just need the help of the communities.
Because we do have a core team doing the bulk of he work, and this is definitely the start of the Coalition, and I learned a lot from her to do this kind of work, so, yeah, so maybe whoever has access to lots of, and wants to add comments is great but we can also engage in a discussion about the set of principles that we have, or if you have any comments on the work that we did already, we're happy to discuss.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks very much, Hanane. Exactly, we'd like to hear from the floor. We also have remote participation. We have a transcript, so just bear with me. Some of you may already be accessing the PDF or the live comment version. Have people managed to find it? You have to be registered on the IGF website to be able to make comments. But that's okay. If you have comments, you can enter them on the record.
There are 21 articles to the full Charter, of which ‑‑ which are distilled in our 10 Rights and Principles so even if you can't get on the live wiki platform from the Internet Governance Forum, you can go to our website, InternetRightsandPrinciples.org, and access the Charter booklet under the tab IRPC Charter.
And I just want to read out the contents so people remember the amount of work we have and for the benefit of the transcript if I may. I'm reading it out in English. It's currently in 8 languages. Right to access to the Internet. Article 2, right to nondiscrimination in Internet access use and governance.
Article 3, right to liberty and security on the Internet.
Article 4, right to development through the Internet. Article 5, freedom of expression and information on the Internet.
Article 6, freedom of religion and belief on the Internet. Article 7, freedom of online Assembly and Association.
Article 8, right to privacy.
Article 9, the right to digital data protection.
Article 10, and this is very specific for our job today, the right to education on and about the Internet. The right to education about how human rights relate to Internet design, access and use.
Page 2 of the Charter, thank you so much, Article 11, right to culture and access to knowledge on the Internet.
Article 12, rights of children and the Internet.
Article 13, rights of people with disabilities and the Internet.
14, right to work and the Internet.
Right to online ‑‑ Article 15, right to online participation in public affairs.
16, rights to consumer protection on the Internet. Obviously, this is now implicit.
Article 17, rights to health and social services.
18, right to legal remedy and fair trial for actions involving the Internet.
19, right to appropriate social and international order for the Internet.
20, duties and responsibilities on the Internet.
And 21, general clauses. So there is plenty of material there for us to think about.
And the 10 principles are a bit further back just prior to that.
1, universality and equality. 2 rights and Social Justice. 3 accessibility. 4, expression and Association. 5, privacy and data protection. 6, life, liberty and security. 7, diversity, 8, network equality. 9, standards and regulation. And, 10, governance.
So one can start the work at any point but we'd like to get some content if we can on those 21 articles from you. But I think it would be good to hear. Before I hear from the room I'd like to introduce Minda Moreira who will be speaking to this work at the Dynamic Coalition station in the morning. So Minda is our energizer and leading light in getting ourselves out there online and through the remember site. She's also our Rapporteur today. As I throw it over to the room, please speak to the microphone which I tend to forget myself and say who you are, where you're from so that Minda can do the report.
So are there any comments you wish to raise, input you wish to give so we can take note of and add accordingly. Feel free. Okay, okay. Please, our colleague from Egypt and you can go second. Thank you.
>> I'm from Egypt. I work as a lawyer. And I have one comment about that the Article, the rights of refugees and migrants is not included. I think refugees and migrants is most people who need this. We need to guarantee their rights especially as was spoken about, the region of North Africa and specifically I'll speak about Egypt. Last year, refugees and migrants is online, and they are on the Internet, so we have to find a place for refugees and migrants online.
And also with the guarantee that make sure these guarantees are they will not be affected by using their rights, digital rights, especially about the international refugee. We have to guarantee they will not be subject to deportation especially if they use the rights to express about political whims or something like this. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. Very important point and many, many places in our 21 articles where we can explicitly discuss the issue of refugees and migrants, who also have human rights, as well as covered by specific rights under refugee Convention but you're absolutely right. Thank you very much.
There's much more we can say on this, so ‑‑
>> I have actually a question. We want this session to be as interactive as possible. There's something else that I came across is that in refugee camps, I don't think you have them in Egypt but you do have refugee camps? You don't. In Jordan and other regions, there are other colleagues that might feed into this, I learned that Internet connection is band from the refugee camps so the refugees are not able to actually interact with the outside world. There are a lot of organizations supporting Internet connection, building infrastructure. I know in the Netherlands, because I lived there five years, that ISOC is installing Internet connections through wi‑fi so refugees can be online. I don't know how we can merge it with the principles, because we have one principle of the right to access which is a kind of capacity, but you think there's a need to add refugees ‑‑
>> I agree with you, that's good, and it includes everything, all the rights, but I think for the special situation refugees specifically, we need a separate Article for refugees. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Is there any other ‑‑ exactly I can add also that for instance in the U.K. in detention centers where many asylum seekers are having to wait, sometimes years, access is extremely limited, and what access they have is incredibly punitively monitored. So as you're trying to prepare your case for your asylum request, you're not allowed to access for instance some of the major social media.
You can't download PDFs. So these sorts of restrictions are actually related to the fundamental Article 1, the right to access for all. But we can use the situation of refugees, asylum seekers, and also the housing vulnerable, people who are in situations where they're actually disenfranchised and if they're not able to get access, if they are able to get access, do not have the right credentials to be able to further that access once online. You can always access the Web in a library but if you do not have a proper domicile or residency permit you're often restricted from going further.
Before we move to the next question, is there any more concrete examples around issues of disenfranchised, excluded opportunities, particularly refugees and migrants where the 21 articles need to be more explicit or we can add material so we can discuss issues about the things we take very much for granted in the Internet ‑‑
[ Off Microphone ]
Anymore comments on that topic?
>> Actually it was a comment that I wanted to make or a question that I wanted to ask in relation to how do you perceive that this Charter will be ‑‑ that you will be engaging with LAF for example and with some states in the MENA region or the Arab Region but we all know these basic rights are not respected by these Governments in this region. And when we talk about religion and freedom of religion, privacy, data protection, it does not exist even offline so having a Charter for these rights on the Internet, so how do you perceive the operability of this Charter?
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: We presented it in the past to LAC. It was an attempt like a blunt attempt to introduce them to the principles and of course I mean, Governments digest this type of information very diplomatically and yes, we're aware that this is important and the kind of attitude it would be addressed in the future. Obviously the Charter itself could not change, you know, the deeply rooted issues you spoke about like the rights of ‑‑ to religion is something that is much more complex than discussing in the context of the Internet so obviously having a set of principles will not change the situation in a specific country or a context.
It's just as a principle, it's something that we aspire to achieve. How and when it's going to happen is related to complex set of incidents or things that should happen, to reach that level where we say, okay, we comply by these principles. And it's a long route. It's a Democratic transformation which includes doing a lot of other things, not only adopting these sets of principles, so I might say I think it's receptive to this type of work but to what extent it's going to be implemented concretely, that is something that I definitely cannot answer now, because that work takes a long time.
It's a process. Democratic takes a long time to be achieved. What we want to do is to make sure that, like, the rights that we have offline are also instilled online. And we want to make sure that it's happening now, not later when we have a functioning democratic system in these countries.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks so much, Hanane. We have another contribution on the topic of refugees, migrants, asylum seekers. Specific material, please.
>> No, it's not about the refugees and asylum seekers.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Oh, okay.
>> But I wanted to point out that we also have cases of minorities and other marginalized social groups who even in societies where Internet access is permissible cannot access because of their material conditions. I don't know whether that is also being considered.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Yes, it is, indeed. But the point of our Resource Guide is exactly to highlight specific situations of marginalized groups, so do you want to tell us in your case about which marginalized groups you're speaking of specifically?
>> Yeah, maybe one we can even think of groups in the maybe rural areas, for example in Zimbabwe where I come from, we also have special marginalized groups like the Sen community, there are very few in Zimbabwe, we also have people like the Dolma, maybe in Central Zimbabwe, these are minority groups that have been left out of the political and socioeconomic spectrum. They have little access to education, that is basic education for that matter.
And they are really outside the what has been called the global village. So ‑‑ yes.
So it's a matter of them trying to also integrate them. How can that be done? Maybe making sure they have access to tools, that is technological tools, that can also ‑‑ that can help bring the digital divide.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, yes. Rural communities in in this case Zimbabwe. Rural communities also in the Internet heartland, Alaska, indigenous peoples of Alaska, have enormous problems with infrastructure, slow speed, limited access, and when they're online, they're prevented from all the beautiful graphics that we take for granted.
So the digital divide is not always between global north and south. It's also within the global north, within the global south, and is also about other forms of disenfranchisement so we have Zimbabwe rural communities ‑‑ I'll get to you ‑‑ anymore?
>> Thank you for the presentation. I'm very interested in a proposal of guidelines, principles on the issue of access. You mentioned the barriers for asylum seekers, persons coming to request legal protection under the international protection regime from the Convention on refugees.
And you mentioned recently that there are obstacles, for example to access to PDF, the forms and applications from asylum seekers, when they go to certain procedures to get their case to be processed and then to get the international protection.
My question, I'm from the Permanent Mission of Cuba here in Geneva. I am the Counselor in charge of the negotiation of Global Compact on Refugees. As you know, it's a process that will take place in 2018 here in Geneva. The UNHCR has been leading the process. All the Member States of the United Nations and also there's a large group of NGOs, Civil Society, people working in the field level, in the operations, protecting people to get, if they receive the international protection, because they are really refugees. What I am interested in is to seek your opinion, because there are certain recommendations that have been presented by different countries.
That is to have a better screening, to have better data information, to have better high‑technology softwares and to have uniform standards among all of the countries for the processing of the requesting of the people.
So this is probably is going to be one of the outcomes in one year at the end of 2018. It should be approved, the Global Compact on Refugees. One recommendation, there are several recommendations, but one of the recommendations that are coming from developed countries is to improve the process, to improve the screening, to improve the sharing of information, to improve the standardization on how to process cases of people requesting asylum seekers.
So what ‑‑ how we could guarantee people requesting protection to really get inside of the technology, Internet and so on, for them to be taken into account for receiving that legal protection from developed countries. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Refugees have the right to privacy. Asylum seekers have the right to privacy and as we have articulated in Article 8 and 9 and also to digital data protection.
>> I'm sorry, it's not just ‑‑ my question is not only related to privacy. But you mentioned that sometimes because of connectivity or because of PDF opening, technology, because the reality is that when a person requests asylum, or to be refugee status, it's not only to get that right, or that protection, but the process to get that ‑‑ to be, you know, to be visual I think is very crucial, which you already said on the issue of the process, the application, the technology, the access. Very interesting what you mentioned a few minutes ago, thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you so much. It's such an important example you've just provided us. Exactly why this Charter and the examples need to be taken for people working in your domain so that rights are not completely ignored in order to facilitate data gathering and data storage from the path of state agencies that need to process. So it cuts both ways. So thank you very much for that example.
I just wanted to, we have somebody with their ‑‑ please. And then we can come back to this, because this is in itself a very good example.
>> Yeah. I'm here for ICANN as well as the trade services Union in Berlin called Verdi. Thank you very much for this really great work and presentation.
I have three points which actually are not exactly new, but I think it's necessary to explain a little bit more, because in the online world, if you translate human rights to the online world, sometimes there is a need for explanation, and I don't know how to keep it short but I'll try, I mean, in a sentence for a Declaration.
So you mentioned the right of association. It should be clear that part of that right is the right to organize in a Trade Union, and the right for the Trade Union to get access to the workers. This is especially important in the online platform world. There are new challenges here and this is really something that has to be made clear.
Second, also you mentioned the right of privacy. Workers have right to privacy, too. Of course, this has to be weighed, this has to be ‑‑ there are several interests, the interest of a company, the interests of the worker, you have to make a fair balance but first you have to make clear, there is a right to privacy for workers too.
And the third is really complicated. If you look at privacy, there is a totally new challenge in these years now. I think we have to say here that privacy must not be part of a trade‑off for basic services. For example, I need water, and the deal is, oh, you get the water for free, but we watch you all day and night. Or, you give us the data of your apartment, of the IoT services, you're totally connected, and you get a cheaper price if you do that. If you deliver your privacy to the company, then you get a cheap price, or even free service of basic things like water, like energy, and so on. So the basic needs should never be part of a trade‑off. That I think is important. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you so much, Anita, and also in the world where we now have smart grids, and in a world where you have Internet cafes in parts of the global south where you have to trade off your access for lots of information about who you are, where your live, so it cuts in that sense both ways. Thank you so much.
We have some more suggestions, there and then. Okay, thank you.
>> Thank you. My name is Adi. I'm coming from Indonesia, with the International Society Fellow. I would like to question whether people should have the right to self‑defense or retaliate like under agreement of law we have the rate to offense against any breach. Internationally we have retaliation where if there's any breach against our interactivity, then we can do something, because after all, the right to legal remedy will take a very, very long time to help you and help us resolving your issue. Thank you.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Can you be more specific? What do you mean exactly by the right to retaliation? Because that can be perceived in a different way by different stakeholders.
>> Yeah, I mean, if there is let's say a violation to my privacy or someone stealing my data, and I can either make another hacking attack against those who steal it, or maybe I should do something that maybe is going to be offensive or maybe going corrupt in the sense that hey, my data has been hacked. I'm sorry that person may be somewhere else, like other person, some kind like solution.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Okay. The reason you would resort to a solution like that is because there's no legal mechanisms that are being enforced in local context and that's why we would do that. From my personal perspective, this is not in the name of the Coalition or anything, I think it would be controversial to have a principle which explicitly calls for something like that. You can definitely add a case study, or maybe, you know, a specific case to respond to such, you know, existing ‑‑ we not know that these incidents exist day‑to‑day basis but I don't think we should explicitly, you know, coin a principle to specifically call for this action.
Because you might anticipate the repercussions of such actions especially if you want to present this work to policymakers, because I think you will create a barrier from day one, and what we want is the exact opposite. We worked for many, many years to bridge that gap between the Governments and Civil Society or the activists.
The last thing we need now is to have some ‑‑ an approach that is more confrontational. I can assure you that will not work in any context around the world.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: There's a case study, an example of how these things are becoming more granular, the right to be forgotten, what to do about identity theft, issues around online hate speech, sexting, abuse of women and other minorities using anonymity in ways we do not support. But if you look at Article 18, the right to legal remedy, we are simply showing that the right to legal remedy already exists as a fundamental right and freedom. The right to a fair trial needs to be defended at all points, and the right to due process. This is one of the more aspirational Articles of our Charter, so the more case studies we have allow lawmakers and law students and policymakers to consider the downstream effect of any actions that may actually make things possibly worse in the future. So we need really concrete examples, so thank you very much.
We had two more from the floor.
One, two, three, and somebody at the back there, just to queue you.
>> I just want to make a quick thought regarding online, something that you have mentioned now, online misogyny. I didn't find something very specific. There are a lot of things about hate speech but based on cases that happens in Lebanon, the country where I come from, so many journalists especially female journalists are subject to misogyny online more than men do and I think it would be important to mention this literally. I think it happens all over the world so women are more harassed online than offline.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Good morning. And Article 10 and 11 are more generalized but we need more examples, right?
[ Off Microphone ]
Yeah. So your example, Lebanon, many. So, Kevin, yeah.
>> Yeah, thank you. I'm from Germany. I'm a Researcher in Germany. Two comments essentially. The first, I'm working in the Pacific, in Republic of Palau. And there they landed the undersea cable and gained access for many people in Palau, but it also highlights the problem with inequality of access, because all of a sudden an island nation has Internet, which means 70% have access, and the other 30% in the outlying islands don't have that access, which means they need to move to the more centralized the bigger islands essentially for these populations, something that's a paradox in that access debate in a way. It increases inequality in some circumstances.
So, which probably means you have to bring everyone together to access rather than only part of the country. And the second question, actually more a question, about the relationship of the Charter and also the educational guide, to other such digital rights charters, is that also may be material, these other documents, material for the educational guide to see what other interpretations like you mentioned in Italy but there are other local initiatives how these kind of things feed into that discussion and maybe take some of these interpretations and put them in the guide, the reference in the guide.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Absolutely. And many are already referenced but definitely because there's been a sort of mushrooming emergence of very interesting spinoffs and individuals, absolutely they're going to be included as well.
Small island states are very important examples, as a group, the Caribbean, the Pacific, in terms of how access in itself is not a panacea for other issues. It doesn't solve everything. Thank you for that example. I was born in Samoa so I know exactly what you mean. Some of the largest transmission routes pass under the water and over the Heads of many Pacific Island nations and yet the people on those Pacific Island nations do not have Internet access, let alone media access, I'm speaking in my personal capacity.
We had someone else. I think we had ‑‑ .
>> Hello. Okay. So thank you for the presentation. I have, like, maybe one question and one comment. I looked at the page, and there was mention of 21 rights and 12 principles, but I don't see very clearly what are the principles on the page. Maybe I'm wrong or ‑‑
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Just to answer, there are 21 articles to the full Charter, and if you go to the PDF of the Charter booklet, if you go back two or three pages you'll see the 10 Internet Rights and Principles, which distilled the Charter. It was one of our early and very successful vehicles for moving the Charter work forward. So 21 articles to the full Charter and 10 Internet Rights and Principles.
>> Okay, so I have a comment, but maybe the comment will not be okay as I didn't read the full thing, but I was wondering, like, how it can be articulated as design principles. I know there are other incentive like human rights protocol, and also like how can we use these principles for further development of the Internet. It might be good maybe to ‑‑ I know there might not be clearer idea about this, but maybe to point out some direction in this to make relationships with engineer and the people who are further developing the Internet, so these things are taken into account at the moment of development.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Are you referring to the principles that were developed recently, I think?
>> Yeah,.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: So there was a range of principles. Depends what we're talking about. There's the Manila principles for the intermediary reliability, and these principles are more generalized. Article 19 is working closely with IETF to help engineers understand how protocol should be developed in a way that respects human rights, and I think there's even ‑‑ there is what we call a protocol now. It was published recently I think about a set of principles that engineers need to take into account when they're developing protocols. This is specific to IETF.
So I mean, this is more ‑‑ I think the principles are more opaque. They touch upon, like, various fields, but not specifically the technical side of the Internet. But I definitely see a point. I don't think we can merge them per se. They stand alone. So you already have a reference point where you can actually find principles that are specifically designed for the technical community.
>> Yeah, I understand. My comment would be more like not to merge them, but how they relate to each other. I don't know, it's just a comment maybe you can ‑‑
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: It's an important comment. That is the ongoing work. We've had computing engineers were part of the initial drafting team, and this is why this Charter is so successful, because it took into account very important technical standards at the time, so that it could actually be deployed and operationalized at a later point. Our sister coalition is the Core Values Dynamic Coalition, so obviously there's a lot going on there.
So you can't do everything all the time in the one spot. The main thing is that this full Charter allows engineers to apply these ideas or to debate these ideas, but every technical point isn't itself a case that we can add to the Resource Guide, particularly for engineering schools, where ‑‑ or information and communication departments, digital journalists, so they can bring it down to something that makes a meaning for them wherever they are.
We have 5 more minutes. Be great to have some input from one, two ‑‑ please.
>> My name is Dan O'Maley. I'm from the Center for International Media Assistance, and this is more of a comment, because it's piggybacking on what the woman over here said about violence against women online. I work with an organization trying to promote media freedom around the world. We've seen a lot of issues in the online space in terms of misinformation, harassment, et cetera and so I think these principles are really important because they create a tool that groups can create advocacy campaigns around. That's one of the things that we've done with other organizations, it was created using the IRPC principles, a guide that looks at how these affect democratic processes. We think about media as being a key part of democracy.
I think you can also check it out OpenInternet.global and one of the things we did when we were looking at this is we did some research on how different groups around the world have Civil Society groups have organized to protect these initiatives, because I think that's, certainly we all have our different issues here that we're trying to organize around but I think it's interesting to see how you can concretely do work that leads to these kind of high‑level human rights principles.
So I'd encourage everyone to check that out, OpenInternet.global, and thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. Someone else was queued. I believe, yes, please, thank you.
>> Hi, thank you. Thanks for this session. I'm only discovering the Charter. I work here in Geneva for the Belgian Delegation to the UN, and so from Europe, obviously developed countries and we also have issues in terms of access in remote areas, and also for vulnerable populations.
But increasingly we also have debates around the right to disconnect, and so as I said, I'm not very familiar with the Charter, but I just wanted to know if there was anything around this, around the right to disconnect. And I guess it's also an issue for workers, for example, especially in the world of work. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: I totally hear you, yeah. I think that is hopefully implicit but I think it's a good case to start developing, particularly as people are starting. There is evidence people are wishing not to be forced to connect in certain ways, to have the prerogative to say, no, I do not give my age. I do not need to give my age. Or I do not want to be on LinkedIn or whatever it happens to be. Point taken. It needs to be built out as a case I think to show the other side of the implicit connectivity that we're speaking to. Point well taken. Thank you.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: I sense that we probably need to work on a new Article of the Charter. It's got to be a little bit contradictory with the first Article which is about access, so 22 of the Charter would be about the right to disconnect.
But again the context is very important to be specific and enlisting a case study is crucial but I hear you. Point well taken.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: We have one minute, two minutes, for any other examples we can develop. Please join the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition. We have a straight forward email list. You can find it on our Web page. You can join us. Please join us in the Dynamic Coalition main session. You've provided lots of great material and inspiration for Minda, and if you have anymore to tell us, we'd like to let you go and have your lunch now because at 2:00 it starts again.
>> I have one last point. It's about what was mentioned. Thank you for the work that you did and I think what you did brings a completely new dimension to the principles from media practitioner. There is a new kind of issues that we're not familiar here with at the IGF so you bring a new scope. Media is definitely important.
We don't have that in the Charter and maybe we can work a little bit more on that aspect in following years.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Definitely for case study work in terms of journalists, bloggers, content, and all that, absolutely, there's plenty of material there to bring in what we call traditional media. Thank you so much.
Thank you everyone for your input, your enthusiasm, and we'll see again sometime online or offline.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Or in the main sessions.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Analog or digital, it's up to you. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
[ End of session ]