RightsCon Online 2020 Publishes Outcomes Report

 Voltaire Veneracion

 7  November 2020

The organizing team of RightsCon Online 2020 launched on rightscon.org last 14 October 2020 its Outcomes Reportdescribing the digital rights conference’s intersecting themes, program tracks, and community highlights, as well as many sessions of relevance to Business and Human Rights.

Organizer AccessNow – a non-profit founded in 2009 that seeks to prevent Internet shutdowns and defend digital rights of people around the world famously through its Digital Security Helpline – describes RightsCon as “the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.”

Notably, the Outcomes Report described the official statement of six United Nations special rapporteurs during RightsCon 2020 that warned people, businesses and governments of the narrowing of digital spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic and reiterated their commitment to continue documenting the intersection of technology with their respective mandates.

“COVID-19 has made us even more reliant on digital technologies and the space they create for civic engagement,” the independent experts said.

“With the closing of civic space and restrictions on offline media, access to universal, open, affordable, secure, and stable Internet is vital to save lives, to prevent abuses, to continue to promote and protect human rights and urgently increase access to information.”

The statement’s signatories include:

• David Kaye (freedom of opinion and expression)
• Mary Lawlor (situation of human rights defenders);
• Clément Voule (freedom of peaceful assembly and
  association);
• Agnès Callamard (extrajudicial, summary or
  arbitrary executions)
• Tendayi Achiume (contemporary forms of
  racism)
• Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin (protection of human rights
  while countering terrorism).

Initially called Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, the international conference used to be rotated each year between San Francisco, USA, and another country’s city. Now, RightsCon has each year a new host city and country deemed “power centers for technology and human rights.” Manila, Philippines, played host to RightsCon’s more than 650 participants in 2015.

RightsCon 2020 had been planned to take place in San José, Costa Rica. Due to the global pandemic, however, AccessNow and its partners hosted the ninth iteration of the conference virtually for the first time, serendipitously making it accessible to many more digital rights defenders. More than 7,600 people from 158 countries – RightsCon’s most number of participants and nations ever – joined over 300 sessions.

40.8% of participants belonged to civil society, while 11.4% were from the private sector, including start-ups, and 4.5% from government. 56% identified themselves as women.

Because most people around the world access the Internet and exercise digital rights (or have them violated) using hardware and platforms created or maintained by private companies, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provide useful guidance for the respect of human rights by these companies, for their protection by governments, and on remedies available to people whose rights are violated by businesses.

Some examples of subjects tackled during RightsCon 2020 that are relevant to BHR are:

• On the intersecting (or cross-cutting) theme of Health: internet connectivity; election security (for countries having elections during COVID-19); patient data privacy; and the role of media and technology in preventing the spread of disinformation;
• On the intersecting theme of Environment: online surveillance and attacks on land rights defenders, and benchmarking the footprint of the tech sector;
• On the program track of AI, automation, and the algorithm: biases and business interests that corrupt automated processes and threaten our privacy, security, and freedom of expression online;
• On the program track of Content governance and censorship: transparency and oversight of social media content removals; responses to hate speech and harassment; and fact-checking;
• On the program track of Cyber norms and practice: data protection and encryption;
• On the program track of Internet access and shutdowns: throttling and network interference; closing the digital divide; and digital inclusion;
• On the program track of New models for business and labor: privacy by design; human rights due diligence; structural problems within the tech sector and the platform economy; and labor rights and sustainability;
• On the program track of Privacy and surveillance: biometric authentication and ambient forms of surveillance using our devices; the security risks posed to human rights defenders by the sale by private companies to authoritarian governments of surveillance products like NSO Group’s Pegasus and Amazon’s Ring; and surveillance architecture.

Access the full Outcomes Report on:

https://www.rightscon.org/rightscon-online-2020-outcomes-report/