CDT Joins Civil Society Joint Brief on the UN Global Digital Compact
Internet governance and human rights are at the top of the UN’s agenda. Recently delegates met in New York to discuss the Global Digital Compact, a two-year process that will culminate in a globally negotiated text affirming the central role of governments in governing the internet. But the internet is a global public good, governed by many stakeholders gathered in many different bodies. Civil society –and groups like CDT in particular–have a key role to play in ensuring that human rights are protected, enabled and extended in the digital age.
Last week, CDT joined a letter with dozens of civil society organizations in which, “… we highlight the areas and aspects of greatest concern, including human rights and gender, support for the OHCHR, inclusive approaches to internet governance, consistency in terminology, and decentralization of power.”
These aren’t new issues for CDT. In the past we’ve pushed the UN to focus its efforts on the most critical ways in which the internet is changing the relationship between governments and people, namely encryption, censorship, meaningful access and weapons: “States have roles that are unique. They continue and enhance engagement in all the mentioned governance processes and ensuring the protection of human rights by helping to strengthen the existing multistakeholder ecosystem of internet governance. They are uniquely placed to solve issues of access, censorship, encryption and weapons of war. They are also the actors who can extend the multistakeholder model to reach within and evolve the multilateralism of the UN itself.” [link https://cdt.org/insights/comments-to-the-united-nations-on-the-global-digital-compact/]
When the first draft of the Global Digital Compact was released, CDT along with the Global Encryption Coalition steering committee officially delivered and submitted comments to the UN to suggest, “… three editorial changes to better articulate the ways that encryption provides protection and enablement of human rights.”
As CDT’s Chief Technology Officer I also signed a joint letter reminding the UN of the role of the technical community in internet governance. “… some proposals for the Global Digital Compact (GDC) can be read to mandate more centralized governance. If the final document contains such language, we believe it will be detrimental to not only the Internet and the Web, but also to the world’s economies and societies… Therefore, we ask that member states, the Secretary-General and the Tech Envoy seek to ensure that proposals for digital governance remain consistent with the enormously successful multistakeholder Internet governance practice that has brought us the Internet of today.”
As the negotiations around the GDC wrap up in the lead up to the UN’s Summit for the Future, we strongly encourage Member States to preserve the strong and engaged voices of the human rights community in delivering on issues of core importance in multistakeholder internet governance.
