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This house believes that internet access is a human right

The case: Internet access is a human right

Human rights come from the need to protect individuals from the arbitrary power of the state. Human

rights are “international norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal,

and social abuses.”[1] There have been attempts to codify human rights internationally through

agreements particularly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed in 1948. This listed a large

number of political, social and economic rights that are supposed to be universally held. Despite this

there is no universally followed list of rights and there is the possibility that more human rights may

over time become recognised or become necessary where there was not the need before. Internet

access is an obvious example of this; the internet was only invented in 1973 and the world wide web

in 1989. As the internet has become a vital conduit for information only in the last decade it could not

have been considered a human right only a few decades ago.

Just as there is no definitive list of human rights that is universally recognised what exactly the criteria

for what a right into a human right is open for dispute. The Human Rights Reference Handbook

characterises them as being:

 Inherent in all human beings by virtue of their humanity alone (they do not have, e.g., to be
purchased or to be granted so are universal)
 Inalienable (within qualified legal boundaries)
 Equally applicable to all.[2]

Several other features of human rights may also be added to these. They are based upon the

relationship between government and the people rather than two individuals, and the responsibility for

these rights primarily falls upon the government. They are minimal standards; what we cannot fall

below rather than what we would like to have. As they are universal they need to have strong

justifications that can apply everywhere so that they can be recognised in all cultures.[3] This

potentially provides a high threshold for considering a right to be a human right.

Internet access might be considered a human right in and of itself in which case there is a need for

the concept of internet access to meet the above conditions; however it could equally be argued that

internet access is already a human right as a part of human rights that already exist, particularly the

freedom of expression.

“A human right to internet access is an interesting concept that needs to be explored. It

directly relates to how we fulfil the first draft principle “We – all human beings – must be free

and able to express ourselves, and to receive and impart information and ideas, regardless

of frontiers.” The internet is the greatest tool of communication invented so far. It is however

becoming much more than this but a separate social sphere in itself. A human right to
internet access may well be necessary to ensure everyone is able to interact in this sphere.”

- Alex Helling

UN thinks internet access is a human right


Tim Sandle, 

Digital Journal

Jul23,2016, 10:57 AM

ShutterstockIs the Internet so embedded in the lives of so many people, acting as the main way
for information exchange, that to deny access to everyone in the world is a breach of human rights?
The United Nations thinks so.

In formal terms, the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks


that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP.) This enables billions of devices to be
connected worldwide.

Through this network, the Internet delivers a range of services, including inter-linked
hypertext documents; the World Wide Web; electronic mail; telephony; and file
sharing networks. The origins of the Internet can be traced back to the 1960s,
although its popularity as a social network arguably began with British scientist Tim
Berners-Lee in 1989, when the foundations of the web were laid down.

Ui™ Research@UiResearch

UN condemns internet access disruption as a human rights violation


@verge #UiCo http://fb.me/7WArIExIP 
UN condemns internet access disruption as a human rights violation
The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed a non-binding
resolution condemning countries that intentionally disrupt citizens' internet
access. The resolution builds on the UN's previous...
theverge.com

4:53 PM - Jul 12, 2016

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Ui™ Research's other Tweets

Over the past three decades the global use of the Internet has risen exponentially,
with billions connected and sharing images, posts, mails and stories (with Digital
Journal being a prime example of the rapid dissemination of key news stories.)

Despite the billions of people accessing the Internet there remain pockets of the
world that do not have access, including many people in the developing world; and
there are several countries that attempt to restrict or control the content that users
have access to — such as in China.
The number of Internet users at any one time can be seen via the website Internet
Live Stats (a phenomenal 3,417, 209, 810 at the time this article was penned.)
Despite such a number, it is estimated, according to Digital Trends, that 60 percent
of the world’s population does not have access to the Internet. This equates to around
7.2 billion people. In the Least Developed Countries only one in every 10 individuals
has regular access to the Internet — there is also more access achieved by men than
women, and by the wealthier members of society.

Due to the lack of access and suppressive tactics by certain governments, the United
Nations (U.N.) has declared that “online freedom” is a "human right," and one that
must be protected. This was in the form of resolution A/HRC/32/L.20.

In July 2016 the U.N. issued a declaration, cementing this view. The resolution
indicates the importance of "applying a comprehensive human rights-based
approach when providing and expanding access to the internet and for the internet to
be open, accessible and nurtured".

The resolution did not receive universal backing, with several countries rejecting the
resolution. Notably these were Russia, China and South Africa.

Speaking with Wired, Thomas Hughes, Executive Director of civil liberties group
Article 19 said of the U.N. resolution: “The resolution is a much-needed response to
increased pressure on freedom of expression online in all parts of the world.”

He further added: “From impunity for the killings of bloggers to laws criminalizing
legitimate dissent on social media, basic human rights principles are being
disregarded to impose greater controls over the information we see and share
online.”

Read the  original article  on  Digital Journal. Copyright 2016. Follow Digital Journal on  Twitter.

Internet Access Is Not a Human Right


By VINTON G. CERFJAN. 4, 2012
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Reston, Va.

FROM the streets of Tunis to Tahrir Square and beyond, protests around
the world last year were built on the Internet and the many devices that
interact with it. Though the demonstrations thrived because thousands of
people turned out to participate, they could never have happened as they
did without the ability that the Internet offers to communicate, organize
and publicize everywhere, instantaneously.
It is no surprise, then, that the protests have raised questions about
whether Internet access is or should be a civil or human right. The issue is
particularly acute in countries whose governments clamped down on
Internet access in an attempt to quell the protesters. In June, citing the
uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a report by the United
Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had
“become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.” Over
the past few years, courts and parliaments in countries like France and
Estonia have pronounced Internet access a human right.

But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point:


technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for
something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among
the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives,
like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place
any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will
end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t
have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that
case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I
were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that
we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of
speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not
necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time.
Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as
declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet
was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

Is internet access a human right?


As family life migrates online and the web becomes the home of free expression, it's getting
harder for courts to prevent individuals going online

A recent United Nations Human Rights Council report examined the important


question of whether internet access is a human right.

While the Special Rapporteur's conclusions are nuanced in respect of blocking sites
or providing limited access, he is clear that restricting access completely will always
be a breach of article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
the right to freedom of expression.

But not everyone agrees with the UN's conclusion. Vint Cerf, a so-called "father of the
internet" and a vice-president at Google, argued in a New York Times editorial that
internet access is not a human right:

The best way to characterise human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to
ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to
information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any
particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as
declaring internet access a human right, acknowledged that the internet was valuable as a
means to an end, not as an end in itself.
Cerf does concede that internet access may be a civil right, defined as a right which is
"conferred upon us by law" (arguably a definition which does not apply to the UK
where the European Convention on Human Rights has been incorporated into our
law). He says:

While the US has never decreed that everyone has a "right" to a telephone, we have come
close to this with the notion of "universal service" — the idea that telephone service (and
electricity, and now broadband internet) must be available even in the most remote
regions of the country. When we accept this idea, we are edging into the idea of internet
access as a civil right, because ensuring access is a policy made by the government.

There have been some interesting responses to Cerf's op-ed. Amnesty International's


USA blog argues that he provides an "exceptionally narrow portrayal of human rights
from a legal and philosophical perspective". Moreover, his means versus ends
characterisation of rights is philosophically incoherent, for:

while access to the physical town square may not be a human right in isolation, it has
always been for most inseparable from the right to association and expression

So, applying the same logic, internet access is inseparable from freedom of
expression and its lesser spotted cousin, freedom of access to information. Moreover,
I would argue that internet use may also fall within Article 8 ECHR, the right to
family and private life, as email, Skype, Facebook and Twitter are now essential tools
of interaction between friends and family.

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From the technological standpoint, JD Rucker on the Techi Blog argues that


outcomes are key, and elevating the internet to the status of an inalienable right will
result in "increased opportunity, improved education, and the end of hostilities based
upon ignorance".

Matthew Ingram on Gigaom also makes the practical point that not defining internet
access as a human or civil right "makes it easier for governments to place restrictions
on access or even shut it down entirely". This is particularly relevant given
the widely-cited role of the internet and specifically social media in recent political
revolutions like the Arab Spring.

Of course, this is not just a philosophical debate. States already ban internet use in
one form or another regularly. Closer to home, there are already a number of laws
which allow state authorities to restrict internet access, most notably rules relating to
sex offenders and terrorist suspects. The troubled Digital Economy Act has been
attacked over proposed powers to ban websites which host copyright material
without permission. The government subsequently backed down over the issue, but
the Act remains controversial.

Interestingly, the UK Court of Appeal has agreed with the sentiment of the UN
report, although without expressing its conclusion in terms of human rights. The
recent case of Regina v Smith & others (read Maria Roche's post here) involved an
examination of the terms of a Sexual Offences Prevention Order under the Sexual
Offences Act 2003.

The court ruled that the internet was an "essential part of everyday living" and
therefore, a complete ban on use in this case would be disproportionate. This was
expressed very wide terms, and it is difficult to imagine many scenarios where a
complete ban would be permitted by law.Lord Justice Hughes said:

Before the creation of the internet, if a defendant kept books of pictures of child
pornography it would not have occurred to anyone to ban him from possession of all
printed material. The internet is a modern equivalent.

However, full internet bans have occasionally been permitted by the courts. Mr
Justice Silber ruled in the November 2011 case of AM v Secretary of State for the
Home Department (see Rosalind English's post) that a full internet ban placed upon
a terrorist suspect subject to a control order (a highly restrictive anti-terrorism
power) was lawful. It should be noted that the successor to control orders, the
TPIM, no longer permits complete internet bans.

Interestingly, in AM the judge accepted the security services' evidence that it would
be practically impossible to monitor the suspect's internet use, due in part to
vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system. This sounds highly debatable, but
perhaps that technical argument will be had on another day.

Ultimately, it seems that the current position in UK law - reflecting but not wholly
endorsing the UN report - is that internet access will remain, reflecting freedom of
expression under Article 10 ECHR, a qualified right. That is, it can be restricted but
only if that restriction is provided for by law and necessary/proportionate in a
democratic society, unlike for example the absolute restriction on inhuman and
degrading treatment under Article 3 ECHR.

Indeed, the UN Report accepts that in some scenarios internet access will need to be
restricted, for example in the case of sex offenders and terrorist suspects – which is
also the conclusion of this excellent 2011 post on Inforrm's blog.

This is a question which will certainly be revisited in the coming years. Whether the
UN or Vint Cerf is right on a philosophical level as to whether internet access should
be characterised as a human right, technology is changing rapidly and the courts will
have to do their best to keep up. Whether or not it is a human right in its own
respect, the internet provides the gateway to other freedoms, notably freedom of
expression and the right to family and private life and therefore access to can be,
practically, inseparable from the rights themselves.

It is highly unlikely that internet access will ever attain the status of an absolute
right. However, the current position of UK courts rightly makes it very difficult
indeed for the state to ban completely a citizen's use of the internet, however strong
the justification.
Censorship does more harm than good
Last week a popular Riyadh coffee shop/library that offered tea and coffee to
customers, as they browsed hundreds of titles, had its books seized by the
representatives of the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information.
Every book in the cafe was approved and purchased through book fairs in Riyadh
and had the endorsement of the Information Ministry when sold at the fairs. The
ministry offered no reason for the seizure.
Perhaps the ministry confiscated the books because it sold coffee and tea without
a license. But if that were the case, then another government agency would have
been involved. The mere fact that the Information Ministry took the books only
leads to one obvious conclusion: The content of the store’s stock was suspect.
It boggles the mind that representatives of the ministry, when it comes to
censoring reading material that may not be appropriate for Saudi society, apply
1986 rules in 2016. While many Saudis may believe it’s vital to censor books or
literature — say on topics such as religious extremism or pornography — it must
be said that virtually anything written in any language and any image are available
online if you are smart enough to find them. Even for the lazy reader, there are e-
books and Kindle available. It makes the cutting out of pages and crudely covering
images of women with a magic marker in magazines an anachronism. It’s a silly
waste of time.
This is a contradiction in Saudi society that saddens writers, poets and
intellectuals. We are not a reading culture and it’s difficult to get the young
generation to open a newspaper or an Arabic-language book of fiction. We have
many celebrated Saudi writers, but we also have many whose works are banned
in the Kingdom. We trumpet our book fairs as a sign to the rest of the world that
we are enlightened and literate, but authorities sometimes shut down some
sellers’ stalls.
We want to see more female writers, but often complain they write about topics
— women’s stories, for example — that invite controversy and are perceived as
beyond the bounds of good taste. We fancy ourselves as culturally superior to
others, but don’t trust our writers and poets to express the positive and not-so-
positive aspects of our culture without some sort of external control.
Now consider our neighbor, the United Arab Emirates: The UAE cabinet declared
2016 as the UAE Reading Year to produce a reading generation. It recently passed
legislation to allow workers some time to read during working hours to encourage
daily reading habits. It launched an educational campaign during this past
Ramadan to distribute 5 million books to children in refugee camps and schools
around the world.
Saudi Arabia sends tens of thousands of university students abroad each year to
earn degrees in foreign countries, but the knock against Saudis, according to their
professors, is they lack critical thinking skills that are often developed by simply
reading. We have a public school system that does not adequately prepare
students for a university-level education, which, of course, requires an
extraordinary amount of reading. Saudis may know how to read but they haven’t
grasped the discipline of reading. Taking time out to read each day — sitting in a
chair, reading for an hour, and processing the information. What it means to
understand the difference between a metaphor and a simile, or how to interpret
irony. The motivations and complexities of characters in fiction or what made a
man or a woman great in their chosen field in a biography.
There are some bookstores in the Kingdom, which more or less ask its customers
to shop for books, perhaps browse by sitting in one of the few chairs available,
and then buy the book and leave. Then there are coffee shops, which allow a
more relaxing atmosphere for reading. Then you have the best of both worlds, a
library-cum-coffeehouse that allows customers to explore the literary world
without rushing to the cash register.
If we as a society are to create greatness and a positive environment for learning
and understanding the world, it starts with books.
The days of controlling what type of books we should read are long gone. Our
exposure to the rest of the world has pretty much put an end to that. So why do
we keep beating this dead horse of censorship?

• Sabria S. Jawhar, is an assistant professor of Applied and Educational Linguistics


at Languages & Cultural Studies Department, King Saud bin Abdulaziz University
for Health Sciences, National Guard Health Affairs (NGHA).
nternet Censorship
Yes because...

Despite the generally prevailing principle of freedom of speech in democratic


countries, it is widel...
Despite the generally prevailing principle of freedom of speech in democratic countries, it is
widely accepted that certain types of speech are not given protection as they are deemed to
be of insufficient value compared to the harm, they cause. Child pornography in the print or
broadcast media for instance is never tolerated. The internet should be no exception to
these basic standards. Truly offensive material such as hardcore pornography and extreme
racial hatred are no different simply because they are published on the world wide web as
opposed to a book or video.

No because...
Censorship is generally an evil and should be avoided where ever possible. Child
pornography is an extreme example and there is already sufficient legislation to deal with
those who attempt to produce, distribute or view such material. Other forms of speech may
well be truly offensive but the only way a society can deal with them is by being exposed to
them and combating them. Otherwise these groups are driven underground and become
martyrs.

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