[bestbits] Council of Europe multi-stakeholder consultations on Internet freedom

[rysiek]

Dnia wtorek, 14 kwietnia 2015 14:56:34 Jeremy Malcolm pisze:
> On 14/04/2015 1:44 am, Carolina Rossini wrote:
> > The Council of Europe is working on a draft recommendation by the
> > Committee of Ministers to its member states on Internet freedom
> > (attached). The draft is currently being elaborated by a committee of
> > experts operating  under the authority of the Council of Europe’s
> > Steering Committee on Media and Information Society.
> > 
> > As part of its multi-stakeholder outreach and dialogue, the Council of
> > Europe would like your feedback, comments and suggestions on the draft
> > recommendation to be sent to us, at the latest by *_30 April 2015_*,
> > by E-mail to Marta.WIELOCH at coe.int <mailto:Marta.WIELOCH at coe.int> .
> 
> It has been a while since we collaborated on a joint submission through
> Best Bits.  Is there a group interested in writing something together
> and presenting it for submission jointly?

/me rises his hand, and looks around

And right off the bat:

"1. The European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter the ECHR) applies
    without any distinction to the physical world and to the Internet. The
    Council of Europe member States have both negative and positive
    obligations to protect and promote human rights and
    fundamental freedoms on the Internet."

This has to be one of the best bits (pun not indented) of language in this 
kind of "Internet freedom" text I've read for a long, long time.

My main beef with many "lists of Internet freedoms" is that as soon as new 
technology comes around, we will have to re-do them, again and again, for the 
new technology.

This is what has happened in Brazil, as far as I understand from talking to 
people there -- Brazilian Constitution protected (explicitly) privacy and 
freedoms in phone communication, and hence large portion of Marco Civil had to 
(explicitly) deal with them in the new domain of the Internet.

Don't get me wrong, Marco Civil is a great piece of work, and brings a lot of 
good into the world; but large parts of it were needed because authors of the 
Brazilian Constitution didn't future-proof it well enough against new 
technologies.

I much prefer the approach visible in these two quoted sentences -- clearly, 
unequivocally reaffirming the rights and freedoms we all have regardless of 
the medium we choose to exercise them in.

These rights and freedoms are, I feel, well enough future-proofed, as long as 
we don't dismantle them by explicitly reiterating them for each new 
technological medium (and thus making it possible for future authoritarians to 
claim that "these do not apply in $TECHNOLOGY, as they have not been 
reiterated for it explicitly").

-- 
Pozdrawiam,
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak

Zmieniam klucz GPG :: http://rys.io/pl/147
GPG Key Transition :: http://rys.io/en/147
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