Thanks for the best possible start to 2012 for internet rights advocates. Your New York Times column Internet Access is Not a Human Right sparked a lively debate about the internet, access and human rights. In 2012 we will need this debate more than ever before. While we will vigorously debate some of your points, your call to action for the technical community to take responsibility for human rights is incredibly timely.

Much of the discussion following your column has been about definitions: what is a human right? What is a civil right? What is the internet? What is meant by access? No doubt there has even been some conceptual discussion about “what is a horse” :).

Conversation on various lists turned to the advantages and disadvantages of access to the internet as a human right, the implications (did this mean internet access should be free?), limits on rights and freedoms, and positive and negative rights. Discussions ranged across the centuries from Confucius to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and across a wide range of rights like freedom of expression, privacy, right to information, access to knowledge, and freedom from discrimination.

Cross-regional discussion also followed: What do each of these rights and concepts mean in different countries and regions? Are these rights meaningful if they are not achieved in practice? Is access to the internet more important than access to water or food or medicine or freedom from torture? And if not, can it be a human right? Some ranged into how human rights relate to governments and the implications for multi-stakeholder processes.

Perhaps the discussions reveal more of what we do not know about human rights and their application to the internet. In this regard, I was delighted to see that both you and Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, agree that access to the internet is not a human right, but an enabler of access to human rights (although your article seemed to imply the Special Rapporteur said the opposite). Instead, the Special Rapporteur was clear that in relation to the internet our human rights apply, including our freedom of expression, privacy and freedom of association. He also said that governments have an obligation to facilitate access to the internet and that such access has two aspects: access to infrastructure and access to content. While your column focussed on the former, the current debates in the United States of America for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act tell us that access to content on the internet is now a global issue.

So far many have shared your view that access to the internet is not a human right, and agree that access to the internet facilitates a wide range of human rights, including civil and political rights and freedoms. But many have also qualified this, noting that as more and more governments (and corporations) require citizens to be online for basic civic transactions (enrolling in schools, accessing government information, banking, filing tax returns, compiling health information, and so on) interference with or denial of access becomes a human rights issue.

At the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi last year, APC held a pre-event on access to the internet. The conclusions of this event showed clearly that access to the internet is a multi-faceted concept including human rights, access to content, access to infrastructure, regulatory policies, privacy, security and more. In relation to ‘universal provision’ we concluded that the best way to ensure universal, affordable access was to take a human rights approach to multi-stakeholder internet governance.

You’ve helped to kick start 2012 with a healthy debate, the quality and depth of which is moving beyond a simple “yes” “no” polemic, to a richer, more nuanced and deeper discussion. While some of this will be very familiar to those who shaped the WSIS and developed the APC Internet Rights Charter and similar documents one thing is clear: The conversation about human rights and the internet is growing and the voices and views are getting more diverse.

This will be critically important in 2012 for many reasons including the upcoming Human Rights Council Panel on freedom of expression and the internet, the proposed one day United Nations discussion on “enhanced cooperation” in relation to critical internet resources, and the consideration of internet related human rights issues in the Universal Periodic Reviews of Ecuador, India, Brazil, South Africa, and the Philippines, to name a few.

As to the distinction between civil rights and human rights: international law is clear that civil rights are a subset of human rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related instruments. But this distinction is probably about as interesting to lay people as the distinction between TCP and IP – experts know what these mean, but to a lay person, all are just part of the overall system of shared protocols.

And this notion of shared protocols is why your call for engineers and the technical community to take seriously their responsibility for human rights should be strongly supported. In fact, we owe the current openness of the internet to those in the technical community, including you, who hard-baked human rights into internet protocols and other core internet architecture. Thank you. We trust that that we will be able to rely on this community to stand by their history as we face new challenges to the openness of the internet, such as that posed by SOPA and PIPA mentioned above.

We have called for the technical and engineering community to talk more with human rights advocates precisely for some of the reasons you mention. And there is lots to talk about including WHOIS policy, IPv6, new technologies and privacy, and much more. But is there shared understanding between the technical community and human rights advocates about human rights, about how these relate to technical issues, or about the current challenges facing the technical and engineering communities?

Let’s keep this important debate going throughout this year and beyond. Join with us to bring the technical and human rights communities together to discuss how we can take these ideas forward together. Human rights need to be at the forefront of any technical or policy discussion, which is why we have suggested that human rights be the main theme of the IGF in 2012.

2012/1/10 Grace Mutung'u (Bomu) <nmutungu@gmail.com>

and here's another rejoinder:
deepdip.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/internet-access-as-human-right-mr-cerf-shoots-himself-in-the-foot/
Does the technology tail wag
the human rights dog?
In his recent op-ed in the NYT [1] Mr. CERF has argued
that “internet access” is not a “human right” – though
possibly a “civil right” – because “a technology is an
enabler of rights, not a right itself”.
His argumentation is catchy, but muddles the issues;
Mr. CERF, it seems to me, ends up shooting himself in
the foot.
When he states: “the US never decreed that everyone
has a ‘right’ to a telephone”, he means “universal
service” – a telephone line strung to each and every
door, or country- wide total network coverage for every
citizen. Indeed, there is no right to total (or free)
coverage - just as “freedom of the press” does not
entitle every citizen to a free copy of the NYT every
morning at her doorstep.
When he states that “freedom of access” should
ensure “freedom of speech etc.” he refers to the
political conditions under which people who have
access to communication media are entitled to
communicate among each other: free of government
interference. This personal right is e.g. enshrined in
the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
“Freedom of speech” is an abstract right. Its exercise
necessarily relies on technologies: from the human
voice to paper, radio and so on – and must apply
automatically to all supports through which it is
exercised – internet being the latest (but certainly not
the last) kid on the block. When radio or TV emerged
in the US no one seriously argued that the “right to
free speech” as enshrined in the First Amendment did
not apply to them “because they were only an
enabler” . As long as content and support are
inextricably wedded (and control of the content would
be through the support) Mr. CERF’s argument
“technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself” is
spurious.
The UN Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR )[2] and
the European Convention on Human Rights[3] are
clear on the fact that the abstract right is embedded
in the technologies.
Mr. CERF goes on to make a distinction between
“human right” and “civil right”. He likes “civil rights”
better than “human rights” . He argues: “Civil rights are

different from human rights because they are
conferred upon us by law, not intrinsic to us as human

beings.”
By the same logic, Mr. CERF would reject the US
Declaration of Independence, where it states: “We
hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – for its
character is “self-evident ” and universal. He would
however endorse the Bill of Rights as positive law.
“Human rights” are not self-executing : they represent
legitimate aspirations – not obligations. Their role is to
provide universal legitimacy for these aspirations. No
government may be exonerated from addressing the
moral obligation on grounds of cultural
“exceptionalism” – cultural or otherwise; and it would
have to justify to public opinion world-wide any
curtailment of the aspiration.
On the other hand each state ought to strive and
concretize such aspirations through appropriate legal
means, if and when politically and materially possible.
This is not always the case, as US history retells. The
Bill of Rights enshrines personal and political rights.
Exercising such rights effectively presupposes
economic independence – President Jefferson saw it
that way already, when he hailed “free yeomanry” as
the basis of the Republic. President F. D. Roosevelt
proposed in 1944 that a “Second Bill of Rights” be
passed to make the broad aspiration of economic
rights secure in law. He did not succeed [4] . There is
no “civil right” to hold a job today, though we may hold
a universal aspiration that all have one, and Art. 22-25
of UNDHR stipulate such “rights” .
Would Mr. CERF really be ready to trade the universal
aspiration to politically unfettered “internet access” for
a commitment to equivalent enforceable and
judiciable civil rights in this matter?

On 09/01/2012, Victor Kapiyo <vkapiyo@gmail.com> wrote:
> True McTim, the GA hasn't declared it as such yet. But the report (see:
> http://documents.latimes.com/un-report-internet-rights/) by the
> special rapporteur as presented to the GA is without doubt persuasive
> authority on the subject and will (if not already) influence the treatment
> by states of internet access. And as you rightly point out, many states
> have already taken some positive steps.
>
>
>
> On 9 January 2012 11:16, McTim <dogwallah@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Victor,
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Victor Kapiyo <vkapiyo@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I would agree with Grace and disagree with Cerf to some extent.
>> >
>> > I think the internet has become an essential component of the human
>> > condition, and perhaps that would explain the reasoning of the UN in
>> > declaring access to the internet a human right.
>>
>>
>> I don't believe that the UN has actually declared this a human right.
>> Various Member States have passed laws declaring this, but the General
>> Assembly of the UN has not (yet) to my knowledge actually enshrined
>> Internet access as s human right.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Cheers,
>>
>> McTim
>> "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
>> route indicates how we get there." Jon Postel
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Victor Kapiyo, LL.B
>
> ====================================================

> *“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude” Zig Ziglar

> *
>

--
Grace L.N. Mutung'u (Bomu)
Kenya
Skype: gracebomu
Twitter: GraceMutung'u (Bomu)