26 June 2019, 16:00-17:30
Event
The Internet has provided enormous opportunities for the exercise of the rights to freedom expression, association, and peaceful assembly. As global civic space has shrunk, the online sphere has proven essential for human rights defenders, media, and civil society more broadly, to access and share information and to hold the powerful to account.
The Internet has also brought new challenges. The proliferation of ‘hate speech’ and harassment targeting marginalised groups and human rights defenders, disinformation intended to undermine public debate and trust, incitement to terrorist acts, are among those with significant and negative human rights impacts.
Increasingly, States are engaging in regulation that threatens to restrict online civic space, often delegating the complex task of policing speech to private actors, without also delegating clear responsibilities to respect human rights.
While moves toward regulation are often rooted in genuine concern for the public interest, many States deploy similar arguments as a smokescreen for their efforts to consolidate power, control public discourse, and silence oppositional voices, under the auspices of protecting “national sovereignty” or “security”.
Unchecked surveillance, criminalization of online expression and “cybercrime” prosecutions, data localisation regulations, attacks on encryption, increased website blocking and filtering, and internet shutdowns, are all on the rise, alongside less sophisticated but severe forms of harassment and intimidation. Private actors are often coopted into or actively profit from these human rights abuses, through arrangements that are opaque and outside of applicable legal frameworks.
These trends pose significant challenges to the Human Rights Council’s often-repeated maxim that “the same human rights people have offline must also be protected online.”
Join us to discuss what role the Human Rights Council can and should play in bolstering support for normative progress and action in defending our online civic space.
Adobe
Our research brief, Neurotechnology and Human Rights: An Audit of Risks, Regulatory Challenges, and Opportunities, examines the human rights implications of neurotechnology in both therapeutic and commercial applications.
Adobe
Our recent research brief, Neurodata: Navigating GDPR and AI Act Compliance in the Context of Neurotechnology, examines how effectively GDPR addresses the unique risks posed by neurodata.
Adobe Stock
This seminar explores how national mechanisms for implementation, reporting and follow-up can better integrate the capacities, data, and experiences of local and regional governments in advancing human rights implementation and reporting.
Adobe Stock
The event, as part of the AI for Good Summit 2025 will explore how AI tools can support faster data analysis, help uncover patterns in large datasets, and expand the reach of human rights work.
UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré
This training course will explore the origin and evolution of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and its functioning in Geneva and will focus on the nature of implementation of the UPR recommendations at the national level.
Adobe
This training course, specifically designed for staff of city and regional governments, will explore the means and mechanisms through which local and regional governments can interact with and integrate the recommendations of international human rights bodies in their concrete work at the local level.
UN Photo/Violaine Martin
The IHL-EP works to strengthen the capacity of human rights mechanisms to incorporate IHL into their work in an efficacious and comprehensive manner. By so doing, it aims to address the normative and practical challenges that human rights bodies encounter when dealing with cases in which IHL applies.
The Geneva Human Rights Platform contributes to this review process by providing expert input via different avenues, by facilitating dialogue on the review among various stakeholders, as well as by accompanying the development of a follow-up resolution to 68/268 in New York and in Geneva.
Geneva Academy
Geneva Academy