This week began a new edition of the Regional Preparatory Meeting for the Internet Governance Forum, LACIGF.
LACIGF, like all governance forums, is a multistakeholder space. What does this mean? That they are spaces in which it is a matter of bringing together all interested parties to participate, dialogue, inform themselves and seek answers and solutions to the different problems that are perceived in the ecosystem.
As stated by Guilherme Canela (UNESCO) in the article "Democratic rule of law and internet governance: the key role of judicial operators"Recognizing the complexity of the internet ecosystem implies the need to include a wide range of actors, "especially when their gaze must be considered as central to the development of the internet under a logic that respects human rights".
Governance spaces take on even greater importance in times of pandemic, to the extent that isolation and digitization force us to think about internet access and freedom of expression from a much broader, more just and inclusive perspective. In these times, meeting in the digital space presents a challenge, but also an opportunity. Without going any further, last month we carried out for the first time the CELE workshop “For a better regulation of the internet in Latin America” 100% online. This presented a challenge - despite having been the eighth edition of the workshop - not only to offer quality content in the best possible way, but to coordinate the simultaneous meetings with a group of more than 30 people.
The opening of this virtual space must be celebrated, as it allows maintaining the spaces and facilitating participation. In the 2019 global IGF in Berlin42% of the participants were from civil society, 19% from the private sector, 18% from governments, 11% from the technical community, 4% from intergovernmental organizations, 3% from the press and another 3% from legislators. Only 9% of the participants gathered in Germany came from Latin America and the Caribbean. This is without prejudice to the fact that remote participation in the event has historically been enabled, but even with this resource, Latin America represented 6% of remote participation hubs.
That is why the LAC IGF is a fundamental space to bring these debates closer to the region, especially during the quarantine.
The possibility of having these online spaces allows us to imagine multiple and diverse scenarios around possible attendance and participation in the 2020 forum. Unfortunately, there are no public statistics available on remote participation in this regional forum in the past. Despite this, very probably, the modality can have little influence on the greater or lesser representation of some actors in the debate. Among them, legislators and the judiciary, which historically, both in global and regional forums, have a tradition of little or no participation.
In his paper, Canela points out three key reasons for promoting the active participation of the judiciary in internet governance spaces: they are jurisdictional decision makers on the internet; They require technical knowledge of the Internet and new technologies for the development of investigations of their own jurisdiction, including the development of practices around digital evidence; and finally they are users of the internet and of everything that the virtual world has to offer, and they use it both for private and professional use. And they referred to all of them in the session that Canela himself organized, together with CELE, at the 2019 IGF with judges from Brazil, Ghana and the European Court of Human Rights.
This three-dimensional dimension shows that the participation of judges in Internet governance spaces could be key to guaranteeing respect for human rights on the Internet. However, judicial operators do not have initial training that gives them the tools to deal with these complex issues from a human rights protection and promotion perspective, and they do not tend to participate in governance spaces. This occurs despite the fact that, according to Unesco surveys, judges, prosecutors and public defenders have a clear interest in these issues. This interest is clearly seen in the online course "International legal framework of freedom of expression, access to public information and protection of journalists" that has been carried out for five years under the coordination of Catalina Botero, dean of the Faculty of Law from the Universidad de los Andes, and is co-organized by UNESCO, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In the course, the module on “Freedom of expression and the Internet” is the one that attracted the most attention among those who took the course, “both because it contains novel topics and because it increasingly faces legal challenges in which the Internet appears in the center of the scene ”. The contents of the module seek to bring the participants closer to the perspectives of the international system, in which topics ranging from the basic notions of internet architecture, its design and operation, through the responsibility of intermediaries, to conditions under which content filtering and blocking are acceptable.
Some experiences within the judiciary reinforce this conclusion, even showing how, in the absence of formal participation in governance events, the higher courts (especially) have sometimes generated their own spaces for debate on governance. The public audience held by the Colombian Constitutional Court in 2019 on the liability of intermediaries could be cited as an interesting precedent. It did not discuss a case but problems common to a number of cases that were processed in the Court and that required a multi-stakeholder discussion capable of outlining for the Court the complexity of the problems addressed, the possible theoretical solutions and the implications of the proposed solutions.
A year after the hearing, Lucia Camacho from the Karisma Foundation describes her as: “An unprecedented event in which a high court in the country summoned experts, civil society organizations and representatives of platforms to pronounce on the exercise of freedom of expression on the internet, data protection in the digital age and the responsibility of internet intermediaries such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, among others. " Similarly, the hearings held by the Argentine Supreme Court in the Belén Rodriguez case and the invitation of the Court to present amicus in that case could also be read along these lines, although focused on an individual and specific case.
What happens then? Why is it so difficult for the judiciary to approach these forums? If there is an interest from the governance spaces in which the judiciary participates and from the judicial operators in internalizing issues related to the internet, where are we failing? What opportunity for debate and conversation are we missing? Perhaps this post can, at least, serve as an invitation to the judiciary to join the governance conversations, beginning by debating these basic questions around access to these spaces.
By Victoria Abatte (@vicabatte) and Agustina Del Campo (@gustinadelcamp)
Photo: @marvelous
