Monthly Bulletin April 2021 Legislative Observatory CELE.

News of the legislative and regulatory activity, judicial and administrative decisions.

Argentina

  • On 28/04, the Senate Committee on Systems, Media and Freedom of Expression called a meeting with experts on the subject to discuss “Freedom of expression and disinformation. Tools and actions against fake news that threaten public health ”. Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte, a member of CELE, participated in this meeting and highlighted the work and research that still needs to be done on understanding the origin, nature and effects of the phenomenon of disinformation. In addition, he stressed that the recommendations that exist on the subject are rather prudent and reject the strictest regulatory actions (not because self-regulation is the answer but because regulation does not contribute to solving the problem). Finally, he highlighted the importance of digital literacy measures. You the complete encounter. 
  • On 08/04, the National Cybersecurity Directorate created the Advisory Committee for the Development and Implementation of Secure Applications. The objective of this committee is to advise on the preparation of guides and protocols of principles and good practices related to security in the development, contracting and implementation of computer applications used by the National Public Sector bodies. Different experts in the matter were summoned to participate in said Committee, including the Vía Libre Foundation. 
  • The prosecutor before the Federal Court of Appeals of Bahía Blanca and the prosecutor in charge of the Specialized Prosecutor's Unit on Violence against Women (UFEM) they ruled that it was necessary to revoke a precautionary measure that ordered Facebook and Google Argentina to eliminate a publication in that social network that pointed to a man as the abuser of a teenager, as well as the links that the search engine produced as results in this regard. The relevance of the case was given because the prosecutors maintained that freedom of expression prevailed over the right to honor and highlighted that social networks are "a space to express the violence that was and is infringed" on groups of women and dissidents.
  • On 21/04 the website www.google.com.ar stopped working for a error. This was due to the fact that in NIC.ar (the service that manages the .ar domains), the google.com.ar domain was released because it had expired and, seeing the window of opportunity, another person registered it in their name. However, two hours later the domain returned to work and was listed as the property of Google.

 

Brazil

 

Chile: 

  • The Chilean Senate approved the second debate of the bill that declares the Internet as a public telecommunications service. With this vote, the initiative will go to the Chamber of Deputies for a vote. As Observacom explains, the bill “maintains that the principles that govern the installation, operation and exploitation of public telecommunications services are: technological neutrality; universality; continuity, shared use of infrastructure; and transparency, equality and efficiency in the allocation of resources ”.

 

Colombia:

  • In April, a controversy began on social networks over a bill from the MIRA Party that, According to some people, could lead to prison to those who make cartoons and memes. The project, originally proposed in 2020, proposed to punish those who use technological means to create images or videos in which the face of another person is simulated. However, while the project seeks to prevent cybercrime, several cartoonists denounced that a law like this could be used to silence those who criticize the powerful. Given the controversy, on April 16 the party requested to withdraw the project.
  • On April 23, the Minister of Information and Communication Technologies, Karen Abudinen, presented a bill which seeks to regulate the responsibility of the media and internet service providers with respect to children and adolescents. The project establishes a regime of obligations, duties, prohibitions and sanctions for internet service providers, among which is to block, report and combat the dissemination of content that "directly or indirectly violates moral, mental or physical integrity of childhood, infancy and adolescence ».

 

Ecuador:

  • In a recent case of xenophobia, a journalist of Venezuelan nationality was forced to delete a video by the public force. In the scene, the gendarmes are seen intimidating a Venezuelan citizen in the northern neighborhood of Quito. The case went viral on social media. Ecuador is one of the main receivers of migration of Venezuelan citizens and during the presidential campaign, society witnessed an important politicization of the situation of vulnerability and extreme poverty in which migrants live in the main cities of the country.
  • On 11/04 Ecuador elected its new president, who will command the government until 2025. He is the Guayaquil banker and businessman Guillermo Lasso-Mendoza, who prevailed over the leftist candidate Andrés Arauz, a supporter of former president Rafael Correa. Lasso-Mendoza, who defines himself as a right-wing liberal Democrat, has committed with the defense of freedom of expression in its new term and has announced efforts to derogate the Organic Law of Communication that, at the time, came to be uniformly objected by supervisory organisms in the matter of human rights, for nonconformity with international standards. Although the Law has been recently reformed, it still has questionable tools, such as the directing and supervision of content. 

 

Mexico

  • On 13/04 it was approved in the Senate with 54 votes in favor, 49 against and 10 abstentions, the draft decree by which various provisions of the Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Law are amended and added to create the National Register of Mobile Telephone Users, so that in the coming days it is expected that the amendments to the law will be published in the Official Gazette of the Federation. In this regard, civil society organizations such as R3D y Article 19 they spoke out against, among other things, the risks of concentrating biometric information. On April 16, 2021, it was published in the Official Journal of the Federation the aforementioned reform The presentation of unconstitutionality actions by various public actors with the power to do so, as well as amparo lawsuits, is expected.  
  • On 05/04 the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, revealed that a video that circulated on social networks in which it was seen how an elderly person was not injected with the vaccine against COVID19, was a montage and pointed out that this type of practices have been used in the past, recalling the case of the detention by Florence Cassez. It is noteworthy that the journalist Carlos Loret de Mola identified this action as a personal attack on him.  
  • On 31/03 the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed his discontent with the Human Rights Report of the Department of State of the United States of America, and questioned the work of the civil society organization Article 19, by virtue of the fact that part of the aforementioned report is based on the work of this organization. The President questioned the origins of the funding it receives, as well as the current job that its former directors currently have, in order to highlight that the organization is part of a conservative movement that is against it.   
  • On 06/04 Senator Jesús Lucía Trasviña Waldenrath presented the initiative with a draft decree to issue the General Cybersecurity Law which contains various crimes in which unlawful conduct is carried out through the use of new technologies.  
  • On 14/04, the newspaper El País published an investigation in which it realized that the Attorney General's Office of the Republic-Mexico (FGR) contracted surveillance technologies (Geographic Location Service) with Neolinx de México (a company that the former President Peña Nieto had hired for espionage services). In recent years R3D It has sought to obtain official information about the contracts that the FGR has with companies that develop surveillance technologies, as well as the use that is given to these technologies, however it has received negative results in this regard. 

 

 

Paraguay:

  • The Senate, chaired by its incumbent Oscar Salomón, approved with modifications the bill "That creates a national fund to cover expenses during hospitalization in intensive care units of people with covid-19 in the public, private and pension sectors and the acquisition of essential drugs for the treatment of all COVID-19 patients " . It was during an extraordinary session developed this Tuesday.  
  • The Senate approved un bill «Which allocates the resources for corporate social responsibility corresponding to the Paraguayan side, of the entities binational Itaipú and Yacyretá to purchase medical supplies, biosafety materials for white-collar personnel and hospital infrastructure for the duration of the declaration of the state of health emergency for covid-19 ″, presented by Senator Blas Antonio Llano Ramos, dated April 14 of 2021. 

 

 

Peru

  • On 08/04, the political party Alianza para el Progreso presented a bill that proposes the “tax services modality”, by virtue of which private companies could sign agreements with Regional or Local Governments to finance and / or execute public investment projects that allow the provision of internet access service “for educational purposes in the sectors of poverty and extreme poverty ”, in substitution of the payment of a certain percentage of their taxes. 
  • Two bills that seek the regulation of content on the internet (7222-2020-CR) and the establishment of parental control filters (6383-2020-CR) were merged into one prediction of the Congressional Transportation and Communications Commission. On the one hand, the proposal includes various restrictions on the use of social networks that directly affect the user's freedom of expression, such as publishing “insulting comments”, “overexposing privacy”, accessing “inappropriate content”, among others. to prohibit its use to minors under 14 years of age. On the other hand, Internet service operating companies and social network providers are obliged to install parental control filters that allow the blocking of certain content. On April 20, 2021, the parliamentary commission had to evaluate the proposal, but the discussion was suspended in order to open a previous working table.

 

We thank our consultants for their work and contributions to this regional newsletter: Matías González (Argentina), Ártur Pericles (Brazil), Luisa Isaza (Colombia), Victor Cabezas (Ecuador), Juan Carlos Arjona Estévez (Mexico), Camilo Filartiga (Paraguay) and Andrés Calderón (Peru),