The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> We all live in a digital world. We all need it to be open and safe. We all want to trust, and to be trusted.
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>> We all despise control.
>> And desire freedom.
>> We are all united. (No audio)
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Hello, everyone. I think hopefully we will have more people joining in, but I will start and also we can get the discussion going and welcome to the IRPC. It's great to see so many familiar faces with us today, and I'm very happy to welcome those who are connecting for the first time.
So just as a brief introduction, the IRPC is based at the Internet Governance Forum and we an open network of individuals and organizations committed to making human work for the Internet. Anyone can join our mailing list and I will be sharing the link later in the committee, but you can also find it on our website at Internetrightsandprinciples.org. And those who would like to be more involved in outreach efforts are welcome to join our committee and we will be having nominations and elections very soon.
So our outreach work draws on the charter of human rights and the principles for the Internet which articulates existing human rights laws and norms and translates them not online context. So this charter was published in 2011, and it is the result of an amazing collaborative effort with members of this coalition.
So the charter is ‑‑ and today we are celebrating the great event, with this two‑part session. First part is the reflection on the achievements and challenges, and also a celebration of the translation work. And part two will be looking into the next decade. We look forward to your comments and questions.
We also expect some discussion in the room, and in the chat, and also via social networks. Our online moderator is Raashi Saxena who is part of the coalition and in the room, I hope we have June Paris. Please use the #human rights and as.
>> MARTIN HULLIN: This meeting is being recorded and captioned and our captioner is Tracy Reinke. I hope I'm pronouncing it right and finally and because we obviously want to give everyone the chance to participate, we ask everyone to be brief, interventions of around two minutes.
And now without any further ado, I would like to go straight to our panel.
And my first guest here today is Marianne Franklin, former cochair of the IRPC, member of the coalition steering committee and professor the global media and politics at Goldsmiths University of London. And Marianne, you witnessed the birth of the charter project and you have been part of this outreach effort for the last decade. Can you tell us more the drafting process and what you consider the main achievements and the biggest challenge for the charter ten years on.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, Minda.
I'm going to share screen. So can you see my screen there? Apart from yourselves? With the different images?
>> Yes.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: These images cover the full ten years ‑‑ not quite. The Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet is ten years old which is a lifetime in computing terms. If you followed Moore's law, every 18 months there's a new quantum leap. We have survived five or six of these. The charter is a collective and collaborating effort, across sectors, affiliations funding streams and level of techno and legal expertise. It's actually a child of the Internet Governance Forum.
The second thing I would like to thank is Max Singer and Dixie Horton who were the leading lights back in the early years.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Anyway, I will start again if I may Minda. Can we reset?
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Yes, please. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Well, anyway, I was just acknowledging the three leader ‑‑ the leadership of three people prior to my chairing, which began in 2012, that's Max Singer, Lisa Warner and Dixie Horton and the charter, these sorts of undertakings did not come in a vacuum. It didn't emerge from nowhere. It didn't fall off the tree, already made. It was a long two‑year effort to get this particular version of the charter into respectable level of legal coherence and acceptance by the very broad ranging membership of the coalition at the time which was based on a LISTSERV and that's the basis of 500 members on the LISTSERV now. It was drafted over 2009 and 2010. Anyone could take part. It was a bit of a policy hack. It was modeled, is modeled on universal declaration of human rights and subsequent declarations of treaty and governance which you can see in the table of contents, and I will show them shortly.
This also included acknowledgment of environmental impacts. It only made to Article 4, clause b. It was going to be a whole article on its own, but we are very happy that explicit recognition was in there in 2010 and '11.
Now the full charter text was launched and that's the first photo. This is a game for everybody who been around for a while. Spot the person and tell us where they ended up career‑wise. They have all gone to do great thanks or retired or all sorts of other things.
It was released only in digital form, and it was accompanied by the ten punchy principles a distillation of the 21 articles of the charter. It was very effective, it turned out promotional and awareness raising document.
That was translated by our volunteers into 26 languages and in 2014, which is the ‑‑ the compiled ‑‑ the compilation slide on the right, we got the charter booklet underway, mainly to realize that digital document in itself may be necessary in a digital network environment, but was not sufficient for every form and format and platform, and levels of access. So the booklet took shape as a hard copy and now in digital form. You can contact us and we will send you a printed copy.
What is the charter? Those of us who were there in the beginning, the idea was to come up with a comprehensive framework, anchored human rights law for emerging challenges in what was called and still is in many places the online environment.
To be a shared reference point for dialogue and cooperation across sectors, this is quite distinct from the very important powerful advocacy documents that preceded the bill of rights, the communication rights and many others before, during and since the charter was released to be shared reference points particularly from a legal point of view, to be authoritative in that respect, and framing rights based norms for Internet policy making, and also to be not only an advocacy tool because many are doing very good work there, but to be education and policy making tool.
Because judiciaries, politicians, regulatory agencies still had to be persuaded that this was actually worthwhile. Because it wasn't obvious ten, 12 ‑‑ 11, 12, years ago. Why we should think about human rights law as it currently exists in all three, four generations through a digital network lens.
Anyone who took part in the very first drafting when we took the declaration of human rights and unpacked it and tried to revise it, not rewrite it, but to rephrase it, so that it made sense for what we understood ten years ago was important digitally ‑‑ well, I'm sure I'm not the only person who realized what an extraordinary piece of writing. It was honed down and checked for the legal coherence, argued over passionately, in the form you see now.
And it's for that reason, it's rather if you could argue slightly conservative approach.
It wasn't talking about new laws, not literally new rights. It was trying to articulate and translate if you like, transliterate the ideas, expressions and standards into a form that people who were online and working digitally could understand. So it was very clairvoyant in many ways and setting the bar. And I think in that respect, it's extremely successful and that's been its main achievement, Minda, actually, the ability to actually be taken seriously by lawyers, by judiciaries and by any number of people for whom this work is now a priority.
And human rights is now the epicenter of everything to do with Internet governance. So that's the biggest challenge, actually, I believe that was one of the questions, Linda, if I can finish with this point is maintaining the material support we need to translate, to print, and to reach out and work with local communities on all of these different translations and chip in with the space and time with the following speakers because the translating of our charter into different languages is the work. Every language edition has its own stories, and we will hear some of that today.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you. Thank you, Marianne. I will have to cut you there.
But thank you for the great introduction and insights. I'm really happy to see that we also have more people in the room that were involved from the beginning, including Anriette, and I would like to ask you another second question, because you mentioned, and well that the charter is now also available in print, and it has been translated into 11 different languages. And Marianne, you have been the driving force behind the charter booklet project. You have been coordinating the translation work. And so I would like to ask you, why ‑‑ why does it make a difference to have a printed charter in this digital age, and also how important do you think it is to have the charter translated into other languages?
Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Because you can hold it in your hand. You can open it. You can write in it. You can bend it backwards. And protect yourself when it's cold when you are on your bike. It's a powerful thing. It's a material article but it's powerful in digital form. It's either or. We realized that the materiality of this work is ‑‑ this is one format. The other materiality is digital, but we couldn't reach out in a way and contact communities for whom the Internet is still out this in the dream world, unless we had a hard copy and versions of that hard copy. So just quickly, the translations as I just said, are everything. They are the heart of the work, and I only realized that as we got on to half dozen languages, we got the Arabic version. When we heard about the struggles with the Turkish version and we had the Spanish version presented to us, out of the blue, and then it got presented to the Spanish Cinert. They said we don't know how to translate "Disability" in Arabic because it's a tricky word. And that's how we got into it.
From that point, I will stop because I know our next speakers will tell us about specific challenges and excitement and the thrill of translating something, translating meaning, you know, making sense of it. Thank you.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you, Marianne. And we actually are very lucky to have here with us a few representatives of the charter translation teams. And to share more about their work, and what it means to translate this document.
And last June, we had the soft launch of the Italian charter, and we are happy to welcome the coordinator of this translation project, Edoardo Celeste, with law and technology and innovation at the school of law and government at Dublin City University. Edoardo, thank you so much for joining us, and your team did such an amazing job with the Italian translation. And it was really a great collaborative effort. So can you tell us a little bit more about the Italian translation process?
Thank you.
>> EDOARDO CELESTE: Yes, sure. It's a pleasure to be here with you today and many thanks to Marianne and the people involved in this Dynamic Coalition for all the amazing work you have been doing over the past few years in the charter.
So we are inspired by your work and this is why in the first instance we volunteered to translate the charter in Italian. We felt that actually our language was missing, among the many translations and especially we have heard that actually as Marianne said, the translation itself is extremely helpful to get into the minds of, for example, law and policymaker, judges to speak their own languages. So first of all, there was sort of like the theoretical motivation and also behind this, as you said a collaborative effort. I will take a couple of words about that in a second.
So we felt essentially there was a discrepancy between constitutional language, expressed in the Italian language, related to the digital rights and the content promoted by the charter. So we wanted to bring in line this ‑‑ or put forward this conversation about digital rights that was being advanced in the English language and in other languages also in the Italian context. So this was one of the primary motivations of our translation. And secondly, related to the ‑‑ as we said, the collaborative effort, indeed, I'm extremely grateful to all the people that supported us in the joint effort because the translation was indeed done by several groups of students from the University of Padova, and the University of Salerno and I have also to thank my colleagues Claudia Patovani where the teacher involved in supervising the students in these two different universities and I helped them coordinating these students and achieving this translation.
If I have time, I would like to focus maybe, and let's stress a couple of points which were particularly difficult for us, in terms of from a translation perspective in Italian it may be helpful for others who may be translating the charter into other languages.
One the big problems we had was in terms of gender, and especially the Italian language, of course, we have strong masculine tradition in the sense that most of the neutral ‑‑ apparently neutral pronouns or terms that we used in reality are actually related in their masculine form.
So we tried to bypass this problem by using either the plural or find essentially new terms that we think are month are gender neutral, and we hope that by doing that we are also fostering a conversation from a legislative perspective and law making perspective in Italy about more gender‑neutral pronouns I don't know the field of digital rights.
And then another important point is more from a translation perspective, the fact that in English sometimes some prepositions are missing, and we needed to fill the space into Italian.
For example, the ‑‑ whether you talk about the Internet rights. So we had to specify where this Internet are sort of like placed from linguistics perspective. So we had to decide whether, for example, these rights were in the Internet or for the Internet, or of the Internet, and so on. So you will see, those of you who are familiar with the Italian language, strike a balance between these different forms. For example, in the title we opted "for" principle, but we see that some other rights are articulated into the Internet, because we thought implementation of the rights in the particular context of the Internet is needed.
I will stop here because I'm sure we have other topics to discuss and many other speakers.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you so much, Edoardo. It's really interesting what you said about the challenges with the language, and words themselves. And just to follow a little bit up on your remarks and we also have with us Malia Garcia, at the University of Salerno and also a collaborator in the translation project.
Thank you so much for joining us Maria. Could you tell us more about the student involvement and also as Eduardo said, did you experience any particular challenges with the translation?
>> MARIA GRAZIA VALERIANI: I will be speaking on behalf of the two groups of students who worked on the Italian translation of the charter. Let me introduce how we managed to work on the project and share a little bit of the challenges we faced during the process. So let's say that I want to start by saying that at the time we worked on this project, for many of us, it was first time we were introduced to digital policy and human rights. So we had to become familiar at the beginning with the material, and read it and understand all the charter as a whole because it was a very big notion at the beginning for us.
But after our first approach on the material, a typical work line for us was, you know, doing the 21 assigned articles, we had to create a first draft translation and then we added it to a common document in order to get feedbacks on the quality and the content of it, and we developed different moments of briefing and debriefing among the groups. So with a lot of suggestions from students and professors.
We also had in our groups international students and that's, I think, that was a good strength for the process because they could give their perspective, this he could analyze how the charter was translated into their language, and we could see some of the mechanisms from this. And that was very useful, I think. Also because we could look at aspects from new lenses and a richness for the project. So during the process, of course, we had to face different issues. Some of them were expected. Others turned out to be very challenge.
So following what Professor Celeste suggested, of course one issue was finding the gender neutral terms. As we know, English has a neutral general language, but Italian was very difficult thing to manage here in this case. So our goal was, of course, to obtain gender inclusion. We had to choose at the beginning if we want to maintain a neutral noun so create two different options, female and male option or find the right one that could contain both inclusion and a neutral response, of course.
I think at the end, we tried to ‑‑ we end up with non‑gender perspective in our translation and we came up, I think with good solutions. We tried to take inspiration also from other Italian documents for these topics and so we are starting to see more and more inclusion in this linguistic area and we should get used to keeping the gender neutral terms in all of our documents.
Another concern, of course, was the language because working with Professor Celeste has been extremely useful to receive his tools and directions and the Italian legal code, of course. We ended up seeing that Italian has different ways assessing different contents and sometimes we need more elements and sometimes it needs a completely different structure. So the main issue with keeping the original meaning, and at the same time, we have to guarantee the Italian's perspective.
And we know that ‑‑ we were supporting this cause and we felt very happy to be part of the effort. Thank you.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you, Maria. Thank you. We were hoping to have Carlos Affonso from Brazil here with us today. I don't think he will manage.
So I would like to go directly to Santosh, because I guess that a lot of the insights that you have been sharing with us will be important for his project too. So Santosh Sigdel is an IRPC Steering Committee member and part of the Digital Rights Nepal and we are collaborating with them for the Nepali translation of the charter. And Santosh, I hope you are there still.
>> SANTOSH SIGDEL: Yes, I'm still here, Minda.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: That's great. That's great that you managed to join us from Nepal. It's possibly a bit late over there. And I would like to know a little bit more of what's led you and the DRN to start this translation project. And also, what is your feedback so far. Thank you.
>> SANTOSH SIGDEL: Thank you Minda. First of all, hello, everyone, I'm very glad to be here and represent the DRN as well.
So we had organized the Nepal organization. And I was amazed and I didn't know about its existence until then, it was in 2017. Was my first encounter with this charter. During the lockdown time, the digital rights discussion is very limited but the uses are growing, the regulation is slowly coming but new regulations are coming but there are very few people discussing about it. So we started this initiative, Digital Rights Nepal.
And during the first strategy meetings and others we thought that this document would be very useful to promote digital rights and principle in Nepal because most of the documents are in English and there are very few and the stakeholders are very limited knowledge. We wanted to go to multi‑stakeholder and have a discussion about it. We needed it for the policy discourse, for policy lobbying. And so it was a kind of standard tool we were looking for. That's why we approached the coalition and we ‑‑ we requested for collaboration in translating in Nepalese. Now the process has started and there are a few challenges and a few revelation and few technical language‑related issues because the grammatic part and the sentence matter in Nepalese is different.
Here the subject, form object is different in Nepalese, it's subject, object and verb. And so verb in the last and so the sentence pattern is different and there are a few examples, political terms which doesn't make sense if we literally translate. For example, the term like "global south" and "global north." They are kind of political terms and if we translate it literally it doesn't give any sense. The one thing we first encounter is governments. There's no concept of the word. So it's not regulation. It's not administration. So how do we define the word "government" that's one the challenge and lately the team has decided that maybe we could promote the Internet governance as a single term, using the governance of the English because that is getting more popularity.
So now we have ‑‑ as part of the process, we are reaching out to the stakeholders. We will also share ‑‑ we have done the first draft and we will reach out to the stakeholders, and we are using it in Digital Rights and we believe that having it in Nepali, and they will be knowing more about the values because earlier, as Marianne said, this is a kind of reference point. This would be the reference point for the lawmaking processes and the new regulations and about the interpretation of already existing rights in different terms. Thank you, Minda.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you very much. I can see the time is flying. So I will open the floor for any questions you may have. And so Raashi, if ‑‑ and if you have seen any questions, please feel free to let us know or you can just raise your hand if you would like to do so. And for those in the room, if you would like to come forward and ask your question please too.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Minda, I'm not sure, are there any hands online? I'm just looking now at the Zoom session. I don't see any. It's Anriette here. I wanted to reflect here and there's a discussion in the chat about the history of the charter and why it's so important. I think that it really is significant. I mean, some of us will remember the history of this actually ‑‑ oh, June, you were going to speak. It dates back to the WSIS. The World Summit On the Information Society. And this was a lot of contestation on whether we needed new rights or not and we had the communications rights movement we felt we needed new rights and you had the traditional human rights organizations who felt, no, we've got to look at existing rights and how they comply.
And, in fact, I was at that time with the Association for Progressive Communications and we decided that we would look at existing rights and reinterpret them for the Internet. And we did that in quite a basic way. And then when the IRPC emerged, during the world summit of the Information Society where the IGF was created with people like Ricky Frank Jurgenson and it was the human rights experts who said look, use human rights and that the IRP did that. It was also very much influenced bring the work of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee and their ten principles that they ‑‑ that they launched into 2011, I think.
And which was looking at these rights from the perspective of people working in the Internet. I think that's why this is such a powerful. Because it does bring together that role of traditional human rights as Marianne was saying, but it also speaks the language of people that are working in the Internet. And speaking to Monika, I think the framework like the IRP charter initiated the work that is now being taken up by the human rights instruments and mechanisms, because we have done this translation, and because this charter reflected it so well. Now we can go and when we complain about our governments or our states not upholding rights, we have these documents to draw on and there's recognition for the fact that offline rights apply online.
It doesn't mean it's easy, but I think it's given us the language. It's given the tools, and the translation has been incredibly important, and it's given us, the community of people that continue to do this, and I think that's the interesting thing. That's ‑‑ that's an interesting thing. Net neutrality was a big issue. Now we are looking at artificial intelligence. I think there will always be new challenges that we need to look at through the lens of these Internet rights and principles.
Back to you, Minda.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you, Anriette, for the great points. I think we still have people trying to ask questions. I think Raashi and then Edoardo. Thank you.
Raashi, are you there?
>> RAASHI SAXENA: No, no, I have no questions. I just wanted to say that the questions are already answered.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you. We can go to Edoardo.
>> EDOARDO CELESTE: Rather than a question, I wanted to provide my position on what has just been said about the debate between like new rights and old rights in the challenge of the transition into Italian of the charter. Two groups of students from different universities spent the entire semester to understand how to translate simply from a different language, digital rights written into a charter can tell you about the necessity of doing this work of translation.
My opinion, the question between old rights, new rights, is not the right question here. Probably is the first problem. So here, there is a need for translation. Whether this will lead then to new rights in terms of rights that have not been expressed in this form in the past or not, I think is not the ‑‑ at least from a legal point of view, the question that we should ask at this moment. In my opinion, I think we can all agree that a work of translation is needed, constitutional norms have been crafted for an analog society that doesn't exist anymore. We read them in pieces of legislation and so on that very often norms are crafted in a way that cannot directly speak to the actors of digital society.
So I just wanted to stress in light of the work that we have done with the Italian translation.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you. And just before we go to Joanna, I just wanted to let June in the room go and speak, because she was asking for the floor for a little bit now. Thank you, June.
>> JUNE PARRIS: My name is June Parris. I'm a member of the IRPC. What I wanted to bring to your attention the Zoom room is locked. I'm not sure if everybody is having the same difficulty. I was unable to log in and I also want to commend the group on ‑‑ on all the work they have done with interpretations and translations, and I think it's a very good group to join and if anyone else is interested in joining in, I encourage them to get involved with the IRPC.
We also had a Working Group on language within the MAG and perhaps ‑‑ I'm not sure if you seen any of the work that that group was doing and so perhaps you should be, the IRPC should try to look for some of these documents and see if we can join forces with them. I'm not sure in the group is still active. It's actually evolved to another group and it's going places. So it would be a good idea to join forces with the work that is being done that started with the language group. So that's what I have to say. Thank you.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you June, thank you for being there as well and reporting on this session. And now, Joanna, the floor is yours. Thank you.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you. I wanted to share a few thoughts. At my last meeting that I participated if physically, as opposed to today, was in Venice during the IGF during the very early days of coalition and I wanted to highlight that this meeting is an opportunity for me to go back, to catch back with old friends, thank you, Marianne for having me here. But I also realized listening to you guys speak how much of an impact this work has had. So looking back at the history of the coalition, I see Mattias, Cateman and Marianne with whom we are launching the global digital human rights network which is clearly a research project, but the work that was initiated within the coalition clearly has fueled the generation of human rights researchers and human rights activists and I'm deeply convinced that the eager debates we had around the shape of the norms, around what it would mean to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the online environment, has fueled research in more ways than we imagined originally.
You can see now this bold work that was put forward, being transposed as Anriette and Marianne have described. Just during this one meeting, we have seen the European Commission regulate the work the platform workers that's something that the Dynamic Coalition had originally proposed, and you can see that reflected in the charter. This exercise of translating the principles into different languages and effectively adjusting them to different cultures, different needs, different histories, has helped us highlight the authority in different international settings and impacted the fact that the United Nations, for now and the disarmament context recognizes international law in its entirety as applicable to cyberspace and if that is indeed the case, all that is left to do is adjust the understanding of individual human rights to best suit the global environment and that's a work that's already been done by the Dynamic Coalition.
So I do hear the concerns around new rights or new circumstances where these rights will be applied and I appreciate the conversation, the chat as well, but the work that was done by the Dynamic Coalition has helped us to understand where these challenges areas might be, and has helped us to advance the dialogue so far that we are ready to have these conversations.
I welcome further work of the coalition with regard to, for example, artificial intelligence, as we have just noted, and I just wanted to note on a personal level, I feel terribly guilty for never completing the project of the Polish translation, but I view this invitation and my presence here as an opportunity to live up to that original promise. So thank you for having me here. It's a wonderful trip back in time. That makes me realize the entirety of the impact that the Dynamic Coalition has had. Thank you for having me here. That's what I wanted to say.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you so much, Joanna. Thank you for coming as well.
Now if there's no one else that has a question, we will have the opportunity to ask more, and I will pass it on to Marianne, because ‑‑
>> Sorry, Minda. We seem to have a raised hand in the room ‑‑ I don't want to interrupt your flow.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Elisabeth, nice to see you there. Yes, let's take the last question and then we'll go the to next part of the meeting.
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you. Can you hear me well?
Okay. Thank you. Just a very quick question, I understand that this kind of document is not an official document yet, adopted by the UN, it's probably and hopefully it's a work in progress, in that ‑‑ or will be an inspiration for documents that will be adopted later.
I don't know to launch ‑‑ to make ‑‑ probably you don't know that some people on this ‑‑ on the Internet cannot connect to the Zoom because the Zoom doesn't accept connections from the site. They their IPs and they ‑‑ when they find ‑‑ not only the Zoom, so many, but so many applications but, for example, Zoom, which is used to provide this service, cannot do this. It's not their option. It's being ‑‑ it's happened this way.
I don't know if this is a right being violated or not. I don't ‑‑ I hope that in the future, this kind of documents will try to formulate a way that we can discuss if this can continue or this can be solved or resolved. Thank you very much.
>> MINDA MOREIRA: I will invite Marianne to take the floor and moderate from here. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, Minda because Minda will be part of our next round of speakers which is Minda, Jacob Odame‑Baiden and we will relate to what the charter was and other initiatives to thinking what next, and how to build on the charter so to speak. And here we have, you know, the issue of timing and time sensitivity. So we are going to focus a little bit on work around the environment, artificial intelligence because we have been hosting some sessions there.
And how can the charter in its current form, as it's currently written with an eye to the future, how can it, you know, deal with eel merging issues that at the time ten years ago didn't have the public attention, particularly environmental sustainability and issues around AI and perhaps Edoardo, your point was a very, very important point in the beginning what is the difference between a new right and old right and principle.
So here, I think I will ask Minda and Elisabeth to take the floor. Our four speakers are ready. What do we do next and how do we include the youth voices.
And how can ‑‑ so I think that's the first question, I think. Is that the best way to do it so you speak to that first question? Expanding issue areas, updates, what's happening now, and what can happen next. So Minda, would you like to speak to this first of the two next propositions?
>> MINDA MOREIRA: I didn't thank you, Marianne. I will start with the example of the environmental sustainability, because it has been a focus issue for us over the last few years, as well as artificial intelligence, of course. But environmental sustainability because I think you went really a long way, and it all started as they were addressing over the last few years articles 1 through 4 of the charter and Article 4 of the charter is the right, the development through the Internet and we're looking at the article and looking at the closed environmental sustainability and it became very clear that technologies have huge impacts on ‑‑ on the environment, and ‑‑ and there was not much going on and not much discussion at the Internet Governance level and ecosystems.
So we started to look into it, and we started to bring this discussion to the IGF. I think 2018 was possibly our first meeting on the environmental sustainability and the ICTs.
And then, by looking at it closely, we kind of had the feeling that possibly we should do more about this clause, because Marianne knows the background story that we were supposed to have one more right, apparently in the charter and that would be focused on environmental sustainability, but at the time, it was one too many. I hope that I'm telling the right story.
It's a very important one but some people and some of the us feel that it should be developed. What do we do about it? Do we rewrite the charter? Do we include a new clause? As it has been proposed last year, our last meeting on human rights and the environment. And one of the discussions led to maybe we don't have to rewrite the charter. Maybe we can build upon it but leave the original intact. And that was the idea to possibly start with different protocols and environmental sustainability, for instance, would be one clause that would be reviewed and possibly developed.
So, yeah, I will stop here. I hope that I'm kind of responding to your question.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Yes, thank you, recalling the idea of a protocol, that Linda Horner used in getting the main protocol, and to develop and add new themes, updates and such like without going through ‑‑ re‑inventing the wheel as Monika quite rightly points out can be a danger.
What about our youth constituency and the fact that a generation of so‑called digital natives are extremely active and engaged in these topics. As Edoardo's students have shown and my students over the last few years. So Elisabeth Schauermann, I would like you to speak to that in any way shape or form. Welcome, a member of the youth forum. The ‑‑ what is it the Internet Governance Youth and also the German Informatics Society. Thank you, Elisabeth.
>> ELISABETH SCHAUERMANN: Thank you having done for the past few years a lot of capacity building work in the Internet governance sphere, what I see is the young people are aware of the principles that are in the charter and they work in different aspects and in different regional contexts on those. Some of them or many of them, maybe even without realizing that there is such a text to refer to.
Before I go into the environmental sustainability point of view, a thought that I had while you were speaking before, is that this is really a human rights education effort that we ‑‑ that we have to make because it empowers young people to know that they can build on something like this that can be recognized and has been developed in such a way.
So this is on the very basis, and I think myself included and also other people in the ‑‑ in this sphere, who engage new young people and Internet Governance, should refer to this more and also maybe as an activity, something along the lines of train‑to‑trainers is always a good idea to reach more people.
And then on the topic of environmental sustainability, as we pointed out, this is something that young people are very activist about and knowledgeable about. Based on the work of the coalition in 2019, at the youth IGF in Berlin, so the German youth IGF in Berlin and the IGF in Berlin. Youth topics. They said we need to pay attention to this, and sustainability needs to be looked at from ‑‑ from an ecological point of view, from a social point of view and economic point of view as well and all of these young people that came together really agreed on this and came up with messages and postulates and did this aft year, specifically in a project that I had the pleasure of the coordinating which was youth for sustainability, we were focused on this. If you look at the youth summit this year in Poland, which was also done as a collaborative project, there were also notions and postulates on environmental sustainability, data centers, regulations, such things.
So I think there's a lot of activity that's reflected back on the charter, and where a lot of work can be done to maybe integrate young people even more and make them aware that they can refer to this. And I see a waving hand in the room. So I will stop now and let you decide now Marianne, how you want to deal.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, Elisabeth. I'm sure we can come back. Just a point of order. We were zoombombed in the beginning and I'm not sure if the room is open. I wonder if our technical ‑‑ apparently the Zoom room is locked. Is it opened again to people arriving later or are we in danger of being zoombombed again. It's open again. Okay. All good.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Youth, yes, back in 2010, around Arab uprising. There were young people. And ten years on, they are so much youth. Also the idea that a lot of these ideas and principles are already now taken to heart, and back then, it was still a space one conversation.
So it's very fertile ground now.
And on that point, I would like to move to the next couple of speakers Joanna and Jacob to talk about how can the chart err help advance, you know, national if not regional, even local initiatives trying to educate and make aware, leaders, community leaders, judiciaries, local judges perhaps, how can the charter help in that work? And, please, speak to this your own way and what makes sense to you. I will start with Joanna. Thank you.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you, Marianne. That is indeed a very valid questioning, especially in the challenging times where human rights are a topic of an intense political debate, not just in central and eastern Europe where we virtually are meeting in a hybrid format today but universally. So the work that the coalition, as I so excitedly emphasized has done thus far is phenomenal background for further educational activities in whatever capacity those can have.
Now, speaking of the research backgrounds that the coalition has provided, you can see this happening with the current generation of researchers would are trying to keep them in their universities like mine or NGOs or organizations that focus on human rights. There's a lot of work being done to the same aim, by the Council of Europe, looking at the regional land cape here and those activities are targeted, and specific communities including judges, for example.
So wherever the Council of Europe sees the need to advance human rights, it puts it forward. And there's also work by the fundamental rights agency, when it comes to thematic areas, and it stems from the very same source. So if you guys looking at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when is the paramount example of human rights and all that is left to do is detail that to the needs of current societies. So the fundamental rights agency does this, for example, right now, targeted at artificial intelligence. There's a huge project there.
But I'm trying to cherry pick examples of the work that the charter has influenced to have a common denominator. There's now this debate around cybersecurity curriculum. We're looking at a cybersecurity professional and we're trying to figure out what it means. Now, not only does this professionalized cybersecurity curriculum mean human rights understanding and awareness, but now it's listening to you guys speak and looking at that decade of work that has provided such tangible output, I'm thinking about building a human rights curriculum that would combine these exercises. I'm not saying there isn't work being done. Yes, there is and this is happening everywhere and I welcome a new generation of human rights policy developers. I don't want to say just researchers, activists but there are policies, comprehensive policies being put in place. I welcome that. There is an intense debate in Poland and elsewhere around what human rights mean.
Let's just look at freedom of expression online. One could say Euro concept of hate speech, where do we draw the line these are pertinent policy questions that we need answers to. I think that's the platform that we need to develop. I have seen different coalitions working on different areas of internet governance, some of whom are represented in the Zoom room and in the room in Katowice and I have seen them developed into well‑structured curriculum.
This was a way to translate this on what human rights mean, when put online, I think that would be wonderful and that's my inspiration, that's my takeaway from this particular panel. But generally, speaking, I think that you guys have the capacity to offer trainings not just through individual institutions or supporting those, which I know is happening, and the Dynamic Coalition, has people who do the work, but I think you have provided a framework that could easily be transposed on to professionalized human rights training. I wanted to thank you for that, and I think that might be part of the answer although I have no claim of providing a comprehensive one. That's all I have at this point. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Yes, the bridge between the technical communities, the lawmakers, the human rights activists and the Internet policy, that was the premise of the charter project in the beginning and it's still its basic animating factor.
Jacob, you have been doing amazing work in your community and with your network. So we would love to hear about how you see the charter inspiring and forming or providing perhaps a backbone for your work and what are you doing so we can learn from you. Thank you. The floor is yours.
>> JACOB ODAME-BAIDEN: Thank you very much. I will try to undo my video, but it's difficult to bring up my video.
I became the IRPC member beginning of this year, and I got introduced to the charter very simple, straight to the point, ten‑point charter and that resonates with me, because I'm a lawyer and I'm passionate about human rights.
And in Ghana, the Internet ‑‑ we have the Ghana school of Internet. One of the major themes was to focus on the digital rights as part of my speech, I was speaking on human rights in the digital age, and I decided to make the charter my main focus. So in this, that is comprised of fellows about 30 fellows. I did a presentation to them. We had various stakeholders from civil society, you know, technical community, but most importantly, we had people from the government and so you could sense that it was an eye opener for them. Human rights is fundamental and has a place in our national constitution but they really could not relate how it exists in digital spaces. And illustrations like, you know, Internet shutdown, for instance, that is prevalence in our region. When the Internet goes off, then you can point to association, because you cannot collaborate in a time like co‑visit, where physical meetings were limited but the way people could actually mobilize and communicate was to use online platforms and then, of course, issues concerning the freedom of expression and they basically saw that connection and they were excited. We introduced the coalition to them, and I think Minda testified to it, that day we saw a spike. So we had a lot of people from my community join in ‑‑ join in our coalition.
And I have seen active web activity following the work of the coalition. This happened around the 30th of June. Then on the 24th to the 26th of August also, I got invited from our friends from Cameroon during the ICT Africa symposium and I presented the same topic and I got basically the same reaction.
So what I basically sense is that we need to continue with this effort, and seize the platform and the opportunities to be able to present this work, because it is very fair, and people resonate and identify the human rights are issues. It's a very topical issue but then the temptation is people find themselves using the Internet and stuff and they do not really know that connection, that, you know, this human rights, which is fundamental need to be guarded, especially as we are moving towards digital environments for how we go about our ways, how we go to school and how we access services and how we collaborate and all. So that's my contribution, based on the work that I have done here in Ghana and on the continent. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you so much, Jacob. I put the link up. I believe ‑‑ I hope that's the right one. Ghanasig.org?
>> JACOB ODAME-BAIDEN: That's correct.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: This session goes to 20 past the hour; is that correct in yeah. We have a little bit of time for open discussion. We have a question from the floor from Amir, which I have answered to some respect by pasting in the chat page. The aims and the principles of the charter, which we ‑‑ which is to generate this conversation and I think to become a touchstone, a point of reference as Joanna has put to well. And an inspiration as Jacob has attested to. And a form of accountability as Elisabeth has noted about the audience to whom and for it speaks. And as Minda pointed out, the next steps need to be to develop points in the charter, articles and subclauses of those articles as protocols which in itself is a whole writing exercise and requires quite a bit of time and attention. Those are the kind of themes coming through from the second part. Elisabeth, does someone have a mic to hand to that person?
>> A mic is available.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Andre, hello.
>> PARTICIPANT: Hello. Hello. Nice to meet you all. Nice to meet Marianne. Ice to meet you. Now, I'm representing McGill University in Montreal, Canada. And so I have some observations about that. About the issues discussed. First of all, about the use and interaction of the youth. So when I'm teaching on any course on human rights on the Internet. I give them the chance to create the draft document on the human rights. It could be a good student project and it could be a good project, how to show what ‑‑ what are they thinking of in creation of this kind of instrument. That's my first observation.
The second observation is I think ‑‑ the good thing is to organize something like the model United Nations, with the topic of the human rights online. And what will be created there that was a great surprise?
Also there in Montreal, I initiated, let's say the Working Group to create the universal declaration of digital rights and we have a seminar last month about that. And let's say what will happen with the student ‑‑ the student community?
And then there are issues about the unchangeability and the ‑‑ and the document as a living document.
I think the idea is to create protocols, to the charter on specific issues, like it was done, for example, for European convention of human rights or other human rights instruments just to create protocols on new issues or emerging issues and human rights protection.
But I think the ‑‑ that's my general observation is to go to and prepare to implementation of the document. Let's say that we have a mandate to be revised after 2025, and I hope the forum itself will get ‑‑ will receive the opportunity to adopt soft law instruments and that ‑‑ and this atmosphere would like to, let's say, to adopt it officially as international legal instrument, we should be based for all kind of digital rights. And I think that will be a good idea.
And before 2025, we should have a text to be actually prepared for this implementation.
I think there is no obstacles to implement, or to implement it officially at the UN level.
Thank you very much.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, Andre. Thank you, Andre, who translated the charter in Russian and published it and also a second volume of commentary on the charter in Russian. So we are looking forward to the PDF so we can have that Russian translation on the website.
And what comes up next with the new document and the highest possible level. It's coming from the floor from Amir. Before I turn to Amir's question, Minda, did you want to make a point here?
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Yes, I was just moving on what Andre has just said, because I also believe that we should really look and as we have been discussing at RPC, it's some developments on I mention issues like artificial intelligence and environmental sustainability and so on. And, yes, I also agree that ‑‑ which one of my ideas that inspired me and possibly going this route was the convention ‑‑ the European Convention on Human Rights because I think it's great that you can see the original document, and ‑‑ and then you have all the protocols that follow, obviously, but you can always go there and see Article 2 and the provisions that at a time made sense, and you know that these days were not ‑‑ wouldn't be possible, and other protocols came and were ratified and therefore, the provision ‑‑ the initial provision just doesn't exist anymore, but it's still there.
It gives you a perspective on this living document and I think that this charter is a living document and therefore, needs to be developed.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: We have a question or a comment from Amir about the relationship between the charter and the global digital compact SG. I'm unsure what document is being preferred to. The charter is the beginning of a large change, like a genealogy and the charter itself didn't begin for nothing as we have in the chat.
So perhaps the next question is the strategic question of drilling down as Lisa Horner and both Minda Moreira, were part of this. We need to go deeper and unpack certain provisions, not by rewriting the charter, but by unpacking and that way to implement it.
That's the answer to the charter relationship to some high-level initiatives that are in the air now. There's some word of treaties, there's the digital cooperation initiative that ‑‑ that the UN Secretary General is leading, and there are many ‑‑ we could say competitors. We could say it's a very competitive doe plain but I ‑‑ domain but I think this would be missing the point and reducing our collaborative work and cross sector work to a sort of marketplace of survival of the fittest and I think that would be a shame. Nonetheless, it's a reality.
I think we need to move to summation and final takeaways. We also had from Amir, he was wondering about the charter on justice, ethics and morality. The charter of Internet ‑‑ the charter of human rights and principles for the Internet is embedded in the UN our treaties and covenants which address justice and morality, but none of these documents are set in stone as Minda quite rightly points out.
At this point, I would like to ask our speakers ‑‑ I will see if there's anything in the room? Does nip have any questions or comments or challenges from the room or on Zoom before we start rounding up?
None?
Okay. Well, I'm just going to ‑‑ we brought Eduardo, we have Elisabeth, Minda and Jacob and Joanna so just to get you thinking, one sentence statement on the future of the charter and then I have the dubious privilege of wrapping it up. So I will remain from my one sentence and make that at the end as a form of outro. Should we start with Maria Grazia, are you still with us? Maria, given the experience you just had, what is your one sentence statement on the future of the charter as you have experienced and translated it?
>> MARIA GRAZIA VALERIANA: My presence here is a sample of what we are talking about, the inclusion and the importance of involving more and more different background experiences. So I really believe in this, and these actions, I think, I think ‑‑ these are strongly needed. And so I think that a situation like this are happening more and more, and it has been a pleasure for me to be a part of this, speaking on behalf of all the students. So we hope to see things like this on the future more and more, and ‑‑ and so, yeah. And so it's a pleasure for me.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you, Maria, thank you for all of your work. Edoardo, one of the leaders of the Italian edition. What are your thoughts of the charter itself in the current form or extended form?
Edoardo? Okay. We will come back to Edoardo. Santosh.
>> SANTOSH SIGDEL: Thank you, Marianne. I think this is a very problem time we are passing through. And it is not only the governments, and the big companies as well. Looking at this from my open country. We are going through the law country. We have the cybersecurity policy and everything, and these are the kind of framework, or these are the kind of larger framework that we have to work on to make the upcoming laws and the policies. So I see very much on it and at the same time, we have to work on the new generation, the young people, the policymakers, tech companies, everyone. So this is very valuable and because we are referring to it as a living document, we have to also address the upcoming challenges and make it more timely, so that it is not discarded but would be more useful in coming days. Yeah.
Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you so much, Santosh. Jake on, for your part, the future of the charter, the work?
Is Jacob still with us? Or has he been knocked off?
Okay. I can't see Jacob. Joanna.
>> JOANNA KULESZA: Yes, I ‑‑ I keep thinking about making this a tangible input into the discussion. I'm certain that there is room for a structured cooperation working at the university. I keep thinking about research projects but what I'm also thinking is about social media presence, the work you guys are doing is so amazing that I'm certain that there is more room to have this advertised and as you rightfully noted, these partnerships with the governments, as the IGF has made possible, for example, through this meeting, our partnerships with the technical community and that many of the IGF participate and participants are happy to facilitate. I just saw Olivier just dropped by. I see there's other civil society organizations, not so closely linked to the IGF, but, for example, participating at the IGF in Katowice. It offers direct guidance own pertinence, current human rights issues online.
Just as you could see at the opening ceremony with young people barging on to the street with ‑‑ on to the stage with banners and highlighting the need to protect platform workers, you have the solutions in place. I believe that there's room, indeed for modifying the charter to best address the charters as Minda was saying but also to propagate it across different communities and I myself volunteer to help achieve that aim. I will work on the Polish translation as originally indicated. I'm not putting a deadline on it. I think it will be tremendously usefully, since the intense human rights debates we are having in Poland. And I will stop at that. Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful to see the long road that the community has gone through.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you.' list Beth, did I give you the floor?
>>> ELISABETH SCHAUERMANN: Thank you, Marianne. A lot of smart and true things have been said already. I think that the charter as it stands is already ‑‑ is a wonderful tool, not and as it has been made out to hold states and powerful actors in check. And I think going forward, it is really ‑‑ it should be and it is from what I'm seeing continuous effort to include those groups actively in the work and in the processes to revisit and further develop the topics that were talked about and youth is just one of those groups so to speak, but we also always have to think about the other marginalized community. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Edoardo, you are back? The future of the charter.
>> EDOARDO CELESTE: Yes, many thanks. Apologies. Anyway, yes, I wanted to thank everyone for this session, and in terms of like next steps, I really look forward to launch the final version in Trieste next year. It's very important and I hope that this will be a very important instrument of the, like advocacy within Italy and beyond. Thank you very much.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. And Minda, who has been champion our outreach, the topics that were just muted in this charter and taking them places wax is your dream for the next stage?
>> MINDA MOREIRA: Thank you, Marianne. I have joined the IRPC quite a few years ago and my job was basically just helping with the social moo media and the website, and ‑‑ and then I joined the steering committee and last four years, cochairing. It has been intense work and I had hoped to do much more, at least what I was supposed to do, that was outreach of the charter.
But we are all volunteers and I do think that we have done a lot but a lot more still needs to be done. You know, I could see that Santosh had some ideas on the chart. I completely agree with Joanna as well, and Edoardo. And, neutral terms, there are also other projects that we have been drilling in but not being able to then take forward just because of time and I ‑‑ I talk about, for instance, the ‑‑ the educational resources guide, with case studies, you know, that was also another build on the charter. So another important thing is the charter itself is recognized as an output of the IGF, and that hasn't happened yet, but we are hopeful that at some point this will happen and hopefully very soon, because the IGF is looking into the work of the ‑‑ of the Dynamic Coalitions and trying to get these outputs out there. So this is something that I think is important too.
And then obviously, collaboration with other stakeholders, and so many times we come across people at IGFs when you could be there face‑to‑face, would are working with the charter that we had no idea and from all around the world, and the important work that they have been doing. So getting these people together, working, collaborating with them, reaching out, also other projects, right? Tomorrow, we will have discussion with several human rights documents that basically were born within the IGF, and I think these conversations are important because at the end of the day, what we aim for is to make sure that human rights exist online as they should offline. We can't do this alone. We need everyone to work with us.
I hope in the future, the next ten years, all this will happen and that we will finally have human rights online as we'll have also human rights offline hopefully. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: We are nearly out of time. And it's nearly all been said. My dream is that this is a living document but like all living organisms it needs feeding and sustenance and air to breathe and all the diverse cultural and economic, and the constant erosion of human rights online and offline, and at the intersection which is now where most of us live. Horrendous things are happening to journalists through being tracked and surveilled through tracking technologies. Horrendous things are happening at borders right now as we speak, using mobile devices to track and attack our asylum seekers.
Human rights are as difficult, as fragile and as important as they ever were. They are not purpose. The covenants and the treaties and the documents in the UN are not perfect, they are constantly being revised and so Minda's historic sense I endorse. And I hope it can live another five years. And so my final point is I call to the IGF as a UN arm, as a UN project to formally recognize the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internets it's a fusion of two other Dynamic Coalitions' work closely with all stakeholders. I think the time has come for this document to be officially recognized and footnoted. We exist nonetheless and we can continue our work. Thank you for being here, for inspiring us and teaching us and we will touch base afterwards. We will let you know about the next round of elections for the incoming steering committee and all the business details on the LISTSERV. Thank you everyone, be safe, have fun and good night. Thank you.
>>> Thank you, everyone.
>> Bye‑bye.
>> Bye‑bye.