 Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for braving the inclement weather to join us here. Just a brief reminder, this event is being live webcasts for Prostheter. So keep that in mind. And without further ado, I'll let Berkman Klein fellow, Naani Janssen-Reventlow, take it away. Thank you very much. Welcome to David Kaye, human special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. You were appointed in this mandate in 2014, right? That's right. Just were extended for three years. You also teach at the University of California. So very welcome here today. I'm going to kick off by asking you basically a question that can be summarized as, what are you? What am I? What does a UN special rapporteur do? Yeah. So thanks, everybody, for coming, for braving the weather. It's great. I mean, I'm from California. So we don't have weather. But I still came. So special rapporteurs are part of what we call special procedures in the UN system. And they are specifically appointed by the Human Rights Council of the UN. And the Human Rights Council is the central human rights institution of the UN system. It's a subsidiary body of the General Assembly. And the idea of special rapporteurs, generally speaking, is to do more or less three things. I mean, the overarching idea is that we monitor a particular area of human rights law. But in doing that, we conduct country visits. We communicate with governments on a regular basis on matters of concern. Once in a while, we congratulate them on something that they've done. I mean, that doesn't happen very often, sadly. And then we do thematic reporting. So we identify particular issues where either there's a need for normative development or maybe a focus on institutions for protection. And those we report directly to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly. So one of each of those every year. You're an independent expert. The UN doesn't pay you any salary. But you are a UN special rapporteur. How does your independence relate to the label? Because I would assume that the label also opens a lot of doors for you in executing your mandate. How does that work? It's true. So as a professor, if I decide to convene a meeting, maybe I'll have three people show up. I mean, that's not totally true. But as special rapporteur, it's a pipeline, in a way, into policy and law at an international level. And so there's really this kind of, I'm not sure if it's a profile, but it's the position of the mandate of special rapporteur that really attracts people to be involved in what we do. So that really helps define the kind of work that we do. And it is independent. The idea is, and this is slightly problematic, to a certain extent, because special rapporteurs do a lot of work. I mean, there's a lot. It's really, I mean, I've been lucky because I teach a clinic also. So students actually work with me on all of the work related to the mandate. But it's all encompassing the work that we do. And yet we're not paid by the UN system. And that, I think that's a really important separation. If we're getting paid by the UN, then there's the possibility that some of our work, whether it involves calling out states for bad behavior or even calling out the UN for things that the UN might be doing that undermine, say, whistleblower protection or freedom of expression within the UN system, it'd be a little bit harder to do if we were actually employees. So that independence is pretty important. But the platform also really enables us to straddle different communities, whether it's advocacy communities, the UN, government, academics, and so forth. And how do you work together with other mandates, other special mandates, not only within the UN, but also outside. So for example, within the inter-American system, the African system, there's OSE, you have counterparts in all of those systems. And there are, of course, special mandate holders who have different agendas than you do. How does that work? So that's a really good question. And there really are two kinds of other monitors, let's say, among human rights mechanisms internationally. So one is other special rapporteurs and special procedures, and there are about 50 of them. And you're right, it's not always the case that rapporteurs are working, I'd say, in the same direction on a particular issue. But I think generally speaking, when we work together, we can identify a common direction. So if we're talking about, say, the special rapporteur on minority rights or special rapporteur against racism or against violence against women, they're kind of a common set of norms that we can identify and work on those together. And sometimes we do. So this past March, we issued a statement myself and the special rapporteur on violence against women that focused on gender-based violence and gender-based abuse online that identified some core principles that we thought should be taken into account and thinking about that space. So that's in the UN system. But then Nani, as you mentioned, there are other rapporteurs focusing on freedom of expression in different mechanisms around the world. So there's the Inter-American Commission, the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, and the African Union, African Commission. And each of those institutions has a special rapporteur focused on freedom of opinion and expression. And we work regularly together. So as an example, every year we issue a joint declaration on a particular area of freedom of expression law. Tends to focus on the media because the OSCE mandate is representative on freedom of the media. But we issued one in March focus or 2017 joint declaration is on fake news and propaganda and disinformation. And we did one last year on countering violent extremism and the impact that that has on freedom of expression. And then sometimes we work on common mission. So I'm hoping to go to Mexico, for example, with Edison Lanza, the special rapporteur in the Inter-American system, to focus on journalism and surveillance in Mexico. So there's a lot of working together, a lot of collaboration both across regions and with the UN and within the UN system. So you mentioned the country visits and emissions. How do you choose where you go? And how do you make sure that you have a balanced travel schedule, so to speak? And if I may add a question there, would a mission to the US be in the cards? Yeah, so we could spend 45 minutes on that right now. So in order to conduct a country visit, so I mentioned country visits before, country visit for it to be official means that when we conduct the visit, we actually are expected afterwards to report on the visit to the Human Rights Council. That's what makes it official. So I go to countries around the world unofficially. I mean, I am officially there, but I'm not officially on mission. And those could be through academic visits and whatnot, but there won't be a report afterwards. So what that means is in order for us to do a country visit, it's bad behavior really. It's like asking to be invited to a party. So we actually need to request an invitation. And how we choose depends on a variety factor. So if you actually look at the OHCHR website for the mandate, if you look at country visits, you'll see that we've made requests for something like 20 different countries. And my going in expectation is that 18 of them will say no, and you'll see the list and you'll understand why that is. But we hope to conduct the visits. And some of them say yes, sometimes surprisingly so. So last year, we conducted three visits. One was to Tajikistan, which is deeply, deeply repressive right now, particularly freedom of opinion and expression to Japan and to Turkey. So Turkey agreed to a visit as far back as February of 2016. And even after the attempted coup, they didn't cancel it and we had a five day visit to Turkey. So what we try to do is, we make requests to visit countries where there's a significant situation involving freedom of opinion and expression. And we could talk about what those substantive areas include. But we try to do that first. And the truth is we could go anywhere, but we do try to keep it geographically balanced. So we're not just visiting a particular region where there's a particular kind of threat. We'll try to mix that up a little bit. I wanted to bring up the three. But I did not talk about the United States. Thought you were just clever. The answer is yes. I mean I would say, so on the US, we have, even before January 20th, we communicated with the government on different proposed policies and different issues. So just as an example, last year, Department of Homeland Security and the Customs and Border Protection proposed adding to the visa waiver program to the, and there may be people from visa waiver countries here, adding to the online submission form for the SD, if people are familiar with this, to adding to that a request for what are your social media handles? Where are you active in social media? And it was optional, as if it were optional. And we made a kind of a statement to the US government, to the Obama administration and participated in the public comment that they instituted for that. And obviously now, that which DHS approved, now that has a different balance after the travel bans and so forth. And I think CVP and DHS are ramping those things up and we'll engage in those even more in the coming weeks. But there are a number of other issues in the United States right now, issues around protest, protest laws that are proliferating these proposals to restrict protests in states around the country. So there are a lot of issues and certainly doing a country visit in the US would, I think, would be great. That kind of brings up the issue of state support, in a way. And then I'm thinking specifically of state support for a candidature for positions like yours. How do you become a special rapporteur? Is it like a situation with the treaty bodies where you have to campaign and basically your state has to lobby for you? Or does it work differently with the special mandates? There's a little bit of a black box around how rapporteurs are actually appointed. So, but there is a process. So the process is anybody can put their name forward and there was a time, I don't know if this is still happening, but the International Organization Bureau at the State Department would actually send out a notice to people involved in human rights and say, these are the mandates that are coming open. We encourage you to apply. But the State Department, normally because there's more than one American who applies, they usually don't do much to advance your candidacy. So what happens is, let's say for any given mandate, there may be 20 to 30 applicants for it. There's something called the consultative group in Geneva. So part of the Human Rights Council, this is a representative from each of the five geographic groups in the Human Rights Council. One ambassador from each, they look at the applicants, they create a short list of five or six, they conduct phone interviews and then they actually write a report to the president of the Human Rights Council saying, these are the, this is the ranking of the people we interviewed, these are the top three. And then they send it to the president of the Human Rights Council who makes the choice and then the Human Rights Council itself approves it. So they're not to choose number one from the list, they could just randomly choose. They could choose from one to three, they could choose off the list. It's sort of, it's up to the president really of the council to decide and the president is also representative of one of the 47 states on the council. So before we move on to the issue of digital rights, more men than women tend to be appointed in these positions over the, historically, if you look at all the people who have held positions under the special mandate, it's only 33.4% of those for women. Your mandate has never been helped by a woman and not to discount for the wonderful job that you are doing and that Frank LaRue did before you. Don't you think that's time that that changed? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so, yeah, I don't, I think that first of all, anybody should apply who has an interest. So Nani, you should apply. You should throw your name in. I agree. And the diversity is problematic for a number of levels, so probably the starkest one is gender. But there are also problems, so they try to make geographic diversity an issue. They try to make sure that of the 50 rapporteurs or different working groups, that there's representation geographically that it's fairly spread about. I think the bigger problem is, I'd say it's a little bit more demographic or professional. So it's relatively easy for somebody like me who works for a law school and can therefore afford to do this kind of work and to have the support of my institution to do it. So there's quite a number of rapporteurs, other mandate holders who, they may not have American nationality or European nationality, but they're at an American or European university. And so there's probably an imbalance in that sense, that there are a lot of academics and a lot of lawyers who are doing these jobs. And I think that there could be more diversity. Now the problem is, again, it goes to the lack of pay. Not only is there, there's no, people aren't paid for their work, which could really be an issue in less developed countries, but it's also an issue of the support that anybody might get from their institution. And so I think that philanthropic foundations, for example, could be doing more to support individuals who might be coming from the global south, for example, who don't necessarily have the resources at their home institution or say their advocacy organization to do the work, but they could maybe do it, and there could be a greater pool of people who would do this if there was some support coming from outside the UN to support them. And in executing the work that falls within the mandate itself, how do you think that gender and other type of diversity should play a role in that? I'm just thinking of the example of the newly appointed special rapporteur on arbitrary killings and summary executions. It's always a long title. So she, at the beginning of her mandate, called specifically for input on how to include a gender component in her work. Do you think that that's one of the ways to go about it and kind of making sure that that issue gets addressed throughout the special mandates or? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think we need to be intentional about bringing in gender issues. So I mean, this is something that we tried to do by having this statement with the special rapporteur on violence against women is this is a particular issue that involves a particular community in digital space. And in order to study that appropriately and to come up with principles around it, you need to have a diverse group of people to address it and that I think includes on the substantive side saying and reaching out to people and saying we're doing this study that has to do with gender, we want your input on it. Other than that, I mean, I think it's important for us all to think about how we integrate a gender perspective and what we do. Don't, for men, don't sit on manals, for example, right? I mean, really, because there's, and that's just one example, right? And kind of glib, but I think we need to be intentional about bringing that perspective in. I want to move on to some of the substantive issues that you've worked on. In September last year, you submitted your report to the UN General Assembly, which you painted a rather stark picture of the state of freedom of expression around the world and you were very pessimistic on the issue of digital rights. You said that you saw an ongoing deterioration of online rights, even as the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly urged that rights offline should be respected online. Could you tell us a bit about which specific issues kind of triggered this kind of gloom and doom scenario and kind of warning the world about what was happening? Yeah, so I think there's this dichotomy right now, I think in normative space, like what's happening on the normative side and what's happening on the actual implementation side. So the normative side is certainly in the Human Rights Council, we've seen over the last six or seven years the development of this mantra, rights offline apply online equally. Of course, that's a problem when offline rights are being undermined. So that mantra I think needs to be specified a little bit more, but we do see at the Human Rights Council a succession of resolutions that are fairly strong on digital rights issues. Last September, the Human Rights Council adopted a resolution that condemned internet shutdowns, for example, which was, that's a positive. We've seen even a recognition in the Human Rights Council resolutions of digital security issues. So welcoming, so I did a report in 2015 on encryption and anonymity and there's a little bit of movement supporting that at the normative level. The problem is at the national level, where the rubber hits the road, as we say, laws and policies are undermining those kinds of rights. So we see that in the context of national security and countering violent extremism, and we see it in the context of defamation. We see it in a whole host of areas where notwithstanding the movement at the Human Rights Council or the Human Rights Committee and the development of General Comment 34, which is a very good and strong statement on freedom of expression, notwithstanding that kind of normative movement at the national level, we're seeing the equation of journalists with terrorists. And that example is kind of most stark in Turkey. We see sort of the exceptionalism that governments see in terms of what's happening in online space. So something that might be punishable in an analog world or physical world when it comes to expression gets heightened penalty when we're talking about something online in social media. So those kinds, it's sort of a combination of, on the one hand, this countering violent extremism, which the West is doing nothing to tamp down, right? So governments use that as an excuse for all sorts of restrictions. And at the same time, I think that governments are still feeling somewhat behind in figuring out how to regulate digital space, and so they're going to the takedown, the strongest kind of anti-expression policies that they can find with criminalization and takedowns and so forth. So that, I think it's grim from that perspective, right? That the rights are there, but the permissible restrictions under Article 19 are swallowing the rules. On the online and offline context, you mentioned earlier the statement that you did together with the other special mandates on fake news, which I think could be argued isn't really a new thing that only relates to the online context. I mean, false news laws are present all over the world. But in the recommendations that you formulated, in a way, when I was reading it, I was like, well, these are just basic human rights principles that you're setting out there. To what extent is it helpful to even speak about digital rights in that sense as if it's some sort of special category? Aren't we just talking about human rights in just the online context? I think that's fair. I mean, these are, so I might be interested in hearing what people think about this, but digital rights are human rights and they may be described as freedom of expression, online or privacy online, but digital rights, to me, is more of an umbrella concept that brings into the discussion specific rights that are well-recognized, well-established in human rights law. So that's how I would tend to see those kinds of issues. So the fake news issue is one where it immediately brings to the table questions of censorship, right? Because Article 19 protects everyone's right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, through any media, right? I should have a tattoo that says that. But actually, I don't need it. But what it doesn't say is, when it says information and ideas of all kinds, it doesn't say excluding false news. So I think there needs to be real focus on if we're talking about regulating the information environment, doing so in a way that's respectful of those basic rights to freedom of opinion and expression. And I've been worried since November, really, about the nature of the debate moving from, this is a problem that we need to solve, that technology can very easily solve. I mean, this was sort of what we were hearing in November. Moving from that to essentially giving cover to authoritarians who criminalize and their governments criminalize false news, propagation of rumor and so forth. So we don't wanna see a convergence on those. I think we wanna be able, as human rights advocates, to say false news prosecutions, which are almost always used in order to tamp down opposition and dissent, that that is something that democratic societies should reject and that we as advocates should reject in those different spaces. And the question of fake news needs to be addressed within the context of those same principles. Just wanna use the false news bridge to kind of jump back a little bit to your activities, because I know because you intervened in a case that I worked on when I was still at the Media Legal Defense Initiative that challenged false news laws and criminal defamation and sedition laws in the Gambia, basically criminalizing speech and making it difficult for independent journalists to do their work there. There was a case filed at the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice and you decided to intervene together with your African Union counterpart. What made you decide to include this as your activities as a special rapporteur? Submitting amicus briefs in national cases and international cases. And I would also be very interested in hearing how you decide what to intervene on and yeah, what would you weigh in also. So look, I think our, as a rapporteur, I think simply putting a report out there isn't enough. It gathered whatever the equivalent of dust is in digital space. That's the point isn't to just put out a report and then move on to the next thing. The idea is that reports, resolutions, all of the normative activity that's happening at the UN level or regional levels actually makes its way to implementation at the national level because that's where law is really affecting individual lives. Whether it's your work as a journalist or simply as a citizen posting online, whatever it might be. So we're constantly looking for ways to move like those principles that are way over here to the local level, to the national level, bless you. And so as we do that, we think okay, we have these communications which are direct allegation letters or urgent appeals to governments. Those, we have a very low response rate for those. But if we go the amicus route, we put it into a regular process and it forces a state to consider the, I mean unless it defaults totally from judgment, it really forces a government to grapple with the issues and to respond to the issues that we're raising. And so you brought the issues both in the East African Court of Justice and in the ECOWAS Community Court, you brought that to my attention. And those are really strong places where there's normative movement. The courts are nascent in a way. I mean there's, they're young courts and they're looking, I think, to find principles at the international, at the human rights level, not to mention their own charters, but looking to find ways to make a difference from a human rights perspective within their own regions. And so in part, we're looking to see where can we make an impact. So the sub-regional courts in Africa, I think are really valuable places to do that kind of work. I mean of course you are working with local actors and there was an interest in those local actors having our input. I mean we wouldn't engage if local actors didn't want us to engage, but we're responsive to that. And so we've done this similar kinds of interventions in the European Court of Human Rights, case of Khadija Smilova, an Azerbaijani journalist who is imprisoned on all sorts of pretextual charges. We've done that, we did that in the U.S. and Federal District Court, related to Ethiopia's surveillance of an Ethiopian-American activist in Maryland. So we're looking for these kinds of opportunities where we can present the human rights norms in a context that they might actually make some difference and be implemented at national levels. Your upcoming report is about digital access providers. So internet service providers, telecommunications companies, basically the private actors, generally speaking, that allow us access to communicate online. And it focuses on censorship. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about the focus of your reports? Yeah, sure, so I thought you'd never ask. So we've been, one of the things that we in the mandate started last year was a focus on basically the private sector in the digital age, because obviously the private actors, whether we're talking about the infrastructure level and the access providers, or we're talking about search and social media, they're regulating expression today. I mean, they are really deeply involved in much the same way that governments have been in terms of regulating content and regulating access. And so we started last year with a mapping report that looked at who are the different actors out there that actually have an impact on digital space. And we decided that our first report would focus in on telcos and ISPs. So as you said, digital access providers. And it involves a whole range of issues. And it also, it's a useful place to start drilling down into the private sector's role, because the role that those access providers play is very much mediating between the state and the individual. So if you look at the issue of internet shutdowns, for example, those are driven by states. And yet, the ISPs, the telcos are put in a position of actually implementing these shutdown orders. And they don't have too much space to resist those kinds of orders. They are actually providing a service, whether it's internet or mobile or whatever it might be, providing a service in a country by virtue of contract and regulation. I mean, they are highly regulated entities. So they don't have a lot of room to push back when they get these orders to shut down. So part of the report focuses on the state's use of the private sector to regulate expression. But there's also real significant questions for the private sector, just for a few questions would be when a telco decides to engage in a new market, what are the issues that they should be considering? Do they have a human rights assessment that they make to decide whether if they go into the country, they will be put in the position of essentially complicity with restrictions on freedom of opinion and expression? To what extent will they be required to shut down service for say unlawful reasons under human rights law? To what extent will they be put in a position of cooperating with demands for user data, so surveillance? So there are a whole lot of issues that companies should be thinking about before they get into markets, and some of those questions also relate to leaving markets. So sometimes a company may be involved in a market and decide that the pressure is too much on human rights grounds or that they're not making money. I mean, that would be more of the issue, right? For most companies, but when they leave, they might leave infrastructure that could be easily tapped into by the government. So they need to think about those kinds of issues as well. So this report, it's not just about that, but we're basically trying to set up several principles, drawing from the UN's guiding principles on business and human rights as to in different spaces, how should digital access providers be behaving? So they can be most protective of the human rights of their users. And how should they be weighing in the balance of all that, the benefit that they might be bringing for the economic development of the people in the country? Because there's lots of success stories about how mobile payment really helps with, you know, spring on local economies, et cetera. Do you have any guidance on that in the report or is this anything that you've been speaking out on yet? Well, so the report is really focused on the human rights considerations, but I mean, you raise an interesting question, which is the extent to which we could also be relying on some economic arguments. Because internet shutdowns, as an example, but all sorts of regulation of internet space always has some economic impact. And sometimes those arguments resonate more with the state or with the company than some of our freedom of expression arguments might. So I think we need to think about what those arguments might be, but there's a real connection there. And oftentimes a shutdown, for example, will cause real harm to economic interests just as it does to freedom of expression interests. And we see this in Cameroon right now, which I think just opened up, just brought the internet back on after something like 100 days. I don't know why I'm thinking 100 days right now, but just thinking it was about 100 days that the internet was shut down in Cameroon without any information about why it was shut down. And the economic costs are almost certainly in the tens of millions of dollars, but it's also restricting mobile access, communication, social media, all sorts of access across, it was in the south of the country. What do you think made them switch it back on? That's a good question. I don't know, because they withstood, there was a lot of advocacy around it for months and they did nothing. So I don't know if there was some particular trigger that forced them, forced their hand if maybe the economic costs arguments made a difference, but I don't, I'm just speculating really. So, annoying me as a, with the brain of a litigator, I keep on thinking then, like who do you go to then to address these issues, right? That you flag on the report. And is then the starting point that you will have to go to the state in the end or should you also be looking at to the extent to which you can hold the private actors to account? Yeah, I think we go to the states. That's natural, but I think we need to have a dialogue with the companies and also to encourage, and the report goes through some of this, to encourage companies to be as transparent as they can, not just for transparency's sake, but so users know who they go to when an issue arises around a shutdown or a takedown of content. Who's responsible? Oftentimes the user, we used to call users individuals, right, the individual doesn't know why content has been taken down and doesn't know where to go for that sometimes, and oftentimes the access provider is not in a position to share that information or doesn't maybe for particularly protective reasons. So there are real strong reasons for transparency that go beyond just sort of the idea of transparency. That will give people more tools to know. So I think individuals should have a greater ability to decide whether they even want to be online, right? So most users don't necessarily know that if they go online in a particular country that their data will be and their communications will be surveilled. Well, to the extent that information can be shared, that helps give some autonomy and choice to an individual. But that often is information that either most individuals expect they're being surveilled or they don't have any information and can't make a choice. So in your report you also mentioned a couple of issues that you didn't tackle. So lack of adequate connectivity, infrastructure, high cost of access, gender equality, language barriers. Are these all things that are on your to-do list for coming reports or? Yeah, so we're limited. Here's my excuse part, right? So we're limited in our reports to 10,700 words that includes footnotes. And I know, I mean, in a law school that sounds like it's an enhanced op-ed. But that is, you know, that's basically our, we try to deal with a lot in that space and you've identified some issues that we need to deal with in the future. So to give some examples of things that I think are related to, well, to all of the private sector issues. So in addition to the ones you mentioned, one is the surveillance industry, right? So if we're talking, I mean, there have been big stories over the last couple years and I think there'll be, I know the BBC, for example, is working on a couple of different projects and others are working on these kinds of projects, looking at in particular, you know, hacking team, FinFisher, other surveillance companies, companies that create spyware that are virtually unregulated. They're certainly unregulated by their home companies and that means that authoritarian governments that don't otherwise have the tools to conduct surveillance have pretty ready and cheap access to surveillance technology. And yet there's almost no, I mean, there's an emerging discussion but there's almost nothing at the UN level, let's say that addresses how these companies should be behaving. I mean, apart from the general principles, like the ruggy principles on business and human rights, there's nothing that specifically addresses these kinds of actors. And so that's an area that we definitely want to engage in. We're also thinking in terms of content regulation, specifically issues of gender, how do we deal with that? What's the community that should be involved in that discussion? You know, what about other sort of rapporteur or human rights conflicts and how to integrate those into digital space? You know, where privacy and expression might not be heading in the same direction. How do we think about those kinds of problems? Okay, look forward to the reports. Before I hand over to the floor for questions, I want to ask you one last question about how you define success. I mean, you've been tackling some really challenging issue in your rapporteurship already. You've been heavily involved in the debate on encryption. You mentioned the gender issue that you're working on, and their surveillance, et cetera. That's a lot. And of course, it would be great if you solve the fake news issue and all of those things in the next three years, but it might be a little bit too optimistic. If at the end of your next, which will also be your last term in this particular role, you look back, how will you determine whether or not you've been successful as a special rapporteur? That's a really hard question. I mean, we tend to look at it, I tend to look at the issues at a fairly granular level. So with our communications, we deal with very specific victims. So just to give the example over the weekend, Yamin Rashid, who was a blogger who people involved in advocacy, particularly digital advocacy, many people knew him. He was a blogger in the Maldives, and he was stabbed to death on Saturday night. And he's one of legions of people who are trying to use digital space to communicate, to share information, and they get very little support from their governments, very little physical protection, and the law is going in the wrong direction. So the Maldives is just an example where they adopted a new defamation law that includes defamation, particularly online expression that would wound religious feelings. And Yamin was somebody who was writing in space that could be considered to wound religious feelings. I think if anybody in this room read it, it wouldn't necessarily read it that way, but that's how it was interpreted. So he had no normative protection and he had no physical protection. And I guess if we can move some of that normative protection to a better place, so if there are maybe laws that aren't adopted because of, and I wouldn't say that would be because of our intervention. When we intervene, it's usually as one actor among many on a particular issue, whether it's an individual protection issue or it's related to legal change and legislation. So we can't say, oh, this is because of what we did. Either this thing happened or it didn't happen. So it's really hard to identify what would be a success. I think that if we do thematic reports that are responsive to concerns that people have in digital space and in non-digital space, that we could look back on and say, yeah, this was important to do at that time. And we found ways to integrate those into regional and national legislative and legal processes. I would think that would be a success, but it's really long-term. So I don't think three years from now we'll be able to look back and say, yeah, we descend freedom of expression, but were we successful? I don't know. I mean, this morning I probably overused this word when we were talking at Birken Klein. It's grim. The situation for freedom of expression is bleak. Look at what's happening in Hungary, for example, and Central European University. This is a European Union member state. And the response from other states is, there's some response, but it's shockingly low. And this is just one, what follows will be an NGO law that will restrict nonprofits and non-governmental space. So the kind of attack, the sustained attack on freedom of expression that we're seeing is in digital space and non-digital space. And frankly, I feel a little bit overwhelmed by it, that there's so much happening that's problematic and we don't have the same kind of support that maybe we once had in terms of Western states pushing for protection. So that's not a really upbeat way to answer a question about success, but it is true. That's how I tend to see it right now. I don't know. I always kind of look at these things also, like what is the alternative, right? If you weren't there to make all these efforts, like look grim now, but just imagine how bad it would be without people pushing back. So that's, yes, I agree. So one thing that always gets me is when, when arguments are made that human rights law doesn't matter. And most of those arguments, frankly, are made by academics and they're made in the West. Human rights law doesn't matter. But my experience of the last three years, and I think anybody who works with advocates or in clinical space or whatever it might be, is that for the people who are looking for protection, it matters a lot. And that for me, so if there's any, maybe do they have an upbeat thing is, you know, if there's any sense that advocates in really difficult environments have that they have an advocate at the level of the UN who's also coordinating or helping to connect other advocates around the world to move in the direction of support for those victims of really serious restrictions, then I think we're, that's a success. Like there's this, you know, felt sense that there is support. I mean, if that's all we can hope for, that's great. I mean, we'd like to see actual movement too, but that's, I think part of the goal is to demonstrate that there is law and that there are advocates who have official titles and don't have official titles who are working for freedom of expression. Thank you. To the floor. I wanted to ask when there are human rights violations or denial of freedom of expression or in those kind of situations, you put the onus on the digital service provider, but many of those situations are also precipitated by government institutions in some of these countries. And in some cases, they may even be able to set up a parallel system for internet service and just expel the Western operators who are participating there. Can you tell me what the UN, if anything, thinks they can do about that sort of situation? That's a really good point. So one of the problems is that you have two things going on in many of the countries that we've looked at that are of most concern. So one is on the legal side. So there's been a lot of new law recently. To give an example in Pakistan, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act was adopted last year and it ramps up penalties for defamation and other issues when they're online. So there's a kind of a legal framework that's taking place that is hostile to online rights. And then there's also extra legal pressure. So we've seen more and more where states or state actors will go to, say, the social media company and say, we see this expression and it violates your terms of service, take it down. So they're not even saying this violates our law but it violates your terms of service and that's creating a kind of an additive, like a supplemental way to restrict expression. And that's, it's opaque to most individuals who are using these services. So I think one thing that we're trying to do is to say that the principles that govern state behavior which they're not just principles, they're obligations under human rights law that those principles should also, to the greatest extent possible, guide the behavior of private actors. And that's, sometimes that's a hard argument to get across and to make. It can be any, I mean, there's all sorts of sort of baseline laws and excuses and justifications that are used for restricting expression. And we really just scratch the surface on some of those here. But I mean, I do think that the UN, when I say the UN, the Human Rights Council, the third committee of the General Assembly, the Human Rights Committee essentially of the General Assembly, the Human Rights Committee, the monitoring body of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, can all be doing more, I include myself in that space, can all be doing more to emphasize that those principles that apply to states should also apply to the private actors. The more the private actors are essentially becoming regulators of expression. Ooh, very adequate. Hi, I'm actually not gonna ask a question about Central European University, where people who don't know me, I'm based. But I actually wanted to pick up on something you were talking about in terms of the economic factors. And I'm thinking in particular about the measure proposed in Germany about finding Facebook for not complying with removal of content within this 24-hour period as agreed upon with the major social media companies and the European Commission, right, with this Code of Conduct on Hate Speech. And I wanted to ask your thoughts on that because, I mean, it seems like it's not a good idea. But on the other hand, it starts to put me in this position where I feel like sometimes we, in the face of government overreach, even from democratic governments like Germany, you know, in the precedent of what that means for non-democratic governments, but I feel like sometimes we end up on the, like defending corporate behavior more than maybe many of us are comfortable with because I do think there's a distinction we need to make between responsibility and liability. And so that was a long way of asking the question broadly about what can we do to push for better responsibility without having negative impacts on speech? And in particular, this question about economic sanctions or whatever, penalties. So yeah, there's a lot packed into that question. No, it's great. So I think there are things, so there's, there are processes, let's say, I mean, we're in a law school, we should talk about process. And I think there actually are some good processes that help bring the concerns that we might have that are expressed in this case related to Germany that bring them to companies in a direct way. So Global Network Initiative, which was essentially born here, right, is a process that brings the companies together with advocates, there's the Freedom Online Coalition, which brings together companies, advocates and states together. And so, I mean, I think there are places where increasingly the companies are getting the message about their concerns, whether those are concerns that are raised by particularly members of vulnerable groups or their concerns raised by states. So I think the companies are getting the message and I think the companies are, I mean, I share your, it's a kind of ambivalence, right, because on the one hand, the companies, many of these companies, particularly social and search, but also the digital access companies, it's in their economic interests to have the greatest amount of access and the greatest amount of freedom and the least amount of regulation is possible. And by least amount of regulation, I don't mean just corporate regulation in the way we often think about regulation, but I mean the least amount of speech regulation, regulation of expression. And so, I think to a large extent, we're on the same side in terms of arguing for keeping that space as open as possible. But also, I think it's important for the companies to recognize that just as states do have some responsibilities to regulate certain kinds of space when it comes to expression, when it comes to national security or public order and so forth, that the companies will have that responsibility as well. Certainly the larger their platform becomes and the more users they have, the more they're looking more and more like states and regulators and lawmakers. And so they should, with that does come a certain kind of responsibility to regulate in a way that's consistent with human rights norms. So on the German law in particular, to my mind, it's clearly disproportionate. I think the fines go up to something like $50 million, which for Facebook may be a drop in the bucket, but as a matter of principle, that's a pretty significant penalty around expression. And also, going back to the EU company code of conduct, it was largely conducted without the kind of public input that I think you would normally get out of public lawmaking. So there's a lot of process that could happen around these issues that would, I think make those of us in the advocacy and academic space more comfortable and confident that the actual regulations are consistent with human rights norms. But they're adopted, I think, in often opaque ways that they're presented to us as these are your terms of service. These are your community standards and we don't have much involvement in shaping those. That could change. You mentioned that enforcing human rights is difficult, especially when you have to enforce human rights vis-a-vis private actors. I read with much interest your report of last year where you specifically address the responsibility of private actors, of private corporations. So in principle, human rights are obligations of states. So these obligations can also include enforcement of human rights against corporations that have their seat they are, which are established in that territory. But corporations can also choose to avoid certain jurisdictions and try to establish in another jurisdiction where the requirements are less strong. So it is difficult, I guess, to really enforce human rights when it comes to private corporations. You may talk to governments and try to convince them. So my question would be, have you also been thinking or actually have you had any initiatives going in the direction of joining forces with civil society, organizations, consumer organizations, internet activist groups, et cetera, to create pressure on certain corporations in order to make them correspond to certain human rights standards? So I don't really see the role of special procedures in a traditional kind of advocacy role. So we don't tend to, like we don't sign petitions, we don't join civil society efforts in sort of the traditional way of thinking about those, but we're very much a part of that space and we work pretty closely. So the report that you mentioned, as an example, we did two experts consultations that led up to that report and we invited a range of people from civil society, from human rights organizations, from digital rights organizations to be a part of thinking about what are the principles that should govern in this space. So we do try to do that, even if we're not joining forces in the same way that if we were an NGO, we might join with other NGOs. I think it's also, it's really important in this space to be thinking about the concerns of local actors. So and a good example of that is around sort of net neutrality and zero rating in particular, where generally speaking, I think zero rating is problematic from a freedom of expression perspective, but there are arguments that are sometimes made at local levels where there's limited access around sort of temporary zero rating kind of, as long as they're kind of a bridge to broader access. And I'm not saying I'm on one side or the other on that debate, but I think it's really important in some of these debates for it not just to be the civil society actors that are based in the US or Europe that are involved, but that they really integrate the thinking of civil society groups around the world that are really engaged in sometimes really brave engagements in particular countries that we involve them as much as we can. So from my perspective, to the extent that our work is used in other advocates' efforts, we also wanna get at the front end the views that advocates and academics around the world might have. I think Grace also had a question and Amy. Thank you. Back to this economic question and relating it to internet shutdowns. Sometimes I wonder whether we've diagnosed it correctly and whether we are prescribing the right medicine, so to speak, because people talk about losses and economic losses. For example, in the case of Cameroon, where they say a certain amount of millions or billions of dollars was lost. But I always wonder who pays for these losses and if really there was such a loss, wouldn't these companies have moved out of these areas and gone to other places? So I'd really like us to question the approach we have to corporations at both levels. The search, especially when you look at Africa, the search corporations really do not want to set up offices in Africa. They operate from outside yet, the business is inside the continent. And then also when you look at the infrastructure providers and the mobile network operators, for that matter because that is how the people access the internet in Africa, they are still there. In the case of Cameroon, three months later, they are still in business, they are still operating, meaning they are still raking in profits. So is this really the correct diagnosis or are we getting, are we not getting the problem and how to approach the corporates? Which we are taking like two questions or so at a time. Sure. Take Amy's question as well. Thanks again for coming by and talking to us. I think especially for students who are just entering the space like for me, there's so much information and so much to learn. Given your experience, I was wondering if you saw a particular area of scholarship that is still missing and that you find troublesome and want more people to understand a bit more of. Great. So maybe I'll address Grace your question first. So I think, I mean, in part is your argument that the corporate actors that are involved on the continent are not really alive to the situation on the continent. They don't take into account either the economic or the human rights concerns because in a way they're protected. So sometimes it's that I really wonder whether there's any economic loss to them because they're still there and happy and very much in bed with sometimes governments that are not the most democratic. That is one end and then on the other end, I really wonder, like it's a rule of law kind of problem, human rights for who? Human rights are for those Western people, not for you know. And so for example, when I look at let's say Uganda, people just find they can't access the internet on their phones. No information from your mobile network operator. When you finally get information that is sort of a rumor directive, it says yeah, there was something on the license that we had to oblige to. And so you really wonder are they count, is there really any loss or does it help? Because they're still, I'm sorry, sometimes when they really need to make a good argument, it comes in another language, so I have a translation. But I understand what you're saying and I think that so my experience in talking at least with some of the providers, so the multinational telecommunications providers, for example, that have pretty significant business either in Africa or Latin America or Southeast Asia that oftentimes they actually struggle with these issues and I think that these are big companies that maybe can absorb a loss, but they also lose money in these shutdowns. That's my impression from them. Now it might not be the case for all of them and the smaller ones in situations where there are persistent shutdowns may find it economically impossible to continue doing work in that space but I think it depends on the particular shutdown, the particular region where it's happening to know what's going on there. But I do think that there is some variation, so some of the companies that are in the telecommunications industry dialogue, which they've joined GNI, that those companies are a good avenue to have this discussion, to learn more about where they're coming from, what concerns they have, also what forms of pressure work. I mean, these are companies that have at least taken the step to hire someone who would have a human rights position within the company to do human rights impact assessments and so forth. So I think that's one direction to think about the conversation. But we could talk more afterwards also. I think it's a tough, tough problem. As for places to think about doing work in this space, I think it's wide open. And I think one of the issues, I mean, Susan Benish and I were talking about, there are a million issues here. I mean, really legal issues. But I think thinking about, like as a law student, to me one of the most interesting things would be to study the nature of lawmaking by private companies. Because I think we should think of them less and less as being in a contractual relationship with us as users and more think of them, not always, but think of them as regulating the space that we're all having conversations in. We're all sharing information in. And what's the nature of that law? Like where does it come from? What's the basis for our acceptance of that as sort of the regulatory framework? Is it just in contract? Is there something else? And is there some other way of thinking about the private actors and their relationship to the sharing and censoring of information? I think that's a particularly interesting place to be in, but I mean, we could spend the next three hours creating, and I think a lot of people in this room could sort of creating a list of things that should be studied in the space. We can. Overdrinks downstairs, which I like to invite you all to. And you can ask any further questions there. So just thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks everyone for coming. Thank you so much.