Meaning of a Global Perspective

The Gender Apartheid Inquiry, conducted by a Panel of UK Parliamentarians and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, seeks to investigate the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran and join the conversation on codifying gender apartheid. The Inquiry’s recently published report argues that while the Rome Statute includes the crime of gender persecution, “the experience of women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran, although different in some respects, requires a more accurate representation in law” due to the institutionalization and scale of oppression. The report reviews the states of education, employment, movement, expression, assembly, association, and access to justice for women and girls in the two countries. The Inquiry then examines the gender apartheid concept and considers legal avenues for codifying it.

“The Internet was designed to be a kind of free-speech paradise, but it has also been used to incite violence, spread lies, and promote hate. Over the years, three American behemoths – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter – became the way many people around the world experience the Internet, and therefore act as the conveyors of some of its most disturbing material. Who should decide whether content should be removed from platforms, or which users should be kicked off? Should the giant social media platforms police the content themselves, as is the norm in the U.S., or should governments and international organizations regulate the Internet, as many are demanding in Europe? How do we keep from helping authoritarian regimes to censor all criticisms of themselves? David Kaye is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the global body’s principal monitor for freedom of expression issues worldwide. He is also a clinical professor of law and the director of the International Justice Clinic at the University of California, Irvine.”

The source directs the readers to the transcript of two lectures delivered by Lee C. Bollinger at Cambridge University’s 2018 Clare Hall Tanner Lectures. In the first lecture, Prof. Bollinger delves into the First Amendment experience and presents a summary of it prior to offering some observations about how it may be interpreted as well as understood. In the second lecture, Prof. Bollinger focuses on the present and the future, intent on interrogating three of the most important questions of the present century: “(1) Should the legacy of the last century be continued and what are its prospects given current political and global trends towards authoritarian regimes? (2) What should be the general approach to dealing with the rising importance of the Internet and its component elements, which are now widely perceived as increasingly dominant in shaping the public forum? (3) And, lastly, what are we to make of the fact that the modern world is increasingly inter-connected and inter-dependent, yielding problems and issues that can only be resolved effectively through collective international action, with a new truly global communications technology to serve as a global public forum, but with vastly different competing conceptions of free speech and free press in contention? In other words, how should we think about free speech in a globalized world?”

“Kathryn Sikkink examines the important and controversial new trend of holding political leaders criminally accountable for human rights violations […] Sikkink offers a landmark argument for human rights prosecutions as a powerful political tool. She shows how, in just three decades, state leaders in Latin America, Europe, and Africa have lost their immunity from any accountability for their human rights violations, becoming the subjects of highly publicized trials resulting in severe consequences. This shift is affecting the behavior of political leaders worldwide and may change the face of global politics as we know it. Drawing on extensive research and illuminating personal experience, Sikkink reveals how the stunning emergence of human rights prosecutions has come about; what effect it has had on democracy, conflict, and repression; and what it means for leaders and citizens everywhere, from Uruguay to the United States. The Justice Cascade is a vital read for anyone interested in the future of world politics and human rights.”

"This article examines the ‘Joint Declarations on freedom of expression’ from a critical perspective. Since 1999, these Joint Declarations have been adopted annually by the four intergovernmental mechanisms on freedom of expression with the assistance of two non-governmental organisations. This article identifies the factors which contribute to the Joint Declarations’ value, with a specific focus on the collaborative process leading up to their adoption, their progressive content and their demonstrated influence upon courts and other actors. It also acknowledges the limitations of the texts, including their non-binding nature as soft law, their limited impact and lack of visibility. Notwithstanding these issues, this article contends that the Joint Declarations constitute a distinct and potentially influential body of international soft law on freedom of expression, one whose relevance to policy debates deserves broader recognition."

In this policy brief published by UNESCO, Joan Barata, Senior Legal Fellow for The Future of Free Speech, focuses on the right to information and one specific aspect within the realm of exceptions to this right – the so-called “public interest override.” The policy brief cites the relevant international law provisions and national and international case law as courts have used the public interest override to balance the public’s right to know with other competing matters and interests, like national security, privacy, commercial confidentiality, or law enforcement. Among the principles and recommendations listed, the first one reminds states and other relevant actors that any restrictions imposed on the right to information “must respect the three-part test established under international and regional human rights standards (legality, legitimacy, and proportionality).”

This summer, the UN launched Global Principles for Information Integrity, which tackle the main information challenges of our technological era – misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech. Grounded in international law and consultations with Member States, scholars, media, civil society, and private sector representatives, the principles serve as a framework that invites “multi-stakeholder action for a healthier information ecosystem.” There are five principles: 1) Societal Trust and Resilience, 2) Healthy Incentives, 3) Public Empowerment, 4) Independent, Free, and Pluralistic Media, and 5) Transparency and Research. The recommendations follow the principles’ descriptions and address technology companies, AI actors, advertisers and other private sector actors, news media, researchers, civil society, states, other political actors, and the UN.

The study, published by Access Now, analyzes the UN Security Council resolutions between 2001-2023, focusing on digital, cyber, and human rights and the language used to refer to them. The findings show that when it comes to including digital rights in the broader human rights and security agenda, the UN Security Council is falling behind if compared with “more digitally aware” UN bodies. The report emphasizes that the UN Security Council “is overlooking the overall advancement of international law protecting people, peace, and security in the digital age, focusing on operational and physical security at the expense of human rights and human security.” The paper concludes with recommendations for the Council’s Member States.

“Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. [The authors] induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. [They] argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. [They] also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.”