UN Experts Discuss Digital Tech amid Covid-19

The United Nations human rights experts have said that the Covid-19 pandemic has made them even more reliant on digital technologies and the space they create for civic engagements.

Development Diaries learnt that the UN Special Rapporteurs made this known after attending the annual RightsCon conference on human rights in the digital age.

‘With the closing of civic space and restrictions on offline media, access to universal, open, affordable, secure, and stable Internet is vital to save lives, to prevent abuses, to continue to promote and protect human rights and urgently increase access to information’, they said.

The independent experts spoke on a range of topics including lessons learnt from the pandemic, surveillance technologies, security and data collection, racial discrimination, and online attacks against human rights defenders and protest movements.

‘Digital technologies that construct and surround the space in which we conduct our lives during these unprecedented times must not be used by governments or companies to restrict fundamental freedoms, reduce civic space, and target civil society actors, including human rights defenders’, they added.

It was noted that the experts have presented reports, sent numerous communications to various states across the globe and issued press releases addressing emerging digital technologies and racial inequality; the freedom of expression during disease pandemics; targeted killings through armed drones; the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in the digital era.

Source: UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner 

Photo source: Austin Public Library

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