Cyberlaw and Human Rights
01/31/2019 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM in Cambridge (United States of America)
After two decades of little direct legislation of the internet, national laws and related court decisions meant to govern cyberspace are rapidly proliferating worldwide. They are becoming building blocks in new legal frameworks that will shape the evolution of Internet governance and policymaking for years to come.
In the Global South and particularly under repressive regimes, these frameworks can be imposed with little regard for human rights obligations and without a full understanding of the technologies and processes they regulate or their implications for the preservation of the core values of the internet: interoperability, universality, and free expression and the free flow of information.
This panel brings together practitioners from five international organizations monitoring the development of legislation and case law related to cyberspace to discuss the implications for the future of human rights online.
Panelists
Moderator
Robert Faris is the research director at the Berkman Klein Center where he contributes and provides oversight to research at the center. His research includes the study of digital communication mechanisms by civil society organizations and social movements, and the emergence and impact of digitally-mediated collective action, as well as the influence of networked digital technologies on democracy and governance and the evolving role of new media in political change.
Dr. Hawley Johnson is the Project Manager for Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, an initiative to advance the understanding of international and national norms and institutions that best protect the free flow of information and expression in an interconnected global community. Hawley has over twelve years of experience in international media development both academically and professionally, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She recently worked with the award winning Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project to launch the Investigative Dashboard (ID), a joint effort with Google Ideas offering specialized databases and research tools for journalists in emerging democracies.
Robert Muthuri is currently a Research Fellow – ICT at the Centre for IP and IT (CIPIT) at the Strathmore School of Law. He is a Legal Knowledge Engineer working at the intersection of legal theory and AI. Robert is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya who, with the conviction that technology had a lot more to offer the legal domain, further pursued a career in legal informatics.
Juan Carlos Lara is a Chilean lawyer, specializing in law and technology, currently working as the manager of the Public Policy and Research team at Derechos Digitales, a non governmental organisation based in Santiago de Chile that promotes and defends digital rights in Latin America. He has worked as a consultant in intellectual property for public and private entities, has been a research assistant at the Centre of Studies in Cyber Law at the University of Chile, and is currently an LL.M. candidate at UC Berkeley. In Derechos Digitales, he leads research and policy analysis on technology and data privacy, equality, freedom of expression, and access to knowledge and human rights in online platforms.
Gayatri Khandhadai is a lawyer with a background in international law and human rights, international and regional human rights mechanisms, research, and advocacy. She previously worked with national and regional human rights groups, focusing on freedom of expression. She coordinated the IMPACT — India, Malaysia, Pakistan Advocacy for Change through Technology — project with the Association for Progressive Communications. Her current focus is on digital rights in Asia with specific emphasis on freedoms of expression, assembly, and association on the Internet.
Jessica Dheere is co-founder of the Beirut–based digital rights research, training, and advocacy organization SMEX (smex.org) and a 2018-19 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is also incubating director of the recently launched CYRILLA Collaborative (cyrilla.org), a global initiative that maps and analyzes the emergence and evolution of legal frameworks in digitally networked environments through open research, data models, and databases.