On 11 October 2024, the UN Human Rights Council concluded its 57th Session in Geneva. ARTICLE 19 was present at the session to promote the right to freedom of expression and interrelated rights, including by taking part in negotiations on resolutions, meeting with delegations, and making statements.
Our core priority at the session was to take part in negotiations on a new resolution on human rights on the internet. We also made several statements calling for accountability in situations where the right to freedom of expression is in crisis, including on Belarus, Cambodia, Myanmar, Russia, and Turkey.
We highlight the details of the resolutions we followed closely at the session below.
Human rights on the internet
We welcome adoption of a progressive resolution on the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet by consensus. This resolution was led by Sweden and a wider core group consisting of Brazil, Tunisia, and the United States, and co-sponsored by over sixty countries from all regions. We took part in negotiations and worked closely with the core group and other delegations throughout the session to ensure that the resolution set new progressive standards. This is now the sixth in a series of resolutions with the same title, the first of which was adopted in 2012 and made the landmark affirmation that ‘the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online’.
The iteration of the resolution has the overarching theme of connectivity. Crucially, it makes a welcome departure from traditional narratives on connectivity, which solely focus on economic development, and instead recognises that universal and meaningful connectivity is essential for the enjoyment of human rights. Moreover, it makes progress by recommending diverse and human rights-respecting technological solutions to advance connectivity, including by creating an enabling and inclusive regulatory environment for small, non-profit and community internet operators. This is essential given that larger dominant telecommunications operators often lack incentives to invest in infrastructure for remote or rural communities. The resolution calls on governments to ensure these solutions are made with meaningful, transparent and inclusive participation with civil society, including remote and rural communities and persons belonging to groups at risk, of being disconnected from the internet.
The resolution also draws a clear link between connectivity and the right to information, calling on governments to facilitate easy, prompt, effective and practical access to public information and proactively disclose information held by public bodies as a means of intensifying efforts to advance universal and meaningful connectivity. We have long held that the right to information is one of the key tools to advocate for connectivity that is available to civil society, the media, and public watchdogs – it allows them to use knowledge about government and private companies’ action or inaction to advocate for change to the status quo.
Alongside these important developments, the resolution maintains several core commitments adopted in previous iterations, including calls upon all governments to cease and refrain from shutdowns and online censorship, as well as to ensure net neutrality.
We urge all States to fully implement the commitments of the resolution and scale up human-rights based efforts to ensure universal and meaningful connectivity.
Russia
We also welcome the adoption of a new resolution on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation. This resolution makes recommendations to alleviate the human rights crisis and also renews the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Russia, which was first created back in 2022. It passed with 20 votes in favour and 8 votes against adoption, with 19 abstentions. We supported efforts led by our partners to ensure the renewal of the Special Rapporteur’s essential mandate in our conversations with delegations.
The renewal of the Special Rapporteur is absolutely essential. We spoke at the session to highlight how the right to freedom of expression remains heavily repressed, with numerous individuals prosecuted under so-called ‘war censorship’ laws and other legislation targeting so-called ‘extremism’, ‘foreign agents’, and ‘undesirable organisations’. Independent media has now largely been driven out of the country, while journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society actors face increasing repression, both within the country and in exile.
We reiterate our full support for the mandate, which plays a crucial role in documenting and investigating human rights violations and providing pathways to ensure justice for victims. We mirror wider calls to ensure that the mandate holder has all the resources necessary to fulfil this increasingly crucial role.