Session
Al Sur
Building up on the succesful discussions facilitated by the "IGF 2019 Pre-Event #42 Technology and Surveillance in Latin America: Towards Human Rights Standars" that already identified and discussed topics such as the incremented use of technology for surveillance purposes in Latin America, the aim of the present submission is to promote a reassessment of some monitoring technologies proposed in the context of the COVID-19.
Al Sur is a consortium of 11 organizations from civil society and academia from Latin America that work collectively to strengthen human rights in the digital environment of Latin America and the Caribbean.
On a recent statement*, Al Sur showcased a few cases of abusive use of data being implemented into applications and the need for any emergency response to COVID-19 must be proportionate to the risk assessed, necessary and non-discriminatory. Moreover, Al Sur has started an Observatory of surveillance practices in the context of pandemics, a collective effort to understand the phenomenon and their regional commonalities as well as identify future challenges once the state of emergency is over.
In this session, Latin American representatives from Governments, Civil Society and the Private Sector will discuss strategies aimed to work towards a regional Human Rights framework that regulates the use of technologies for monitoring the advance of the COVID-19 Pandemics. General audiences, even not from the region, will have info to compare situations in different areas of the world and identify common challenges in the digital environment.
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* Al Sur's statement "Civil society from Latin America and the Caribbean demands to respect human rights when governments deploy digital technologies to fight against COVID-19" : https://web.karisma.org.co/en/civil-society-from-latin-america-and-the-caribbean-demands-to-respect-human-rights-when-governments-deploy-digital-technologies-to-fight-against-covid-19/