The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Hello, everyone. Good morning and welcome to this session on Internet standards and human rights. We will get started.
I'm starting we are starting a bit late. I was waiting for the Panelists to arrive.
A very warm welcome to you if you are joining us online as well. My name is Sheetal Kumar and I lead digitals engagement in digital governance processes and we are cohosting this session with the European Centre for not for profit law, ECNL with the Office of the UN's High Commissioner ner for human rights, oche and the European Commission, the Department for international partnerships.
So welcome. Welcome.
And we have just started. Again welcome to everyone here in the room and online.
Just to give a bit of a context, at GPD we are a human rights organisation working to embed human rights in the digital technologies which includes not only of course regulation and policy frameworks but also technical standards.
I think Internet standards are perhaps one of the areas of Internet Governance or part of the network that may feel invisible for many, but actually, unless perhaps you are working on them, they are fundamentally shaping, of course, our lives and the exercise of our human rights are in the digital age as we become even more dependent on the Internet and on digital technologies.
And so in this session we want to discuss and elucidate to you two main things: The connections between Internet standards and human rights and the challenges and opportunities for stakeholders to gauge or wider range of stakeholders to engage in standards development.
So the office for the oche weds this year published a report based on stakeholders on technical standards for new and emerging technologies. That's why I'm delighted to start with opening remarks from Peggy Hicks, Director of thematic procedures and rights development provision. Peggy does have to leave us, I want to make sure that we come to you first before we turn to the other Panelists and before I introduce them.
So Peggy, over to you. I know that the report is really important introduction to this issue and provides an overview and an understanding of how technical standards and human rights intersect, that relationship provides a range of recommendations as well.
If you can provide over the next few minutes and overview of the report, its substance, that will provide a really great context for our discussion here.
Over to you, Peggy. Thank you.
>> Peggy: Thanks so much. It is a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for really highlighting this critical issue. I think you're right that it is an issue that doesn't really rise to the top the way that it needs to in terms of the focus. It is incredibly important. I think in the conversations I have had here in Kyoto at IGF, the impact of AI developments as well in this area, this is, we are only -- it was already important. Now it is even more urgent given the reality that many of the critical decisions around AI may come as a result of the work of technical standards studying bodies.
You referenced the report -- sorry, just do want to thank, of course, the European Commission, global partner and ECNL and your incredible work in this area and in convening us today.
You mentioned the report we did last year. I have with me one of the primary drafters. We are grateful to the human rights Council for giving us this mandate on this issue. The results weren't surprising to us. But it gave us a real opportunity to look at the full landscape for standard setting and to see what are the challenges within it from a human rights perspective. The first thing I need to say, we found, of course, that it is not a landscape that has just one actor or one type of actor. It is a vast constellation of actors that are diverse, various differences in terms of the standard setting organisations. They have different size, different working methods and processes.
What we found within them, of course, were a number of best practices, but also a number of challenges. The challenges that we saw related to access. The difficulties with regard to working documents, proposals, meeting minutes. Obviously problems with meaningful participation and transparency of working methods, language, technical knowledge, lack of financial and human resources to do some of the work that we are looking for.
One of the things that we focused on was the need for greater transparency and access to standards processes, standards setting processes, making documentation accessible to the public, addressing the financial and cultural barriers to participation. Of course, something that I think needs to be naught about much more seriously including in this IGF Forum, the need for inclusion of more diverse voices including from women, youth, voices from the global majority and those historically marginalized.
When we look at the landscape that I've just described, as I said one of the key things is that we need to recognize that there can't be a one size fits all approach. That the standard setting bodies themselves are at different places and we need to look at how to move things forward for the different standard setting bodies. It is an urgent endeavor, as I said. We are thinking of a two flank approach. The first flank is to look at each standard setting body, work with them to see what are the barriers to access in their own institutions and work to put in place policies that make it more easier to bring in human rights expertise in a variety of ways including, of course, civil society engagement as I just said but also from the academic community and others.
And breaking down those barriers to access, transparency is a critical piece.
The second piece, of course, though, we want the doors to be open, but even when the doors are open there are still real obstacles to Civil Society and academia being able to engage effectively in these bodies. These are labour intensive processes that go on for long periods of type. A lot of work being done in person rather than remotely. It requires resources and capacity to be able to do it.
And the reality is these are bodies that are often dominated by large companies. They are the ones that have the resources to be there. We need a level playing field. That requires real investment if we think that Civil Society and academia have important voices within these fora, we have to find a way to resource it and make it happen as well.
What would it take? What types of fundsers would be better able to support standard setting processes and engagement. We need that piece to be put in place as well.
The good news is, I think there's a real appetite from the standard setting bodies we talked to. They want to move forward on this. They understand their credibility and effectiveness depends on better engagement with the communities that are affected by digital technologies. We think there's room to move on these issues, but to leave everybody with the thought that it is an urgent endeavor and one that we need to take action on now.
Thanks very much.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thanks, Peggy. That was great. I think we are are going to unpack a lot of that this morning.
So just to quote from your report, from the report, one line which I think speaks to some of what you said. Technical standards reflect the interests, values and concerns of those participating in their elaboration.
And so, of course, as these standards under gird the technologies and the Internet as it evolves, and thus the rights of those who use them, it is really important, as you said, to ensure that the engagement in them is diverse.
So I want to come next to our first Panelist who is Natam at data privacy Brazil, sitting on my left here.
Because you have done research on exactly this question, engagement in Internet Governance bodies and thank you, Peggy, for joining us. I know you had to leave.
You have to leave. Thank you so much for making the time.
Natam, this report that you have worked on provides real data and insights into the actual engagement in Internet Governance bodies and standard setting. Really interested to hear now if you can keep it to three minutes, that would be great. The top level insights from your research. Thank you.
>> Natam: Hello, everyone, as Sheetal said I'm working with the data privacy Brazil which is an nonprofit Civil Society organisation that deals with the promotion with the digital rights through a social justice lenses.
And I believe that if we are talking about opportunities to engage, it is important to highlight some of the challenges that CSOs face when trying to engage within technical standard setting bodies. In March we at data privacy Brazil submitted a contribution to the human rights office called for inputs. And there we stated the need of such standard bodies to incorporate the escalation of human rights and framework, human rights discussions and frameworks of Internet development of technical standards.
However, to incorporate such discussions and frameworks it is necessary to enable the participation of CSOs and human rights experts in those bodies which is limited, as Peggy said do you to several barriers related, for example, to lack of financial resources and lack of technical capacity building and historically these debates between the debates of technical standards and human rights usually occur separately, which impeding the integration of human rights and considerations in these technical is that standard setting processes.
Because of those two areas we need to advocate for a multi-stakeholder approach so that it would help to improve the dialogue between standard setting processes and human rights.
And this understanding also appears in the study that you mentioned and that we conducted on data privacy Brazil. We designed this study with representatives from global southern organisations and we are launching this report today. The document will be available very soon. And the study is called voices from the Global South perspectives on international engagement and digital rights, supported by the national endowment for democracy an sheds light specifically on the active involvement of carefully selected group of activists from the Global South with the international organisations.
And going forward to the end, I promise I'm finishing. And in terms of opportunities of engagement in this report we were able to identify that despite the challenges and barriers in general that CSOs face to engage with international standard setting bodies, the processes that take place inside the UN, especially the IGF, are still key spaces. Especially because the IGF is the entirely open and multi-stakeholder space, despite not making binding decisions, it is conducive for capacity building and bringing discussions to debate with open and fruitful space within the scope between human rights and. Probably and maybe standard setting processes.
So thank you, Sheetal.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you, Natam. Okay, we'll get this right at some point. On? Yes.
So thank you, Natam. I think what you said reflects a lot of what the OHCHR report outlined. It is important to have that understanding from Civil Society as well on the ground trying to engage in these spaces. I encourage everyone to look at that report that has been launched.
Now I am going to come over to Eva Ignatuschtschenko, Head of international standards and Internet Governance at the UN -- the U.K. as a strategy and standards of engagement. How are you engaging on this topic of technical standards, Internet standards, and human rights? What do you think needs to be done to address the challenges we've heard, but also take advantage of the appetite and the interest in ensuring more diversity in this space?
>> EVA IGNATUSCHTSCHENKO: Thank you to the global partners for setting up the session. It is really important. As you say the U.K. government is committed to this agenda.
Thank you for everybody who made it out this morning. I am going to talk a little bit about the U.K. approach to this and leave you with three thoughts which I hope will spark discussion later.
I feel like I'm repeating myself but this is maybe new for some of you, U.K. has a long history of gauging in standard setting and ensuring integrity and promoting human rights. This is not new for us, but we are very aware of the challenges.
And within that I think the inclusion in the development of standards is not an easy task. Particularly also in the deployment process of standards you sometimes see issues. We have made a huge amount of progress over the last few years. I think I made standards sexy for U.K. government and I stand by that.
We have also embedded in the G7 agreements in 2021 the G7 for the first time adopted an agreement and partnership on digital technical standards which has a lot of human rights relevant commitments of looking at Internet protocols in particular, looking at inclusion, looking at standards that have broad societal impact and how the G7 can engage in that and support the community platform as we heard from OHCHR, standards beds are aware and they know it is not a strayed forward task, but there is more that we need to do despite the fact that standards bodies have woken up to the challenge.
And especially from our perspective, it is not always in the development of the standard. It often comes to implementation that, the deployment of the standard where human rights play a role and where human rights abuses might happen. And you can think of a standard like facial recognition that is important to protect privacy. You might unlock your phone with, that but can equally be used by other regimes for mass surveillance. I want to leave you with three thoughts because I'm conscious of time. First we are not starting with a blank sheet of paper. One of the issues that OHCHR has when looking at this pro, there isn't any guidelines on human rights and technical standards. However, we do have the UN principles on business and human rights. They give good requirements and good baseline for businesses to consider human rights in their engagement and standards bodies in the development of standards. We should be building on those.
Secondly, we really need a meaningful -- I do emphasize that word meaningful way for human rights experts to engage. It is a two way streets of the human rights experts need to start paying attention and start educating themselves. Importantly also standards bodies need to become more open to them.
U.K. is doing a lot to engage Civil Society in particular, but also industry experts and coordinate with them on standards, including in the multi-stakeholder advisory group in the U.K. and also informal networks on organisations like yut, ITF. I am not spelling them out. With standards bodies, you spell them out and you are no wiser.
The last thought I would leave you off, maybe nor provocative. I see AI, I'm not sure you have not heard anything about AI in this IGF as an enabler of this discussion. We are seeing for the first time there is a real recognition that ethics are needed in the new technologies. We hope that brings some lessons learned for the other technologies in the future. I'll leave it there.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thanks, thanks, Eva. That was really useful, I believe, and I'm excited to pick up some of those points in the open discussion an also invite you all to start thinking about your questions or how you would like to engage once we've heard from our next two speakers.
And the next speaker is online. I hope we can connect to Vanessa Cravo who is joining us online. She is telecommunications regulations special is at the Brazilian national tongues agency, ANATEL.
Vanessa, are you able to unmute yourself and join us --
>> VANESSA CRAVO: Yes. Can you hear me?
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: It is working well. All the standards are ensuring we can connect with you. And hear what you have to say and to share about the experience of ANATEL in engaging in standards organisations, but also in engaging a wide range of stakeholders in these discussions.
Over to you.
>> VANESSA CRAVO: So thank you very much and good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all.
So I think it is important to highlight that Anatel has the legal mandate to represent the country in the international telecommunications organisations and perhaps my experience that is most relevant to the session is the fact that I engage in the IGF telecommunications agency now for more than 14 years.
So I think it is a pleasure to have this conversation. And will this is very relevant. In fact, as we have heard today, this matter becomes relevant every day that goes by. Why is that? It is because our world and our lives have changed profoundly without these willing toes and they will continue to do so. We just heard about AI.
And they will continue to evolve. They will continue to disrupt. There was a change of leadership in these new and emerging technologies. They also have turned some processes the subject of our new geo political battlefields.
This also highlights disparities in the participation of persons in the fora aren't it is not surprising that the Global South lags behind in participation in these processes. Something also that was highlighted in the report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on this matter. One of the challenges that Peggy has mentioned before.
So at the same time that we recognize the unique representation, we also recognize that the processes define several different aspects of how we live, communicate, interact. No matter where or how you live.
So we recognize that, but the different voices are not being considered in shaping their own lives. Something also that Sheetal has mentioned in the opening remarks.
So of course, through the history we have seen examples that standards that didn't take into consideration human rights. One well-known example is the seat belt that was designed to save men's life but not women's lives.
So the fact is that now standards have a different, completely different roles in our societies. We live in an inter-r interdependent digital society which relies upon technical standards. We cannot wait until we discover that these standards are not designed for everyone and they can jeopardize women, for example, and other vulnerable groups to take some action.
So having said that, I think there is an agreement that the role of standards has completely changed. And they demand a change in how we look and we consider these processes in this organisations. So the new challenge is how to integrate the discussions in, within the framework and processes of, in standardization. Peggy also has highlighted quite a few challenges that we need to address. And so Brazil has some reflections on this point. And we have participated in discussions within yut framework about this. And we see this as, of course, an opportunity, an opportunity for bank proofs of the working methods. We take into consideration the challenges, but I think one very important thing is how to better integrate human rights perspectives in to the already existing processes.
So we believe that this discussion should be embedded in the cycles of the work of the organisation. For example when talking about yut T we are talking about discussing these issues with them, the telecommunication authorization sector. This is something very important and also something that we have seen is that we already seen some movement in this regard within yut.
And so I think this is for the international perspective that we are trying, we are looking forward to follow how this is going to evolve within ITU and of course engage in this matter. When we look into it nationally, what we have done in Brazil, we have set a framework and structure to try to have a plural position to ITU and other international organisations that Brazil is represented in. This is an open, a plural organisation and we try to foster the discussion, but of course even nationally we consider this as a challenge because it is really difficult to engage. We try to engage academia, for example, for the last session of the security lead group that addressed standardizations within ITU. We were able to engage academia in this discussion. It was the first delegation that involved academia for this discussion. We have seen this improvement as well.
But it is not easy because all the challenges they also apply nationally, even if you are trying to engage nationally to build consensus, to take to this fora.
So this will be my opening remarks. And thank you, Sheetal, very much.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you very much. And I think you spoke to some points that have been picked up, that you picked up on some points from the discussion before that really I think illustrate the opportunities that there are for engaging stakeholders. You provided examples of how Anatel is doing that and show us we are largely at the beginning of many of these discussions.
So for that reason while there are challenges, there are also opportunities to leverage the interest and the appetite that Peggy spoke of, of ensuring human rights voices and perspectives are represented in standards discussions and fowrps.
So Jessamine packs, you are programme officer at the FMA in the Philippines. And really would be interested to hear from you, picking up on these discussions about how in practice it is, what it is like to engage in these discussions as a Civil Society organisation. If you can share how you have faced some of those challenges and trying to engage in these discussions, bring that human rights perspective and perhaps if you have some recommendations for how things can improve.
Thank you.
>> JESSAMINE PACIS: Thank you, Sheetal. Good morning, everyone. So I think from the previous discussions it appears we are all in agreement that there is an issue of access in these spaces, right. I think that's great.
I don't want to repeat everything that Peggy and Natam have already said because I think OHCHR report and Peggy earlier also summed up the challenges quite well. So there is not a lot of CSOs participation in standard setting processes because we are very resource intensive. It takes travel costs, there are membership an participation costs and it takes a lot of time and energy. I think just one thing that I wanted to highlight is that these are labour intensive. These are resource intensive. Because it is not just enough to participate in these spaces. You have to participate meaning fully and this means, because like engaging in this process is not just one thing, right? You have to really continue engagement for a prolonged period of time and not a lot of CSOs have -- not only the access to these spaces but also the resources to sustain this kind of work and this kind of engagement for a period of time.
One thing that has worked with FMA in the past and one thing that we are also trying to do now is being able to access spaces such as the ITU and ICANN and ITF through working with the government. Specifically our Department of ICT as well as our national telecommunications commission because these agencies are often more able to access these spaces as part of the national delegation.
So our previous speakers already mentioned the importance of the multi-stakeholder process, but I think we should also emphasize the fact that this process should also start within the national levels. It is not important just with the global level, but it has to start with our own countries as well.
Of course, there are also challenges with this kind of strategy. Working with the government, of course, there is constantly fluctuating leadership. The officials and the leaders are policed every once in awhile, especially with ministry level agencies.
And in the Philippines, for example, there is some moments in the past when the Department of ICT and the national telecommunications commission were active in participating in global standard setting processes. The people in the government changed over time and the agenda changes as well. The priorities change.
So the level of engagement also changed over time. I was telling Sheetal yesterday that currently I think it has been more than a decade that the Philippines has not had a representative to the ICANN gap which reflects the kind of level of priority and the level of engagement that the government has right now.
So yeah, now the Department of sees the process of coming up with a new digital strategic and a new strategic reasons for them. We are as part of Civil Society trying to reach out to the government to put engagement in these standard setting process back on their agenda in their priority as well. And open conversations on Internet Governance and Internet fragmentation and related issues with them as well.
Thank you.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you so much. And as you were speaking I thought it was interesting that you remarked on the need for that general agenda-setting and priorityisation of the issue, which Eva, you shared some considerations from the U.K. government and the approach of having a strategy and having this sort of I suppose longer term and more embedded approach, which then provides for that ability, I think, to ensure continuity and engagement despite changes in administration, for example.
So that is one area we can explore in the open discussion. But as I mentioned, we are co-organizing this session with the European Commission and the Department for international partnerships, in particular. I wanted to check if any representative wanted to come in at this point and re-fleblght -- yes, please, please do come.
And if you want to use that mic that is absolutely fine. Thank you so much.
>> Thank you very much. Peter Mary Indian European Commission, thank you for organizing this exchange of information. We welcome the report by OHCHR. On human rights and digital standards, I think. And it describes well how some proposals for technical standards can actually turn into standards which undermine the usage of Internet in a way that respects the rights as we see them reflected in the fundamental charters, for example, the UN charter on human rights.
As you all know there have been standards proposed in the past which in our opinion can also lead to fragmentation of the Internet or, you know, quite severe implications for privacy.
So the report we think is specifically relevant for the standard setting organisations. And we hope that these organisations will take them duly into account.
We also appreciate very much the close cooperation, the dialogue between OHCHR and the ITU, especially the recent changes also at ITU.
Now, of course, it is important that these high level I would say commitments, exchanges that have taken place but also the recommendations that have been made in the report, that these, of course, trickle down into the actual work at the technical level working groups and hopefully indeed that other stakeholders as has been mentioned here will gradually be able to be involved even more in these sometimes technical and difficult environments.
Difficult access, as was explained by the speakers.
So on our side we are happy at the European Commission to contribute to this process, to this reinforcement of the links between the human rights and standard setting. We are actually happy to announce a new cooperation on this field between the commission and OHCHR and also later today we will be announcing this in another session.
Maybe I would like to finish just with a question. It would be interesting if people in the room or on the panel or online would have any information about concrete steps that might already have been taken or are being planned following this report, if any. Thank you very much.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you for coming and for also being a co-organiser of this session.
So we can start with your question. I also have another few questions for those of us here in the room and also online.
Do you have experience engaging in technical standard setting organisations or implementing or actioning any of the recommendations in the OHCHR report?
And how do you see this work going forward in? I think we heard a lot of optimism about the opportunities that can exist as long as the challenges that we have identified and agreed on that do exist for human rights perspectives and more diverse perspectives to be represented in standards Forums are overcome.
So do you have further recommendations or ideas for how to overcome those?
I think as we said we identified the challenges and there were recommendations in the report, but are there any other recommendations that you may have based on your experience?
So that is how we will start the open discussion because we've got about 15 minutes to hear from you all. And the way that -- okay, I already see some hands. I would like to do this, is to see whether there are hands. I've seen one, I see two. And then take those two questions first and see whether Panelists want to respond. I'll also keep an eye on the online moderator and whether there's anything there. But please do feel free to respond to what the Panelists have said as well or bring your own perspectives to the discussion.
We will start with a question or reflection here. Please introduce yourself and then ask your question or share your reflection. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: This is on, good. Good morning, my name is Andrew cam pling, I run a public policy consultancy and setting, involved with Internet standards mainly around the ITF.
And from that I reflect that new Internet standards and changing to existing ones have absolutely have significant implications to public policy. However, diverse diversity in the standards bodies is a problem on pretty much every axis. For example in the ITF it's about 10 percent female. It is equally under represented on geographic axes, ethnicity, age. I could go on. You get the understanding.
Part of the problem is certainly within the ITF it is not a multi-stakeholder process. So it is purely let led by the sort of technical community. Now, that might seem reasonable, but that means at a very narrow point of view is represented by those who do engage in the digitalling of the standards. Those few CSOs that are involved are often supported by funding by tech companies themselves, representing a pretty narrow segment of Civil Society.
There is also by the way low involvement of governments and their agencies including the European Commission and the European meats. They are absent from the discussions and users are not even in the room.
Because of that lack of diversity, and therefore lack of diversity of thought, that leads to problems with the culture of the community. And also affects the quality of the standards and the type of standards that are actually produced.
So we will get better outcomes if we have a more diverse community working on the problems. So in my view we need to fix this problem if we are going to make the Internet better. We have got to find a way to integrate multi-stakeholders into the standards process. I would suggest one way of doing that is to measure the diversity of the different standards bodies and publish the stats regularly to hold them to account to do better.
So I leave that thought with you. If anyone wants to discuss this after this, happy to do so.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you. If we have anyone here who is doing some of that work, feel free to share your work, your research. Natam already shared some of the research that is being done. It will be interesting to hear from others as well. Thank you, Andrew, for that contribution.
We have would here.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is -- a lecturer in the University of London and I also chair a research group at the ITF in analyzing the standardization processes in particular ITF and weect. What I want to say is pretty much realignmented what the last colleague said and the colleague from the European Commission and one of the other speakers. The question is how are you, are we going to resolve the conundrum of the fact that the technical standards are technical. We can be aspirational and desire things to be one way or the other but not avoid the fact that at the end of the day these things are quite complicated. I can actually tell you from my research it is getting even more reply indicated. A draft now takes about three years since the first draft until it is published. It involves more people, more countries, more companies. All this makes thition more complicated. Monitoring this is difficult even if you know about the technical difficulties. Many standard bodies are open, very open. Open doesn't mean accessible. Accessible is only for those who understand, have the time and energy, as one of the colleagues said.
This is something that is quite difficult to challenge. I pretty much agree with what everyone said, I haven't heard anything that helps to work towards a solution. So I'm sorry, I don't have a good answer and I think that the work that we are doing in providing analysis is helpful because as I said these bodies are open. But he this are not accessible. Not accessible because they are complicated. And doing research in this direction can help.
I think it also takes an effort from other communities that want to engage, acknowledging the fact that they might not have the technical background is necessary. They are not going to be able to engage with technical people otherwise. Technical people needs to walk a little bit toward the other side. The space in the middle is quite wide. I would look forward to hearing how people think this space can be bridged. Thank you.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you for that. That work is beginning. There are some spaces, for example, at the ITF and the human rights protocol considerations group has been starting that work.
And in the OHCHR report there are recommendations for example that standards organisations put in place adequate human rights, due diligence processes. There are frameworks to support that. I think Eva, you pointed out how the UN guiding principles, businesses and human rights can be used as a framework. Those are some of my reflexes. I'm keen to hear from Panelists in terms of responding to the how. How can we do this better even if we are just starting out?
Vittorio and if anyone else wants to come in. After you I will come to the Panelists who want to respond to the questions including from Ignacio. What do we do and how do we do it.
>> Thank you, I'm from the exchange and I want to support the previous comments. I sated a lot of what I wanted to say. I must say being than would of the people that 2025 years ago were involved in developing the multi-stakeholder model, coming up with it, at the IGF, but we overlooked the importance of the standards setting organisations. Maybe this is the time that we have to do something to make the mountains as well.
But at the same time I was a bit surprised. I came here because of the title. I hadn't read the report. The title is about Internet standards but we are talking about ITF which doesn't do anything with the Internet standards.
Given the way the Internet standards, you deploy technology an then standardize it. You are always catching up. This is not going to change. There is a need for additional effort even before things get to the standardization phase of the process. This is also something that should be demanded to the industry.
But what I want the toed a, it is not just a matter of money, bringing people with good skills, engineers, and you need people who understand the technical part, but there is a mindset problem. Even the HRPC committee which was mentioned it does bring a human rights perspective but very narrow mostly dominated by I say freedom of expression from the Global North. That's the only type of human rights perspective you get. Not a lot of people from the Global South. There are no other human rights. When people come with talking about rights, the groups, like it happened with the --, for example, they are basically sent away and say we don't want you or care about you. This is widely shared by the engineering community. We have follow educate the community to open the understand of the human rights.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Absolutely. We have a few points there about reinforcing the issue of diversity, adjusting research is done, the challenge of complexity. How do we deal with that? And also some reflexes at the end there, I think, to the point again that diversity is an issue and resourcing is a challenge. How do we make those connections happen between the human rights community, making that more diverse as well, ensuring that the human rights perspectives are also diverse.
So lots of questions about how do we actually change this situation relating to the challenges?
Natam, Eva, Jessamine or indeed Vanessa online, do you have any responses to those?
>> VANESSA CRAVO: Can I go, please? So thank you very much. I think the previous comment was quite interesting. I am very aware that we have all this discussion about what ITU does or does not regarding its mandate on related to the Internet. I'm not going to get into this conversation, otherwise we are going to need some hours to try to listen to this position. But that is not the point.
The roirts on this and all this digital toll is much broader than all this emerging and new technologies, they are shaping our lives.
If you go to the standardization sector of ITU and you take a look of the discussions there they are having and the items discussed, it is going to produce recommends and standards. You are going to see that much of the discussions applied also to ITU. There is no role for ITU here in this discussion.
One comment. Usually when we compare standards organisations, usually one of the biggest questions is regarding openness. And I think the previous three comments were right on the spot. To say that standardization organisations is open doesn't mean that people can really engage in it. And they are going to have a multi-stakeholder discussion and a multi-stakeholder standard processes and a process that is going to have all the voices heard. They take into consideration. I think this is quite important that we have very clear in our minds and this is something that always appear when we are having this conversation.
So I think one useful exercise would be also to map all the standards organisations because they have different scopes and different levels of openness. And different level of participation. And to map how does this discussion of the integration, the need to embed human rights into the processes is being held. Because we have organisations that are pulling market led organisations and we have others with different kind of stakeholders. This could be a useful exercise for us. Thank you.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thanks so much, Vanessa and also for that recommendation.
For perhaps bringing more clarity and understanding to what is already happening in standards organisations.
And I wanted to turn to Eva because I know that you wanted to respond perhaps to the questions around what we do. And also would you like to -- oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see that. Please do take the mic there or I can hand you this one. You have one there, great.
>> AUDIENCE: How many engineers does it take to turn on a microphone? First of all this is a very important discussion. I suggest that at least a thought exercise and not necessarily ringing we should actually do this, but it is tempting. Imagine that you think universal declaration of human rights and for each one of the ones that is articulated ask ourselves what kind of standards are needed to realise those rights.
There is a broad category of accessibility. And that covers everything for all practical purposes. If you look at today's world and you ask yourself how do people find out about things that are rights related? An awful lot of it is online. If you don't have access to that online facility or don't have accessibility features, then you are denying access to that information. That is a big broad category.
Along those lines, just speaking about accessibility, one thing I have found is that standards don't necessarily get implemented, people who were trying to implement to the standards don't necessarily have a lot of intuition about how to do that because they have haven't experienced the use of, for example, screeds and things like that. -- screen readers, things like that. The best way to help engineers and user interface developers develop an intuition for this is to give them examples of what works and what doesn't work.
And show them, you know, the differences. And after awhile you begin to develop an intuition for what works and doesn't work.
There are a lot of places around the world that focus on accessibility and technology for that. And I would urge you to prepare whatever documentation you can out of this session and make that as visible as possible just to draw more attention.
Let me just bring up one other thing about justice and the access to it. There have been a number of studies pointing out that in the absence of access to online facilities including accessibility, people do not have access to the justice system. So this exercise going through the Declaration might turn out to help us identify where we have gaps and where we could do more work. Thank you.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you for that very helpful suggestions for what can be done to advance the understanding of different communities. And I think we can pick those up in the hallways and that is, I think that's what is exciting about this discussion.
So we have two points here. If you can make them quick, we then have to wrap up. But thank you.
>> I am from the Internet Society Ambassador. When it comes to increasing participation especially from the Global South, the biggest barrier is funding because being present in the room is very important.
And it is also not something that is going to happen if you are just send people once. This has to happen again and again. It takes time to socialize into the system and again the interests behind the funding, the Indian government is coming up with a programme through which they will send people to the standardization organisations, but of course the people that they are sending will be representing the interests of the Indian government.
If we want the sloit to be present there, we will need funding that has interests of the broader community in mind.
And I want to -- it is not a question but I would like as a social science researcher interested in standardization I want to understand from the room what is the call to action for social science researchers in the standardization domain. Thank you.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you. Please.
>> My name is Collin Perkins, I work at the University of Glasgow and chair of the IRTF.
There have been a bunch of good points made. I especially agree that funding is a challenge for a number of people to participate in standards development. It is a challenge I have been facing as an academic for many years trying to participate in this area.
There are practical steps that can be made. Not all SDOs have large membership fees. There are a number of SDOs, ITF included that provide extensive and very cheap remote participation options.
Of course, remote participation is not as effective as being in the room, but it is a lot better than not being there. There are people who can and do participate effectively via the video conferencing, email discussions, via the various other discussions.
In the ITF community we also have groups like the human rights group, human rights protocol considerations group, as has been mentioned. It has been running for the past decade or so. We've got the research into standardization, standards development processes group, which Ignacio who spoke earlier chairs which is looking at the effectiveness of the process.
We have a number of ITF-led diversity initiatives to try to improve diversity.
These are having some effect. If you look at the ITF, for example, the diversity has increased significantly over time. Twenty years ago if you looked at the RFCs being published, 75 percent were from North America. Now that is down to approximately 40 percent.
The number of RFCs published from the number of people from Asia, Europe has doubled over the last 20 years. Clearly we have a way to go. The number of people from Latin America, Africa is not as high as we would like and women --
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: I do have to ask you to close here.
>> AUDIENCE: To close, I think as Ignacio said, engagement requires time and effort. With the best in the world developing the necessary expertise takes time.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Yes. Actually, I think that is the, one of the key points we have been hearing here. There are a number of areas where progress is being seen. There are many opportunities. There are many challenges, but at least we know what those challenges are.
They are, as colleague from the European Commission also saids there are efforts to start implementing the recommendations from the report already underway.
I wanted to come to Eva very quickly for 30 seconds and then to Vanessa as women and then we will wrap up. I know we are over time.
Eva?
>> EVA IGNATUSCHTSCHENKO: Thank you. I am trying to be quick. I think a bit of optimism. We are talking about standards bodies, hundreds, thousands of working groups and then standard being developed. However, we believe that the majority of those will not have human rights implications and we don't need to worry about all of them possibly being used for human rights breaches. There are a small proportion we are worried about where we need to engage. The land scape is not as scary as it might look from outside.
Three points to responders, what sort of practical actions we can take. What we are doing is we are teaching our own staff members and bringing in technical experts, engineers into government where you have the resources as an organisation to do that. And that's sort of solves one of the problems raised.
Secondly, the best in the world, all the funding we throw at it, we will not be able to get all the CSOs in the room. Working together, being able to work through proxies. We had good experiences on people doing that for some encryption standards, is really important. I think that's than would of the solutions moving forward.
I think if we show up as one individual from Civil Society organisations it is going to be hard because of all the reasons we mentioned. If you work together you might be able to have a voice and share expertise and share that technical than.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you. We had an had a colleague from Article 13, also shared the work that they have done in mapping standards organisations. Which is a particularly useful resource. So it is called the Internet standards almanac. Please do consider looking at that. It is a great introduction to standards organisations, particularly for Civil Society organisations looking to engage.
Vanessa, I'll give you 30 seconds.
>> VANESSA CRAVO: Thank you very much. So just one final comment, one possible way to go for Civil Society organisations is to look for the delegations of your national governments that maybe it is, maybe room for also to explore participation and engaging within your national delegations to all these kind of fora. We have heard the Philippines and Brazil also is something -- and many other countries do that. This could be an option of starting engaging and getting to know this without having to pay fees, for example, for the ones that demand membership fees and all this kind of barriers.
So thank you.
>> SHEETAL KUMAR: Thank you. So I wanted to end now with an optimistic note. We do have the report from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. We have all of these ideas. We do have, I think it sound like consensus. Is it rough consensus or consensus that there are challenges to engaging in standards organisations to reflecting a diversity of views and to ensuring human rights perspectives are reflected in standards development and in implementation.
We agree that that needs to change and that there are a set of recommends in the report. We heard some in the room here to change that.
So I hope that this, for many of us being a dart start to what we need for that change. Please do ensure that you make the connections here with others and online. There is an ITF session happening at 1 today as well as connecting the dots between the different discussions is going to be important. I look forward to continuing this important discussion and implementing the ideas and the recommendations that have come from here.
And thank you also to the Panelists who made the time to be here. And also to the co-organisers of this session. I hope that you have a great rest of the IGF and also I really look forward as I said to continuing this discussion with you afterwards. Thank you.
(The session concluded at 1050JST.)