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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>> MODERATOR: We're going to get started. I see Jacqueline is joining us online. Hi, Jacqueline. I will wait a sec. I see we have some people joining us online.
I think you do have to wear the headset to be able to hear the people online. And it will be channel 5.
So welcome, everyone. We here in this session on Defending Voice & Expression in Africa and the Middle East. I think we are going to get started. We have some people joining us online. It's pretty busy in the venue but not unfortunately but we hope some more people will be joining us soon.
For those of you who don't know me I'm Annelies Riezebos in the Department of Federal Affairs, and in the Department of Human Rights. So I work on issues like freedom of expression online and that includes content moderation, the response to disinformation online and the promotion of information integrity.
So I'm really happy to you could be invited to moderate this session today. And I think we've had a good discussions already at the Internet Governance Forum here in Riyadh he decision on the internet and the Netherlands is a key priority where we believe in an open, and world-wide free open and secure internet.
And internet is essential and can be foundational for achieving the sustainable goals and the freedom of expression, it should be held online and offline. So the staggered approach sin so essential that we have a panel now where we are joined from our colleagues from Civil Society. And also from the Freedom Online Coalition we have made sure to seek coordination among countries and to include human right safeguard online.
Also, for instance this year with the global digital Compaq which we negotiated.
And here we are for to speak about the opportunity for the freedom of expression worldwide but also the challenges that arise from the roles that have been taken by some countries.
And I'm really glad that GBDing to with article 19 has done extensive research on this topic because there might be legs that is not no line with human right standards which corrects them on vulnerable human right genders and journalists and LGBTQIA+ individuals or other marginalized groups and this is in compatible with the human right laws.
In this session I'm really glad we will be focusing on these kinds of legislative measures, specifically in the region. And my panel today we have Jacqueline Rowe with global partners duty who is joining us now. You are on the screen now as well. So welcome.
You are with Aymen now and Adeboye Adegoke in the room who is with me. And to join in the online content restrictive legislation but I'm really hope. We can discuss matters of how we can working to have legislation that is actually rights respective.
So I hoping to we will identify a path to what is the much needed regulation of the online space, which is essential but in such a way it doesn't infringe on the potential -- on the online human rights enjoyment.
We will have to do this in only 6 minutes, so I will take it away right away I will give the word to Jacqueline who will give us more of an overview in the research that article 19 did on the issue, and the other panelist will also discuss the trend they see in the region and we will have a round dialogue to discuss how we can work together.
So Jacqueline, you are with GPD, and you worked on the record an ever tighten net which is on this topic and Jacqueline is a PhD student and she works on designing respond I believe natural language processing at the University of Edinburgh and has worked with GPD on regulation and policies surrounding hate speech and disinformation. Alright, Jacqueline, take it away.
>> JACQUELINE ROWE: Thank you, Annelies. Thank you for your views. It's great to be with you all remotely. As Annelies said, I was involved in the writing this report. And I thought I would give a brief overview of what the report is and ha what it covers and talk about the key trend that we documented in that report.
So the goal was to understand across Africa and the region how restrict onion line content are impacting freedom of expression today. So we looked -- a lot of this work was looking at cybercrime legislation, particularly content based criminal restrictions is online expression.
But we also looked at another range of areas including platform regulations and antiterrorist legislation that applies in the online context and oppressive media regulations and disinformation legislation as well.
So we were focusing beyond specific cybercrime regimes but really trying to get a pick of where these different restrictions are found in countries legislative kind of frameworks and how specifically we were really interested in how those restrictions being enforced in practice. So not just looking at the text of the law but also looking at how they are being enforced and who they are being enforced against.
So our focus within this work was broadly speaking to these restrictions and how they are being enforced and aligned with international human right law or not. And we were focusing primarily on freedom of expression concerns but there were a number of other human rights that are also relevant to these discussions as well.
So with our partners, with article 19, who really pleased to work with on this project, we looked at the over 150 different legal frameworks from countries all over the region and tried to gather -- yeah, as I said concrete examples of how they are being enforced against different groups.
And we found that it's a very diverse region, the whole of Africa and all of the Middle East. There are diverse approaches taken to sign her crime and to what content should be criminalized online. Some of the regimes we looked at, some of the legislations were aligned -- you know more or less with issue human rights law and with the Budapest convention which is the -- I'm sure most people here will be aware but the kind of global standard, the norm on right respecting cybercrime legislation.
And when I say they were aligned, I mean the criminal restrictions they placed online expression were limited to very specific narrowly defined categories of egregious online harms. So these are kind of child sexual abuse material incitement and genocide and child genocide, and terrorists. So four discrete categories that can be per miserably criminalised under International Human Rights Law.
So while some of the countries legislative packages were more or less aligned with those restrictions unfortunately a lot of them were not aligned and included content restrictions on much broader categories of online content and expression than would be considered permissible under international standards on freedom of expression.
And within the report, what we tried to do was group these areas of divergence from human right standards into four main themes that we observed. So the first theme or trend that we looked at was a lot of governments in the region are using public safety concerns or public safety narratives to justice over broad restrings onion line speech.
So for example implementing a restriction onion line terrorism or content which undermines national security, which is kind of using this language of being in the interest of public safety. But in reality we saw that those restrictions were being enforced against, as you mentioned in your introduction human right defenders and human right components the broad definitions used in those pieces of legislation, even though they are towards public safety are in fact not being used to protect public safety A as well.
So this was the first trend we looked at and documented in the report. The second theme was criminal restrictions on disinformation. Over a third of the legal frameworks that we looked at included some kind restriction on disinformation. And while disinformation is of course a legitimate concern and can pose human right risks in itself if allowed to spread, again issue human rights law is very clear that it should never be criminalized and we saw in the report -- we documented allot of examples of how those restricts are being used to sensor political expression and other expression by visual and marginalized groups.
The third trend that we documented in the report was online -- restrictions onion line expression which we see as enforcing authoritarian value systems. So this might include prohibiting criticism of political figures, of religion or religious leaders. This might include bans on LGBTQ content or content for LGBTQ groups as well as any kind of expression or advocacy for marginalized groups as well.
So these restrictions are very far from international standards or what can per miss permissibly be restricted and we saw they had groups in practice. And fine trend we looking at in the report is the shifting away or adding to individual restrictions on what people can say online in criminal law which provide platforms which take down broad categories of illegal content as well.
So those were the trends we looked at in the report. And the main focus of the report was monitoring and reporting some of those risks and concerns. But we did also include very various recommendation Wes developed with article 19 as well. And I can get into those perhaps a bit later on.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Jacqueline for that overview of the report and it's really good that you identified the four areas and that we see that there are so many trend where platform and cybercrime legislation is not aligned are IHRL. Aymen, I would like to give the floor to you.
Perhaps we can go more in Deb and what they have gained from investigating cybercrime in the region. Aymen is a policy counsellor based in Tunisia and he researched impact of journalism and freedom of expression in the region. And he is also an associate forever for designs in the Tunisia region.
Could you provide an overview of the specific overviews that have you encountered and also the advocacy efforts that were employed to challenge these laws?
>> AYMEN ZAGHDOUDI: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. So basically, it was published one year after his coup, and in the absence of the parliament. And I, apart from the content-based offenses, which I will come to later -- it contains civil problematic provisions.
So countries all the time -- I will mention two examples. The first one is the obligation for ISPs -- for all data related to communication traffic and other types of data which is a big threat to the right of privacy. As you know, based on this data, authorities can have an idea about our daily behavior and conduct.
The second example is related to the communication and interception. So basically whether Tunisia or other cybercrime in the region we didn't see any safeguards when it comes to communications and interception.
But most the problematic provision is Article 24, of course, which designs content-based offenses, broad terms, and even the scope is very broad, criminalising not only the publication of content online, but sending proof or even generating content that might be considered against the Article 24.
It contains disproportionate sanctions from five to ten years of prison, information, hate speech. But always, you know ill defined term, vague terms. So long story short, if we analyze this article 24, which dines cop tent based often, under the thee-part test it won't be able to even to pass the legality condition.
So it's unclear.
It was issued without any public debate. The problem also that it contains crimes that are already criminalised based on other pieces of legs lining the press law, the criminal law. The telecommunication law, et cetera.
And now we do have journalists, lawyer, judges, politician, students, defenders and many others either in the prison or persecuted for criticizing the government.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much. And lastly I would like to give the floor to our in-person panelist, Adeboye Adegoke. She is a leading voice for the government space in Africa and senior manager at Paradigm Initiative and a member of the go 20 think tank on the governance of Artificial Intelligence as well a member of the advisory network of the Freedom Online Coalition.
So really glad to you have here. Boy, you have many years of global, regional, national experience with digital rights advocacy. Can you go into to that a bit about the trends you are seeing in particular, and also, how we can move forward to combat the threats we see to freedom of speech there?
>> ADEBOYE ADEGOKE: Thank you very much, Annelies, and thank you, Aymen and Jacqueline. I hope I got your name. Please forgive me if I didn't. It's a pleasure to be on the panel with you. And also the research you worked on and the findings from the research.
I do think that the narratives are similar, whether are you looking at Africa or Middle East or the middle region, generally. I think the Africa is -- the similarities that we have seen is in cyberlaws that were enacted for addressing the cybercrimes concerns. The provisions that are vague but touching on cyber -- stocking and similar names like that.
And what we have seen here is these provisions are becoming -- too used to defending target societies and actors and activities and people belonging to minority or marginalized groups.
If you pick a random African company, I can tell that someone has been arrested because of something they said online or because they belong to a position a political party or take a position, are rely on cybercrime laws. So it becomes very, very challenging for people who are working in this context, because then there is a -- something that has been legalized in law that can be used against you if you dare have an opposing view to the narrative that the government is probably interested in pushing.
And a specific example, in Nigeria, for example. I'm from Nigeria, so I'm even more familiar with the happenings in Nigeria. We trapped hundreds of cases of people who got arrested. These are the cases of such a law.
And the context I will bring into this, is that the law itself has become a tool. And even the people who use the law, they know exactly that it is a tool of oppression.
Now why do I say this? There's a case we are currently working on in Nigeria of a lawyer who had written a book where he exposed corruption in a judiciary and how senior lawyers corrupted the judiciary.
So the lawyer was initially arrested on the libel laws. And it turns out that the case in which he was from had decriminalised liable, so when he was arrested, the police arrested him and justified the needs on the basis of the liable law. And when there was hope and push back, turns out that the liable law that you arrested this guy was outdated. The original version of the law stated clearly that liable is not a criminal law. So if you have a case it has to be a civil case.
The moment that information came out, then immediately the police released new charges under the cybercrimes hat. So you can see it's all about just look for a way to criminalise people that the authorities do not agree with. So that's law at that point comes in handy as a tool that could be used to criminalise oppression.
And the idea is not just this. The idea is when you use criminal laws to arrest somebody, they have alleged to have committed disinformation or something like that, you have the leverage to put the person in handcuffs and chains. And you have the leverage to put a person behind bars because you say it's a criminal offense.
So these are the ways in which these are displayed out not just in did I gather I can't, in Zambia, in floor by, in Kenya. We have seen case like this that have come up over time. But I think in terms of moving forward what do we need do to address these challenges?
Positively -- from west Africa and Sierra Leone, like cyber -- so in Nigeria there was a law on cybercrime. And the amendment shows that the blanket provision which allows just any powerful person to get -- order people arrested for things they said online was removed from the law.
Although the law still is -- the provision still exist. But the implication has been strongly reduced to only affect issues that could lead to public arrest is still problematic because public arrest is not clearly defined. But they made progress. And that's the point I wanted to make.
The process leading to the progress, say lots of walks, I know my public defenders who challenged the law. I know a person who went to regional court to challenge it. And the regional court gave us jump to say the provision is against the institutional and federal Republican of Nigeria and against Human Rights Law. And the regional court amended the provision of the law.
So that was very useful in forcing the hand to Aymen the provision of their law. So it's going to be very difficult for anyone in Nigeria right now to arrest somebody on the base us is of those provisions. So that's just an example of what the nation can do to explore every advocacy measure, purring the parliament to change the law, using the media but also -- because as advocates we cannot run away from litigation.
The kind of battle we have to explore every possible avenue and that's how we are able to change the law in Nigeria.
>> MODERATOR: Wow, thank you. That's nice and I know how are you showing this cybercrime law became a tool that came in hasn't for oppression. And I'm glad to hear you mention already some options that society at least has to advocate for progress and for change.
I think would also like to discuss a little bit more how we can working to as governments, international organizations, also the big companies that are hosting a lot of platform we have been discussing. So we can maybe delve a little bit deeper into the collaboration that we can fostering to.
But I also wanted to ask you the effect that these kind of legislative reforms have on local communities. I think you have showed clearly how there are cases of people who are unable to express themselves online because of the tool that came in happy birthday.
The cybercrime legislation but could you share maybe -- I'm not sure maybe Adeboye or Aymen a little more of your experience working with the community. How have the restrictions actually affected the individual's ability to express themselves online and what is maybe the effect that we see more broadly in the information space of these content legislations? I'm not sure, do you want to take it? Adeboye can start. Thank you.
>> ADEBOYE ADEGOKE: Thank you very much. I think from what we have seen, I think one of the dangers of such laws is that you handle having a system where people self defend them self which has a direction chilling effect on the freedom of expression contest in places where it's applicable.
At some point there is no clarity about what expression is, you know, safe and what expression is not safe. And just as I said in my previous intervention that when the authorities used this law, they don't use it for justice. They use it to oppress and encourage a clime of fear where people ask to oppose the government. Where people ask how they express and how though feel about how they are being governed and how they feel about government policies. That is the real challenge.
The real challenge is I create a climate of fear whereby even when people say things are going wrong they don't want to speak pause they feel if they speak up they may be criminalised for speaking up. And I think that is the general effect of when you criminalise speech. It creates a climate of fear in the ecosystem where people don't want to speak.
When I say a climate of fear, that is censorship. While we deal with censorship generally in our region, we also have to worry about the fact that even people who are sensors themselves by reducing to how they are being governed. Most of them are democratic countries and expression is key.
Without freedom of expression we can't reasonably say that democracy is at play. So what is your sense of why people condition speak their mind? That is what happens. So it touches not just on individual's ability to speak but democracy itself of democracy is the government by the people by the people for the people. So the element of by the people gets in the way when people Have a government who can speak on issues.
And this also gets the team during the election. And there is more clamp down on speech around elections. Because during elections people get to get more hot about debating government issues and debating candidates and assessing (?), et cetera.
So that to plays in the democratic contest is directly (a)ed and that's where we see a decision this in country which regresses in the report. If we looking at the freedom in the next report can you also see this clearly demonstrated about how a lot of countries continue to reach this, because they continue with laws that makes it difficult to experience democracy, to experience freedom in such jurisdictions.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I think it's really good that you link this issue directly to democracy. Aymen do you have something to add to this about the local communities and effect -- also the legal uncertainty and the arbitrariness of the legislation has?
>> AYMEN ZAGHDOUDI: Yeah, sure, thanks. I agree with what was said. This legislation is scary. And when I say scary I'm not exasperating of because for example when I take Tunisia as an example we have seen a huge shift one the cybercrime law in Tunisia was enacted by the president.
For example more and more we see censorship. And you know when we say censorship we don't talk only about political censorship. Even people are afraid to share their sexual, for example, identity. They try to avoid expressing their opinion regarding public subject.
Another example, we don't at the moment political show on the radio and TV are reduced almost to nothing torque zero because even experts, independent experts they to reject media interviews invitation because they are scared that they may be prosecuted based on the cyber clime legislation.
I think also another example is the last presidential election two months ago in Tunisia. For example between now it used to be in Tunisia between 50 to 65% in 2014 and 2019 and the last presidential elections turnout was about 28%. And this also shows the level of involvement of the Tunisians when it comes to public debate.
For example six months before the last cyber election. Candidate to the election also had been jailed. Humanized defenders. So the impact is very clear and tangible. And also for example when you take the example of Saudi Arabia, for example. If you check social media in Saudi Arabia, almost you don't see any criticism to the government.
This is because we have seen in the past years people have been jailed for 24 years of prison just for opposing on Twitter or X to criticize the government. So impact is tangible. And maybe later I will come to explain more what kind of tactics we can adopt to tackle this type of legislature.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much. Yes I would like to delve into the tactics of ethic this type of legislation but maybe also some of the Cree cent trend we have seen for instance with the cybercrime convention, because we do need to, have I think good frameworks for cybercrime to address cybercrime.
I think Jacqueline you also mentioned how important it is that there is -- for instance disinformation is addressed. So we do need some good legislations out there. And I think the report there the research that you did also goes a bit into what good legislation would look like. Could you reflect on that a bit more?
>> JACQUELINE ROWE: Yes, certainly. I think -- it's quite a meaty question, right. There is such a thing as online harms that should be illegal and that cause harm to people. And then there is also this misuse of the narrative about online harms to justify censorship and approaches time and time depend so the cybercrime convention is where these uses have been at. My colleagues can speak more to that than I can.
But I think it's clear that what regulatory system may work in a jurisdiction where have you an independent judiciary and an intermediary regulator that has plenty of funding and is well established for decade is actually very different to what might work in a country where democracy is small, fragile or nonexistent. So I think there's that need to keep in mind the importance of context.
We touched about it a little bit in the discussions but I also think the Lynx between cybercrime legislation and platform regulation are also really important and really complex. Because if a government says this type of content is illegal online then it's only a matter of time before then they also begin to expert pressure on platforms to expert that restriction beyond the reach of the government itself or the Minister of digital or whatever kind of regulatory body is tasked with enforcing that.
So I think as well as the UN and cybercrime convention you also have UNESCO's initiative draft guidelines for regulating digital platforms and you also have -- at least for the Middle East region, like the league of Arab states has been developing this draft, international strategy to regulate digital platforms and digital communities, I can't remember the wording. So there's also these quite influential moves to drag online platforms further into this debate as well.
And I think there are responsibilities that online platforms can and should carry and I'm not by any means saying that they have acted responsibly, particularly in countries that have less market dominance and perhaps less kind of influence where there's linguistic diversity and cultural diversity we know platforms have really neglected key safety issues in certain jurisdictions, but equally forcing platforms to just blanket enforce already very overbroad expressions and restriction is also not the answer either.
So with all of that complexity in mind, in the report we made 11 recommendations for kind of governments, I guess or people looking to develop more cybercrime regulations.
I won't go into all of those details, as people can check out the report. But the main one is criminal restrictions and online restrictions must align with the guidance from the special chapter from the freedom of expressions and freedom of rights, and nothing should be outside of those three main categories.
And the second key recommendation I want to flag near is the solution to harmful content is not necessarily criminalization. There are some types of content which as I said they do need to be criminalise but for issues like disinformation, for issues like harassment or speech which is offensive, but which isn't hate speech, yes, those content types are harmful and they do need a policy response.
It's about a technical system. We just criminalise the content and expect it to go away if there's market pressures and advertising pressures that platforms. There's recommendation algorithms. There's all of these other issues that feed into those arms. And they are harmful and I think the points to address those harm is not at the level of the individual who is posting that content on their social media.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Yes. That's a clear overview. I think Aymen I saw you put something in the chat that we can see here in the room. Maybe you would like to address that can also go into the tactics for addressing these legislatures that we do not want to see in relation to issue human right standards.
>> AYMAN ZAGHDOUDI: Thank you. So basically before we come to the blog post on the impact of cyber describe on the rights in the middle region I want to talk about different tactics that we can use to tackle this sort of legislation. So whether or not Tunisia or Saudi Arabia or Jordan, Egypt, in other countries in the region, they have adopted the same approach.
So it's an approach giving of adding content based often to the cybercrime. And they want to emphasize that content based offenses are not cybercrimes. There is a definition of cybercrimes, and then -- like it regimes or governments in Africa are always trying to include content based often like slander and fake news. In this category of legislation, with harsher sanctions compared for example to similar crimes under the criminal law or the press law.
And when it comes to advocacy efforts, there are different tactics, of course depending on the political context and opportunities we do have. The of course if we have the type to talk to a parliament we can try to convinces them through arguments.
So I would mention at least three different tactics based on access in our experience. First of all -- and this is what we tried this tactic when it comes to the UN cyber describe for example, so asking states with strong respect of the Rule of Law to reject any request when it comes could content-based offenses. And this can sometimes be successful, of course.
And I say sometimes because we have seen in the past some regime goals are were not in need of this corporation as they can just send criminals to their embassy and cut journalist to pieces just because it happened that this journalist had criticized the government.
The second tactic is to meet MPs and try to convince them either to reject the bill or to have existing laws and have been using this strategy in Tunisia and Jordan. So just this morning I participated in a conference or workshop with Tunisian MPs trying to convince them to adopt a sort of law proposal to amended criminal law 54. And basically we wanted to suppress article 24 related to online information and other types of content based offenses.
The third tactic is more like capacity building. And also we have been trying to path in Jordan and Tunisia, Morocco, Libya. Even though they don't have cybercrime. So we worked with judges and lawyers and trying to equip them with sufficient materials and legal arguments so that they can better deal with freedom of expression cases.
>> MODERATOR: These are clear tactics that are you describing. So speaking with countries who have a strong Rule of Law that work with the MPs in capacity building.
I think you also mentioned Adeboye the work you did with legislation. Is there anything further can you add that tactics have addressed for better cybercrime laws or to take steps toward a better situation where the laws are not misused?
>> ADEBOYE ADEGOKE: Yeah I think there are many layers to the intervention we have done for that. Any organisation can do. There is an aspect of trying to put out the fire when it's already hot there. But also trying to ensure that the fire doesn't start in the first place.
So I will give an example. We have been very keenly involved in Nigeria's efforts to add platform regulation. Nigeria has been having a conversation around come up laws and platform regulation or online harms. And we have been in that conversation right from the get-go. From the steering committee. The conversation has not gone exactly where we want it to go but we fin ourself in the advantaged position we got involved from the very beginning.
What our involvement means is just not that we will 100% affect the outcome of what the bill will look like but it also means we can use our privileged position to governise the community the human right community to let them know -- because what typically happens traditionally is you don't get to hear about the law.
It's brought to the parliament. As to which time it's the already too late to engage or even influence. Because of early engagement we already know what the thinking of the government is and we already start thinking about a strategy tone sure it doesn't become too much of oppression in the ecosystem.
So I do think one key thing we have to think about is early engagement with policy processes so ensure we are in a more strategic position to impact outcomes. But beyond this what happens when there's a law and the lawyer is doing a lot of harm to the freedom community to the human rights community and all of that interest --