Human Rights in the Information Society

The internet as a new communication media has fundamentally changed the way we consume, work and interact, thus transforming our society into what is commonly known as the "information society". The opportunities and risks implied by this transformation pose great challenges to legal policy makers, confronting them with new scenarios of exclusion and inclusion. While access to and use of the internet rapidly increase among wide parts of the population, at the same time the digital divide keeps on widening - primarily between developed and developing countries, but also within developed countries, where rural or less prosperous regions lag behind considerably. As the agenda of the forthcoming UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), to be held in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis in 2005, shows, the importance of this topic and the necessity to de-velop adequate counterstrategies for dealing with the current shortcomings in the distribution of information has already been recognized at the international level. Though quite a variety of studies dealing with the digital divide itself exists, a coherent analysis of the relevant factors for the development of a fair and equal information society is still missing. This project is meant to analyze the interrelationship between the current human rights system and the evolving information society, an issue most significant in addressing not only the digital divide, but also with regard to new risks and challenges for data protection, intellectual property rights and freedom of expression. It starts from the hypothesis that the human rights system has an important function for protecting against new threats developing in the information society without unneccessarily restricting human rights and for providing more equal access to new technologies. In particular, the project considers three main questions: 1.) Which human rights are particularly affected by the development of the information society? 2.) Is the current human rights system sufficient to provide fair and equal opportunities for all, or is there a need for new forms of protection in the information age? 3.) What kind of governance structures are needed to ensure the implementation and enforcement of human rights in the information society? As a general aim, the project should give an answer to the question in which way the human rights system, whether in the form of a new right to communicate or an adequate interpretation of the human rights under consideration, can provide a basis for the development of a fair and equal information society.

The notion of the information society is one of the most famous buzzwords of our times, yet it seems that beyond the impact of the internet as a new communication media on ways to work, interact and consume, it remains a rather vague and undefined concept. Accompanying and critically evaluating the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), that took place in Geneva 2003 and in Tunis 2005, the project "Human Rights in the Information Society" analyzed the information society`s ethical dimensions against the backdrop of the international human rights order. An emphasis was thereby put on those human rights most affected by current developments, particularly freedom of expression, the right to privacy and data protection as well as intellectual property and access to information and knowledge. Other questions posed were that of the adequacy of the human rights system as such, assessing the need for a new right to communicate, and that for governance structures needed to ensure the implementation and enforcement of human rights in the information society. The findings of the project have shown that the information society can best be described as a society in which information and knowledge become the primary resources of production and productivity, thereby changing organizational structures and working environments. It is thus not Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) changing the world, but knowledge creating new forms of communication and modes of information exchange. These new forms of communications and modes of information exchange have a sustained effect on the political, economic, social and cultural conditions which originally enabled their development, thus creating a mutually reinforcing environment for ever-increasing knowledge production and faster dissemination of values and norms. ICTs are merely the most obvious manifestation of this evolution. Translated into human rights terms, the major challenge of the information society does hence not consist in making human rights work in an online environment, but to adapt them as a guiding principle for the underlying societal transformations of the information age. This has been made explicit with regard to freedom of expression, data protection/ privacy as well as intellectual property and access to information and knowledge. Since the dominant form of interaction in the information society is the network, the safeguarding of these rights also contributes to the better interconnection and more effective work of all stakeholders, thereby mutually reinforcing multi-stakeholder participation and the enhancement of the human rights agenda. Especially in the context of the emerging governance structures of the information society, including, but not exclusively consisting of, Internet Governance, the link between human rights and multi-stakeholder participation becomes critical for reaching the aims of inclusivity and development orientation. The WSIS documents - the Geneva Declaration of Principles and the Geneva Plan of Action as well as the Tunis Commitment and the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society - do not take into account this sufficiently and remain rather technically-deterministic. Nonetheless, the Geneva phase has shown that an enabling environment for civil society participation created the momentum to put human rights on the agenda of an otherwise technically oriented Summit. Although the results are not fully satisfying, they do at least acknowledge the importance of human rights and are hence a basis for further work on this issue, whereas the Tunis phase turned out to become less encouraging from a human rights perspective. Transparency and openness decreased due to the problems emerging from the host country`s Tunisia poor human rights record, partly rendering civil society participation more difficult, and the concern for human rights did as well. Therefore, the shaping of the information society`s human rights agenda and its future enhancement as well as its effective implementation depends on reviving and enabling broad participation mechanisms.