Surveillance camera

UN committee calls on countries to protect right to privacy

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Image: IDG

26 November 2014

A United Nations panel has approved a resolution that would have its General Assembly call on states to respect and protect the right to privacy in the digital age.

The draft resolution, titled Right to Privacy in the Digital Age, has Brazil and Germany as the main sponsors, and is an important if primarily symbolic move by the countries involved.

A resolution calling for the protection of human rights online as well as offline, also proposed by Brazil and Germany, was adopted last year in the UN General Assembly in the wake of revelations by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s surveillance in the country and abroad.

German officials said in October last year that US intelligence agencies may have spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. There were also reports that the US also spied on Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff among other political leaders.

The new draft resolution was passed Tuesday without a vote by the General Assembly’s Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural). It would still require the UN General Assembly to vote on it. The resolution is said to have been considerably diluted under pressure from the ‘Five Eyes’ surveillance alliance, which includes the US, Australia, UK, Canada and New Zealand, according to reports.

The new resolution added a reference to metadata in the context of digital surveillance, pointing out that metadata can be used to compile personal profiles of individuals. It also affirms the responsibility of private parties to respect human rights when dealing with personal data.

“This means that human rights obligations of States also apply when they use private companies for surveillance purposes,” said Ambassador Harald Braun, Germany’s permanent representative to the UN, in a statement Tuesday.

Disclosure
The resolution also requires states to respect international human rights obligations regarding privacy when they require disclosure of personal data from third parties, including private companies, an issue that has become very important in the US, where some companies have tried to resist providing data to law enforcement agencies in certain circumstances.

“Without the necessary checks, we risk turning into Orwellian states, where every step of every citizen is being monitored and recorded in order to prevent any conceivable crime,” Braun said.

The US took the stand that communications should not be monitored in order to suppress criticism or dissent, or to disadvantage people based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.

John Ribeiro, IDG News Service

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