INTRODUCTION

Just as the previously described events in the Middle East and North Africa were unfolding, I leftmy role as a human rights commissioner for a job with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), focussing on the intersections of the Internet and human rights. I had previously met staffand members of the APC when I attended the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Lithuania in 2010. Established in the early 1990s, APC was a network of civil society groups with member organisations in more than 30 countries, doing high quality advocacy and research, and with a solid political stance on Internet issues, especially for women's human rights defenders and human rights in developing countries. Concerned about the new Internet interferences, APC was looking for someone to coordinate their new Connect Your Rights campaign. The campaign was simple: promote Internet rights as human rights, with a focus on the UN human rights system. It was my dream job. The first steps were to review advocacy strategies and regulatory approaches, and devise a plan to develop accountability for Internet-related human rights violations.

ADVOCACY STRATEGIES

A campaign like Connect Your Rights campaign needed to respond to the deep conceptual debates about human rights violations that were making it difficult to find accountability for interferences with the Internet, in the international human rights system. APC was documenting the trends in such interferences with the Internet, and did not like what it saw. Restricting freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the free flow of information had become a global trend, and its impact was being felt most in countries that lacked a culture of democracy or a strong human rights regime. Combatting this trend needed new strategies: ones that could build on the communication rights movement, and the related advocacy strategies that grew out of the early days of Internet governance.

ADVOCATING FOR ‘COMMUNICATION RIGHTS’

Consideration of human rights in the context of new media began in the 1960s. Then, Jean d’Arcy, a UN official, was considering the implications of satellite broadcasting and other new media, and proposed the ‘right to communicate’ as a way to give effect to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in a global communications context.