international law

Philip Alston, writing in Just Security, asks if the United Nations let the United States off the hook regarding Internet privacy. While the language of a United Nations resolution was watered down at American urging, Alston argues that there is good news in a resolution that is set to be adopted by the full UN this month. Among other good points, "by basing itself on the formulations of the right to privacy included in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the resolution implicitly rejects the US line that privacy rights derive only from a specific treaty which the US in turn insists has no extra-territorial implications," Alston writes. 

Fair Trials International argues that international police work is improperly influenced by political motives, The Washington Post reports. Fair Trials International said that Interpol is used by members, including Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela, to pursue political ends. FTI cites a case in which a Russian environmental activist was arrested in Spain even though he was accepted as a political refugee in Finland; Pyotr Silaev spent six months in a Spanish jail until a Spanish court ruled that his arrest was politically motivated, The Washington Post further reports.

A United Nations committee has advanced a resolution sponsored by Brazil and Germany to make the right to privacy against unlawful surveillance applicable to anyone in the world, The Washington Post reported. The two countries sponsored the measure after revelations of monitoring  by the United States of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The resolution is expected to pass the United Nations General Assembly too, The Post further reported. While the resolution is not binding law, General Assembly resolutions " reflect world opinion and carry political weight," The Post also reported.

The largely symbolic resolution was watered down though. The Post reported: "The key compromise dropped the contention that the domestic and international interception and collection of communications and personal data, 'in particular massive surveillance,' may constitute a human rights violation."

The New York Times reports that the most recent United Nations talks on climate change made some progress: "Delegates agreed to the broad outlines of a proposed system for pledging emissions cuts and gave their support for a new treaty mechanism to tackle the human cost of rising seas, floods, stronger storms and other expected effects of global warming." However, while these climate-change negotiations weren't a Copenhagen fiasco, "treaty members remain far from any serious, concerted action to cut emissions. And developing nations complained that promises of financial help remain unmet," The Times also reports.

Both Brazil and German, which have been the subjct of American surveillance, are seeking to "apply the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to online communications," Foreign Policy reports. The United States, however, is pushing back, "to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that 'extraterritorial surveillance' and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights," Foreign Policy further reports.

Separately, Reuters reports that a "draft U.N. resolution that some diplomats said suggested spying in foreign countries could be a human rights violation has been weakened to appease the United States, Britain and others ahead of a vote by a U.N. committee next week." The initial draft would have had the General Assembly declare it is "'deeply concerned at human rights violations and abuses that may result from the conduct of any surveillance of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance of communications,"' but the draft now proposes the General Assembly declare it is '"deeply concerned at the negative impact that surveillance and/or interception of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance and/or interception of communications, as well as the collection of personal data, in particular when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights,'" according to Reuters.

Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, might have broken into tears because the lack of a global agreement on climate change is "condemning future generations before they are even born," BBC reported. But Figueres still said that a deal can be done by 2015 and the pitfalls that doomed the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations for an international climate-change accord could be avoided, BBC also reported.

With the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, one UN event looked at the role the United Nations could have, if any, regarding ensuring privacy on the Internet from governmental spying.

A blogger for Ars Technica who was on the panel and who wrote about the event "pointed out that while anti-democratic countries may want legitimacy, their policies are already well in place. Surveillance capabilities are already being used, with or without the UN’s approval or disapproval, by democratic and anti-democratic governments."

Another interesting point from the panel was a Brazilian representative who "referred to the fact that President Barack Obama had recently defended the global American spying effort: 'I think it's important to recognize you can't have 100 percent security, and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society.'" 

The Brazilian official said in light of the revelations of American spying on the Brazilian president and a major Brazilian energy company '“Brazil has 100 percent inconvenience, 0 percent security, and 0 percent privacy.”'