Digital Rights and Safety

Digital rights are human rights for the internet era. This session will provide a clear understanding of basic concept of digital rights, different rights associated with digital rights under its scope and importance of digital rights in the exercise of other human rights.

Conceptual Framework of Digital Rights

Human rights are the set of rights of every individual as outlined by the international human rights instruments. Universality and inalienability, interdependent and indivisible, equal and non-discrimination are some of the fundamental principles of human rights. The list of human rights can be outlined under different categories of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, and so on. The country’s constitutions further reiterate and express commitments towards international human rights standards by incorporating those rights as fundamental rights to implement in the local context effectively. The Constitution of Nepal guarantees thirty-one different types of rights as fundamental rights1 which are equally applicable both online and offline.

We live in a world today where information and communication technology (ICT) or digital technologies are rapidly growing. The digital infrastructure provides online services for everything from social media to e-commerce, virtual collaboration to e-learning, government service delivery to payment systems, and social connectivity to each other.

This increasingly pervasive, unpredictable and rapidly changing interaction between ICT and society brings with it a wide range of new human rights risks and ethical dilemmas for companies in the ICT industry, especially for how to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy online. As human rights apply both online and offline, digital technologies provide new means to exercise human rights. These new means or platforms of exercising human rights exposes both the opportunities and the challenges.

Data protection and privacy, digital identity, the use of surveillance technologies, online violence, and harassment are of particular concern.

As with the application of human rights provisions in the offline world, the rights of the people to access, use, create, and publish digital media and  also the right to access and use computers, any electronic devices, internet, and telecommunications can be defined as digital rights. Thus, digital rights imply the elaboration of human rights in the internet era. Digital rights are interchangeably referred to as internet rights, internet freedom, net freedom, digital freedom, cyber rights, etc. as well.

This session will provide understanding of activities related to the development of an inclusive digital space along with the rights related to digital inclusion and connectivity. Further, the session looks into intersectionality of gender, age, disability, language, sexuality to make the online space inclusive.

This session will focus on enhancing understanding of Freedom of Expression online, impacts thereon national regulation of FoE and ways to circumvent sensorship online.

The session will focus on concept of digial security and ways to enhance digital security including by ensuring file and folder security, browser security, Mobile Phone Security, email encryption etc.

The session focuses on scope of privacy and data ptetection, national and international regulation and policy recommendations for national data protection regime.

This session focuses on information ecosystem, mis/disinformaiton and hatespeech, and ways to tackle the problem of mis/disinformation.

This session will impart practical skills and knowledge to the participants to maintain online safety.

This session will focus on digital rights advocacy, principles of effective advocacy, successful campaigns, developing advocacy skills, including networking and campaigning.