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Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International's response to the call of submissions of the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association on the tools and guidelines which may assist law enforcement in promoting and protecting human rights in the context of peaceful protests. The Special Rapporteur's report will be presented at the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council.While PI recognises the role of law enforcement can play in facilitating the enjoyment of freedom of…
Content type: Long Read
Introduction
The 28th of September marks International Safe Abortion Day. It remains a day necessary to mobilise and raise awareness of the continued struggles women and girls face when accessing reproductive healthcare, including access to safe abortion. Across the world, abortion continues to be criminalised, restricted and in some places under attack. All of which constitute severe obstacles for women and girls to fully exercise their human rights, particularly their right to privacy, which…
Content type: Report
In the months following the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, more than half the world’s countries enacted emergency measures. With these measures came an increase in executive powers, a suspension of the rule of law, and an upsurge in security protocols – with subsequent impacts on fundamental human rights. Within this broader context, we have seen a rapid and unprecedented scaling up of governments’ use of technologies to enable widespread surveillance. Surveillance technologies exacerbated…
Content type: Long Read
The defense and protection of the environment continues to come at a high cost for activists and human rights defenders. In 2021, the murders of environment and land defenders hit a record high. This year, a report by Global Witness found that more than 1,700 environmental activists have been murdered in the past decade.
While the issue of surveillance of human rights defenders has received attention, evidence of the surveillance of environmental activists keeps mounting, with recent examples…
Content type: Examples
Even though schools are back in session in person, their teachers can still monitor the screens on their school-issued devices via software such as GoGuardian. In a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 89% of teachers say their schools will continue to use student-monitoring software, up from 84% in 2021, raising worries about how the data will be used in a climate increasingly hostile towards abortion and LGBTQ+ issues.
CDT also reports that 44% of teachers say that at…
Content type: Advocacy
Today, PI filed a complaint with the Forensic Science Regulator (FSR) in relation to quality and accuracy issues in satellite-enabled Global Positioning System (GPS) tags used for Electronic Monitoring of subjects released from immigration detention (GPS tags). We are concerned there may be systemic failures in relation to the quality of data extracted from tags, processed and interpreted for use in investigations and criminal prosecutions.
The GPS tags are used by the Home Office to…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International (PI) welcomes the call of the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants to assess the human rights impact of current and newly established border management measures with the aim of identifying effective ways to prevent human rights violations at international borders, both on land and at sea.
The issues highlighted in the call for submissions are ones that PI has been investigating, reporting and monitoring as part of our campaigns demanding a human rights…
Content type: Long Read
In a roundtable available on YouTube, co-hosted with Garden Court Chambers, Privacy International brought together immigration law practitioners to discuss how they’ve used privacy and data protection law to seek information or redress for their clients.
Index:
1. UK Border 2025
2. Super-complaint and judicial review challenge to data sharing
3. Mobile phone seizure and extraction
4. Freedom of Information Act requests
The dystopian future: UK Border 2025
To set the scene on how the…
Content type: News & Analysis
In a ruling handed down on 14 October 2021 by the High Court of Kenya in relation to an application filed by Katiba Institute calling for a halt to the rollout of the Huduma card in the absence of a data impact assessment, the Kenyan High Court found that the Data Protection Act applied retrospectively.
Background to the case
Huduma Namba as initially proposed
In January 2019, the Kenyan Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendment) Act No. 18 of 2018 came into effect, introducing a raft of amendments…
Content type: News & Analysis
After almost 20 years of presence of the Allied Forces in Afghanistan, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in February 2020 on the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. A few weeks before the final US troops were due to leave Afghanistan, the Taliban had already taken control of various main cities. They took over the capital, Kabul, on 15 August 2021, and on the same day the President of Afghanistan left the country.
As seen before with regime…
Content type: Long Read
Back in 2019, we read through a 1000-page manual released by the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) describing how they conduct investigations into alleged benefits fraud. While out in the open and accessible to anyone, the guide turned out to be a dizzying dive into a world where civil servants are asked to stand outside someone’s door to decide if they are indeed single or disabled and have to be reminded that living together as a married couple is not an offense. The guide – which…
Content type: Long Read
In May 2019, the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – the department in charge of welfare – published their two-part staff guide on conducting fraud investigations. Privacy International went through the 995 pages to understand how those investigations happen and how the DWP is surveilling benefits claimants suspected of fraud.
Anyone who has flipped through a tabloid will have seen articles exposing the so-called “benefits-cheats,” people who allegedly trick the benefits systems for…
Content type: Long Read
All around the world people rely on state support in order to survive. From healthcare, to benefits for unemployment or disability or pensions, at any stage of life we may need to turn to the state for some help. And tech companies have realised there is a profit to be made.
This is why they have been selling a narrative that relying on technology can improve access to and delivery of social benefits. The issue is that governments have been buying it. This narrative comes along with a…
Content type: Explainer
At first glance, infrared temperature checks would appear to provide much-needed reassurance for people concerned about their own health, as well as that of loved ones and colleagues, as the lockdown is lifted. More people are beginning to travel, and are re-entering offices, airports, and other contained public and private spaces. Thermal imaging cameras are presented as an effective way to detect if someone has one of the symptoms of the coronavirus - a temperature.
However, there is little…
Content type: News & Analysis
The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin together with Dr. Krisztina Huszti-Orbán, released today a key report on the “Use of Biometric Data to Identify Terrorists: Best Practice or Risky Business?”.
The report explores the human rights risks involved in the deployment of biometrics emphasising that
in the absence of robust rights protections which are institutionally embedded…
Content type: Explainer
Definition
An immunity passport (also known as a 'risk-free certificate' or 'immunity certificate') is a credential given to a person who is assumed to be immune from COVID-19 and so protected against re-infection. This 'passport' would give them rights and privileges that other members of the community do not have such as to work or travel.
For Covid-19 this requires a process through which people are reliably tested for immunity and there is a secure process of issuing a document or other…
Content type: Long Read
Over the last two decades we have seen an array of digital technologies being deployed in the context of border controls and immigration enforcement, with surveillance practices and data-driven immigration policies routinely leading to discriminatory treatment of people and undermining peoples’ dignity.And yet this is happening with little public scrutiny, often in a regulatory or legal void and without understanding and consideration to the impact on migrant communities at the border and…
Content type: Case Study
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei creates art that highlights the harmful effects of surveillance on society — and is himself a target of persistent surveillance by the Chinese government. In an article for Agence France-Presse, he said, "In my life, there is so much surveillance and monitoring -- my phone, my computer ... Our office has been searched, I have been searched, every day I am being followed, there are surveillance cameras in front of my house.”
Weiwei is an artist, blogger, documentary…
Content type: Advocacy
Last week, Privacy International joined more than 30 UK charities in a letter addressed to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, following his recent declaration, asking him to lift No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) restrictions.
Since 2012, a ‘NRPF condition’ has been imposed on all migrants granted the legal right to live and work in the UK. They are required to pay taxes, but they are not permitted to access the public safety net funded by those taxes.
This is not a topic we are known…
Content type: Long Read
It is common for families with no recourse to public funds who attempt to access support from local authorities to have their social media monitored as part of a ‘Child in Need’ assessment.
This practice appears to be part of a proactive strategy on the part of local authorities to discredit vulnerable families in order to refuse support. In our experience, information on social media accounts is often wildly misinterpreted by local authorities who make serious and unfounded allegations…
Content type: Case Study
Over the past decade targeted advertisement has become exponentially more invasive. To enable targeted advertisement, massive amounts of data about individuals are collected, shared and processed often without their knowledge or consent. This information about us is then used to profile us and micro-target us to sell us products or influence our views.
This is a significant intrusion to our privacy inevitably affects our perogative not to reveal our thoughts; not to have our thoughts…
Content type: Advocacy
To the Members of the European Parliament and to the Committee on Budgets of the European Parliament
The EU urgently needs to step up and provide assistance to protect the health and safety of people trapped in camps on the Greek islands - not just to protect their welfare, but to contain the virus itself as a matter of global public health.
However, as we detail in the briefing below, the current European Commission proposal for funds allocation is insufficient to ensure the safety of…
Content type: Case Study
The increasing deployment of highly intrusive technologies in public and private spaces such as facial recognition technologies (FRT) threaten to impair our freedom of movement. These systems track and monitor millions of people without any regulation or oversight.
Tens of thousands of people pass through the Kings Cross Estate in London every day. Since 2015, Argent - the group that runs the Kings Cross Estate - were using FRT to track all of those people.
Police authorities rushed in secret…
Content type: Case Study
In 2015, James Bates was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Victor Collins. Collins was found floating face down in Bates’ hot tub in November 2015. Bentonville police served two search warrants ordering Amazon to turn over the “electronic data in the form of audio recordings, transcribed records, text records and other data contained on the Amazon Echo device” in Bates’ home.
The reason for the warrants? According to the police, just because the device was in the house that…
Content type: News & Analysis
In mid-2019, MI5 admitted, during a case brought by Liberty, that personal data was being held in “ungoverned spaces”. Much about these ‘ungoverned spaces’, and how they would effectively be “governed” in the future, remained unclear. At the moment, they are understood to be a ‘technical environment’ where personal data of unknown numbers of individuals was being ‘handled’. The use of ‘technical environment’ suggests something more than simply a compilation of a few datasets or databases.
The…
Content type: Case Study
Every one of us has an expectation to be legally protected in the same way, to have access to the same human rights, and to be able to defend those rights in court.
However, for trans and non-binary people, this has not always been the case – and in many places around the world it still isn’t the case. The lack of legal recognition for their gender has had significant consequences.
If the law does not recognise you as the person that you are and treats you as someone you are not then you…
Content type: News & Analysis
Today Advocate General (AG) Campos Sánchez-Bordona of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), issued his opinions (C-623/17, C-511/18 and C-512/18 and C-520/18) on how he believes the Court should rule on vital questions relating to the conditions under which security and intelligence agencies in the UK, France and Belgium could have access to communications data retained by telecommunications providers.
The AG addressed two major questions:
(1) When states seek to impose…
Content type: Case Study
Slavery, servitude, and forced labour are absolutely forbidden today, as is anything that seeks to undermine or limit that restriction. The horrific reality, however, is that modern slavery remains a significant global issue.
Human trafficking is one form of modern slavery. It involves the recruitment, harbouring or transporting of people into a situation of exploitation through the use of violence, deception or coercion and forcing them to work against their will.
Human traffickers do…
Content type: Case Study
On 3 December 2015, four masked men in plainclothes arrested Isnina Musa Sheikh in broad daylight (at around 1 p.m.) as she served customers at her food kiosk in Mandera town, in the North East of Kenya, Human Rights Watch reported. The men didn’t identify themselves but they were carrying pistols and M16 assault rifles, commonly used by Kenyan defence forces and the cars that took her away had their insignia on the doors. Isnina’s body was discovered three days later in a shallow grave about…
Content type: Case Study
The prohibition against torture is absolute. There are no exceptional circumstances whatsoever which can be used to justify torture.
And yet, torture is still being carried out by state officials around the world, driven by states’ ability to surveil dissidents, and intercept their communications.
In 2007, French technology firm Amesys (a subsidiary of Bull) supplied sophisticated communications surveillance systems to the Libyan intelligence services. The systems allegedly permitted the…