Welcome to the Official Schedule for RightsCon 2019, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.
Together at RightsCon Tunis, our first summit hosted in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 2500 expert practitioners will come together across over 400 sessions to shape, contribute to, and drive forward the global agenda for the future of our human rights.
Important note: Whether you’re a session organizer, speaker, or participant, you’ll need to login to Sched or create an account in order to get the most out of the program (including creating a profile and building your own customized RightsCon schedule).
Qatar Spent Much of 2018 USing US Courts to Try to Umask Critics. What Other States are Doing the Same? (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Description: At RightsCon Brussels, I gave a lightning talk about Kazakhstan's efforts to unmask some of its most prominent critics through several actions in the US, and how we defeated them. This past summer Qatar filed at least 5 separate US lawsuits aimed at 5 different critics so that it could issue subpoenas that would force platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to divulge their identities. This talk will summarize those cases and how they played out. Because we at EFF want to catalog and track these cases and provide legal assistance where necessary, I will also call on attendees to report other incidents, whether occurring in the US or other legal systems. Lastly, I will call for concerted action to reinforce to the platforms the importance of flagging these cases and subpoenas as they arise so civil society can intervene.
Speaker: David Greene
Colombia: the country that said NO to peace (Universidad de Los Andes - Department of Political Science)
Description: After 4 years of negotiations in La Havana between the Colombian Government and the FARC guerillas, Colombians were summoned to the voting polls to give their opinion regarding the agreement between the two parties. The results of the Americas Barometer (2006-2016) show that the majority of Colombians preferred a negotiated peace to a military solution, yet when they were given the chance to cast the votes in October 2016 the NO option - the side against the agreement- surprisingly won. While certainly there are many possible explanations to this phenomenon, the political elite polarization and the dissemination of fake news during the campaign in social media surely had an effect on the outcome of this election. To explain this relationship, this talk will start presenting a short context about Colombia's peace agreement and its referendum. We hope to immerse spectators in this issue and the Colombian political context of year 2016. Afterwards, we will review the data of the Americas Barometer by LAPOP on Colombian perceptions during the campaign, were we will notice the environment of extreme polarization between political camps in the days before the referendum. Matanock and García (2017) conclude that it seems that elite opposition to the peace process, based on division among elites, could be part of the explanation of the plebiscite’s rejections in Colombia. Because of that, we will examine how the leaders of the NO campaign, like former president Alvaro Uribe, fueled this polarization. His communication strategy, his mostly unreliable sources (fake news) and his unprecedented social media popularity surely increased polarization and it most certainly helped tip the balance in favor of the NO side.
Speaker: Catalina Nossa
Tech, surveillance and racism: the story of Operación Huracán (Derechos Digitales)
Description: Operación Huracán is a tragicomic story about a group police officers and a self-proclaimed hacker in the south of Chile, developing tools to surveille indigenous activists. My intention is to exemplify how technology could be used to amplify institutional discriminatory practices, and how dangerous it is not having ways to control and oversight the use of surveillance tools in public security matters.
