Can the global spyware industry be constrained?
Notes & Changes
This is a hybrid event. The in-person event will take place in the Gilly Leventis Meeting Room at the Bonavero Institute. To attend online, register here. Those interested in joining in-person need to arrive 15mins in advance. Please note that this event may be recorded.
The global surveillance industry has run amok. It claims to be developing tools to counter terrorism and crime, but companies are marketing, exporting and servicing highly intrusive spyware to governments that use these tools to surveil and intimidate journalists, human rights defenders, politicians and even their families. What can be done to stop it? How might human rights law provide guidance to governments, victims and private actors? Is the control of such malware even regulable?
Speaker
David Kaye is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and director of its International Justice Clinic. From 2014 – 2020 he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. He is also the author of Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (2019), Independent Chair of the Board of the Global Network Initiative, and a Trustee of ARTICLE 19. He has written for international and American law journals and numerous media outlets. David began his legal career with the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a former member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.
Suggested Reading - Article by David Kaye, Report on the adverse effect of the surveillance industry on freedom of expression, Citizen Lab report on Spain’s use of Pegasus.
Discussant
In August 2020, Professor Martin Scheinin joined the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights as a British Academy Global Professor. His research project “Addressing the Digital Realm through the Grammar of Human Rights Law” will run for four academic years (2020-2024).
Professor Scheinin joined the Bonavero Institute from the European University Institute where he has been Professor of International Law and Human Rights since 2008. He is the author of numerous books and articles concerning international and European human rights law, international courts and tribunals, the law of treaties, as well as comparative constitutional law. He was the leader of the EU-funded research project SURVEILLE that in 2012-2015 developed a multidisciplinary methodology to assess holistically the security benefits, cost efficiency, moral harm and human rights intrusion of a wide range of surveillance technologies, including those employed in relation to the threat of terrorism. Besides his academic expertise, Professor Scheinin will brings to the Bonavero Institute his extensive experience in the practice of human rights law, having served on the United Nations Human Rights Committee (1997-2004), as UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism (2005-2011) and as a member of the Scientific Committee of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (since 2018).