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title: Joint civil society statement: States use of digital surveillance technologies to fight pandemic must respect human rights
date: 2020-04-03 00:01:03
updated: 2020-04-06 15:27:35
author: 46halbe
tags: update, pressemitteilung
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global public health emergency that requires a coordinated and large-scale response by governments worldwide. However, States’ efforts to contain the virus must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance.
<!-- TEASER_END -->
We, the undersigned organizations, urge governments to show leadership
in tackling the pandemic in a way that ensures that the use of digital
technologies to track and monitor individuals and populations is carried
out strictly in line with human rights.
Technology can and should play an important role during this effort to
save lives, such as to spread public health messages and increase access
to health care. However, an increase in non-consensual state digital
surveillance powers, such as obtaining access to mobile phone location
data, threatens privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of
association, in ways that could violate rights and degrade trust in
public authorities – undermining the effectiveness of any public health
response. Such measures also pose a risk of discrimination and may
disproportionately harm already marginalized communities.
These are extraordinary times, but human rights law still applies.
Indeed, the human rights framework is designed to ensure that different
rights can be carefully balanced to protect individuals and wider
societies. States cannot simply disregard rights such as privacy and
freedom of expression in the name of tackling a public health crisis. On
the contrary, protecting human rights also promotes public health. Now
more than ever, governments must rigorously ensure that any restrictions
to these rights is in line with long-established human rights
safeguards.
This crisis offers an opportunity to demonstrate our shared humanity. We
can make extraordinary efforts to fight this pandemic that are
consistent with human rights standards and the rule of law. The
decisions that governments make now to confront the pandemic will shape
what the world looks like in the future.
We call on all governments not to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with
increased digital surveillance unless the following conditions are met:
1. Surveillance measures adopted to address the pandemic must be
lawful, necessary and proportionate. They must be provided for by
law and must be justified by legitimate public health objectives, as
determined by the appropriate public health authorities, and be
proportionate to those needs. Governments must be transparent about
the measures they are taking so that they can be scrutinized and if
appropriate later modified, retracted, or overturned. We cannot
allow the COVID-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse for indiscriminate
mass surveillance.
2. If governments expand monitoring and surveillance powers then such
powers must be time-bound, and only continue for as long as
necessary to address the current pandemic. We cannot allow the
COVID-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse for indefinite surveillance.
3. States must ensure that increased collection, retention, and
aggregation of personal data, including health data, is only used
for the purposes of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data
collected, retained, and aggregated to respond to the pandemic must
be limited in scope, time-bound in relation to the pandemic and must
not be used for commercial or any other purposes. We cannot allow
the COVID-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse to gut individual’s
right to privacy.
4. Governments must take every effort to protect people’s data,
including ensuring sufficient security of any personal data
collected and of any devices, applications, networks, or services
involved in collection, transmission, processing, and storage. Any
claims that data is anonymous must be based on evidence and
supported with sufficient information regarding how it has been
anonymized. We cannot allow attempts to respond to this pandemic to
be used as justification for compromising people’s digital safety.
5. Any use of digital surveillance technologies in responding to
COVID-19, including big data and artificial intelligence systems,
must address the risk that these tools will facilitate
discrimination and other rights abuses against racial minorities,
people living in poverty, and other marginalized populations, whose
needs and lived realities may be obscured or misrepresented in large
datasets. We cannot allow the COVID-19 pandemic to further increase
the gap in the enjoyment of human rights between different groups in
society.
6. If governments enter into data sharing agreements with other public
or private sector entities, they must be based on law, and the
existence of these agreements and information necessary to assess
their impact on privacy and human rights must be publicly disclosed
– in writing, with sunset clauses, public oversight and other
safeguards by default. Businesses involved in efforts by governments
to tackle COVID-19 must undertake due diligence to ensure they
respect human rights, and ensure any intervention is firewalled from
other business and commercial interests. We cannot allow the
COVID-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse for keeping people in the
dark about what information their governments are gathering and
sharing with third parties.
7. Any response must incorporate accountability protections and
safeguards against abuse. Increased surveillance efforts related to
COVID-19 should not fall under the domain of security or
intelligence agencies and must be subject to effective oversight by
appropriate independent bodies. Further, individuals must be given
the opportunity to know about and challenge any COVID-19 related
measures to collect, aggregate, and retain, and use data.
Individuals who have been subjected to surveillance must have access
to effective remedies.
8. COVID-19 related responses that include data collection efforts
should include means for free, active, and meaningful participation
of relevant stakeholders, in particular experts in the public health
sector and the most marginalized population groups.
[All
Signatories](https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/02/joint-civil-society-statement-states-use-digital-surveillance-technologies-fight)
of this joint statement.
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