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Prof. Rosie Harding and I have been awarded a small amount of funding to support research assistance for a project on care, security and the internet of things.

The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is an emerging site for the delivery of care interventions and security for individuals (e.g., smart technology that uses GPS to monitor an individual’s movements, or the usage of everyday household objects to remotely monitor home services like heating or cooking equipment). As well as seeming to offer ‘efficient’ solutions to some care and security needs, these technologies gather and process data, which could be used to increase the surveillance capabilities of intelligence services. Thus, the IoT raises a range of socio-legal issues requiring deeper interrogation. In order to identify the issues that must be addressed for any policy adopting the IoT to be considered ‘evidence based’, this project will canvas the potential societal implications of the use of the IoT as a care and security solution.

Research Assistance is required to assist in the identification of the benefits and limitations of technologisation in these interlinked domains.  The question at the heart of this research is: how might the technologisation of care and security impact on the everyday lives of those who require care, and those for and on whom security is performed? We intend to explore six overlapping areas: 1) the practical and conceptual rationales for technologisation; 2) The potential effects of replacing human contact with technical solutions (e.g. increasing loneliness and alienation, the loss of opportunities for transformative interventions, or the loss of jobs in the care sector); 3) The implications of the loss of human judgment and incidental knowledge in care and security interactions; 4) Risk-related implications (e.g. reduction of currently-known risks, emergence of IoT-related risks); 5) Implications for privacy, the right to protection of personal data, and broader human rights concerns; and 6) Issues relating to whether it is possible to gain informed consent to data collection that has unpredictable potential uses.

To support this work we now invite applications to provide research assistance of the following types:

RA Tasks:	Time estimation
Finding and evaluating the existing academic, legal, ethical, and policy literatures relating to technologisation and the IoT	80 hours
Collating a database of references and full text documents	15 hours

RA will be remunerated and the work should be completed by mid-June (as funds must be claimed and paid out by the end of July). The RA would be required to prepare a full literature review (i.e. sourcing, accessing, reading, and summarising the arguments of relevant scholarly and policy literature) as well as collecting the relevant documents.

If you’re interested please send us an email with academic CV attached by 5pm on May 9th (to f.delondras@bham.ac.uk and r.j.harding@bham.uk). We will make a decision promptly after that.

I was very pleased to be invited to speak at the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade NGO Forum last Friday. The event, which took place in Dublin Castle, involved a wide range of speakers reflecting on the first ten years of the Human Rights Council and on Ireland’s time as a member thereof. In my short remarks, I was asked to consider the extent to which the Council has managed to address emerging issues, and in doing so I reflected especially on counter-terrorism. In 7 minutes, of course, one can hardly be comprehensive, and so the remarks below (which are my speaking notes from the event, though not a strict account of what I said) were necessarily selective and intended to give a general account.

For the past ten years, the HRC has been part of a broad patchwork of international human rights institutions working to identify and address the profound challenges raised and unveiled by the ‘War on Terror’ and broader counter-terrorism regimes and operations. As counter-terrorism has internationalised (with the involvement of the Security Council, for example), and innovated (with the continued adoption of technology-based approaches to security) the importance of the HRC’s ability to consider its implications for rights in an international forum involving all states has been abundantly clear. The value of this can be illustrated by reference to just three areas of attention and activity.

The first is the Council’s commitment to taking a broad and inclusive approach to addressing and understanding the rights-related implications of countering terrorism beyond implications for civil and political rights per se. This approach reflects the basic proposition of indivisible rights, and the reality that social and economic conditions, as well as civil and political ones, require attention if terrorism and counter-terrorism are to be fully understood and addressed. Furthermore, in the mandate of the Special Rapporteur (created by the Commission but renewed in 2010 and 2013 by the Council), there is a particular reference to accounting for the implications of counter-terrorism for gender (paragraph (c)), and the first Special Rapporteur (Prof. Martin Scheinin) was clearly attentive to that, including devoting almost an entire report to gender and counter-terrorism in 2009. Relatedly, the Council has paid attention to socio-economic conditions in assessing the root causes of terrorism and identifying the potential of a rights-based approach to addressing radicalisation, extremism, inter-personal violence, persistent insecurity, economic inequality, and other endemic problems that feed into the causes and manifestations of terrorism. In this, the Council’s holding of, for example, interactive dialogues with mandate holders on terrorism and on extreme poverty is very welcome and clearly chimes with the inter-connectedness recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals, for example.

A second area of note is the attention paid by the Council and its mandate holders to the implications of counter-terrorism for the right to privacy and other rights that flow from the “digital embrace” in contemporary counter-terrorism. The turn towards technology-based solutions to security problems is reflected particularly in the instigation of systems of mass surveillance, attacks on encryption and the principle of net neutrality, and a sometimes patchy commitment to privacy by design in technology research and development. The Special Rapporteur has long been attentive to these trends. As early as 2009, Prof. Scheinin argued that counter-terrorism’s implications for privacy required serious attention, that states should be required to establish legitimate justifications for infringements on privacy, and that the Human Rights Committee should adopt a new general comment on Article 17 of the ICCPR. There is a clear connection between the work of the Special Rapporteur, the interventions of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the General Assembly’s 2013 call for reflection on privacy in the digital age, the report of the High Commissioner on the same theme in 2014, and the establishment by the Council of a Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy in the Digital Age in 2015.

A third area that illustrates the Council’s ability to address emerging issues is that of targeted killing by unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones. During the tenure of the present Special Rapporteur, Ben Emmerson QC, this has been an area of concerted attention. That tenure coincides with the striking expansion of targeted killing by drone by the Obama Administration and its adoption (to a far lesser extent) by the United Kingdom. While the Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Killing has also been attentive to this, Emmerson has paid it particularly tenacious attention. His reports on this issue have starkly illustrated the need for transparency, accountability, enquiries when civilians are killed (as is often the case), and a concerted effort by the international community to agree on the applicable legal standards for the application as appropriate of international human rights and international humanitarian law to drone killings. This work, which has been supported by the Council including through holding panel meetings on the matter, has been hugely influential, being cited in (for example) the 2015 Council of Europe Report on the Need to Uphold Human Rights and International Law in Respect of Drones and Targeted Killings.

Thus, when I turn my mind to the key question I was asked to consider today–whether the HRC has been able to ensure the existing human rights framework can address emerging challenges–and apply it to the counter-terrorism context, I am generally inclined to answer in the affirmative. However, two inter-related points of caution apply. The first relates to the fact that some member states of the Human Rights Council continue to use counter-terrorism law domestically in order to quash dissent, undermine freedom of expression, prevent protest, entrench surveillance, and maintain power. Others are among the most prominent counter-terrorism entrepreneurs, engaged in innovating many of the most challenging technologies and approaches to countering terrorism and arguing for recalibration downwards of vital human rights protections in the name of security. The apparent disconnect between the practices of member states and the activities of the Council per se is clearly undesirable.

The second concern is the heavy reliance on the Special Rapporteur to advance rights work in the context of counter-terrorim in the Council. Not only does such a reliance depend heavily on individuals and thus potentially make the work vulnerable through phenomena such as lack of institutional memory, cult of personality, and variability of resources, but it also means that there are dangers of replication and competition in work across the mandates of different rapporteurs, and that the advances made might be undermined by the appointment (by the member states) in future of ‘weaker’ special rapporteurs, designed to ‘un-tooth’ the mandate.

This evening I delivered the 9th Annual Seán Lester lecture of the Irish Society of International Law at St Michan’s Church, Dublin. The lecture, entitled “The Future of the European Court of Human Rights” outlines what I consider to be three key crises facing the Court: the crisis of legitimacy, the crisis of enforcement, and the crisis of dilution. All of these, I argued, are fundamentally crises of politics, rather than crises relating to the Court per se, thus indicating that what is key to the resolution of these crises and to securing the future of the Court is political change in Council of Europe states and across the CoE itself.

One of the great pleasures of preparing this lecture was that I learned much more about Seán Lester. For a country with a tendency to make much of our forebears (not a bad characteristic, I think), the low profile assigned to Seán Lester is quite surprising. He was High Commissioner of Danzig (under the League of Nations mandate, created in the Treaty of Versailles), Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations, and then the final Secretary General of the League of Nations. Indeed, he is arguably better remembered in Poland (particularly Gdansk, formerly Danzig) than he is at home in Ireland, and it was thus a real honour to be invited to give this lecture.

The full text of the lecture (as prepared; not necessarily exactly as delivered!) is available here.

This is cross-posted from The Conversation

Terrorism generates fear – that is its purpose. Attacks serve to make us think twice before we leave the house, to sow suspicion and fear about neighbours and friends who are different to us in some way, to make us question the core of our liberal values. Paradoxically, terrorist attacks tend to unify and to divide at the same time. Just as sorrow and sympathy unite us, fear and anxiety divide us into “us” and “them”.

In these circumstances we are drawn, quite understandably, to demands for more security, more counter-terrorism, more laws. But is “more” the right answer? Certainly the history of legal responses to terrorism indicates that legislation produced rapidly in the wake of terrorist acts can be problematic and often fails to address the core problem. Continue reading “Passing knee-jerk laws in the wake of terrorist attacks will not make us safer”