Rethinking Risk and Security of Human Rights Defenders in the Digital Age

Abstract

Human rights defenders (HRDs) are increasingly empowered by, and dependent upon, digital technologies. These technologies have opened up new potentials, enabling HRDs to extend their capacity to document and analyse human rights abuses, to amplify them, and to more effectively organize locally and internationally. Digital technologies, however, have simultaneously created new points of weakness: exposing HRDs' whereabouts, activities and networks, and creating evidence against them through data leakages, digital traces, and direct surveillance and interception. Attacks on HRDs have escalated over the past two years, with a significant increase in the number of entrapments and networks being compromised through the use of computers, cameras, mobile phones and the internet. This rapidly changing landscape poses a number of challenges to practitioners working in the field of security and protection for HRDs and has led to a growing concern about how best to enable HRDs to assess and mitigate the related risks. After contextualizing and introducing the dimensions of digital insecurity for HRDs, this paper will note some of the responses to HRDs' digital security needs which have been developed, and their limitations. It will then go on to identify three key principles that should inform the work of practitioners in future and to raise a series of critical questions for further research and work in this area.