Opportunities and Challenges in
Southeast Asia, 2019 (Bangkok, Thailand)
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As the area of digital rights remains nebulous, some studies on the topic anchor their
work on existing frameworks or guidelines instead, mostly in the form of Internet/digital
bills of rights or charters, which provide sets of norms and principles agreed upon by
various constituencies through stakeholder consultations (Gill, Redeker, & Gasser, 2015;
Dheere, 2017; Daskal, 2018; Redeker, Gill, & Gasser, 2018). For example, the Charter of
Human Rights and Principles for the Internet by the Internet Rights & Principles Coalition
(IRPC) outlines ten general Internet rights and principles and provides a breakdown of
these rights in 21 articles, using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
as a framework (Internet Rights & Principles Coalition, 2018). Another framework that
is oft-mentioned is the APC Internet Rights Charter by the Association of Progressive
Communication (APC), which organises 31 rights by seven themes.3 There are many
such charters and attempts to create “magna cartas” of sorts of Internet rights. In a
comparative study of principles for governing the Internet, UNESCO (2015) identified
more than 50 Internet-specific declarations and frameworks. In another attempt on
analysing “digital constitutionalism” or initiatives that “seek to articulate a set of political
rights, governance norms, and limitations on the exercise of power on the Internet”,
Gill et al. (2015) identified 30 such initiatives and collected a list of 42 rights which they
categorised into seven themes4.
Gill et al. (2015) found that freedom of expression, privacy rights, and the right of access
to the Internet were the three most featured out of the 30 digital constitutions studied
(27, 26, and 24 times out of 30). Freedom of information, as well as transparency, and
openness (of Internet governance processes and of networks), were other focal points
which were covered by more than two thirds of the documents analysed (22 times out
of 30). Indeed, some studies or documents have found it expedient to narrow down
their scope to the top two to three rights and to move along with their analytical work or
practical advocacy (Daskal, 2018; Global Network Initiative, 2017; Hope, 2011; Kumar,
Prasad & Maréchal, 2017). This may be sufficient if the purpose of the authors is to
look specifically at freedom of expression and privacy rights, however, most discussions
do identify these choices as main or representative foci of digital rights or human
rights in the online space. The challenge then seems to be the lack of a theoretical or
conceptual framework to define the boundaries of digital rights, compelling researchers
and advocates to choose the rights that are most representative and forgoing some other
rights that are deemed less central.
The concepts of digital rights and Internet freedom have been operationalised for the
purposes of ranking corporations and countries on their performance of upholding
rights in the digital or online space. The Corporate Accountability Index, produced yearly
by Ranking Digital Rights, for example, ranks a selection of the most influential Internet,
3
4
Accessible at https://www.apc.org/sites/default/files/APC_charter_EN_0_1_2.pdf
1) Basic or fundamental rights and freedoms, 2) General limits on state power, 3) Internet governance
and civic participation, 4) Privacy rights and surveillance, 5) Access and education, 6) Openness and
stability of networks, 7) Economic rights and responsibilities.