Human Rights In the Digital Age.

Vol. 15 No.4 (April 2005), pp.279-281

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE, by Mathias Klang and Andrew Murray (eds). London: Glasshouse Press, 2004. 276pp. Paper £25.00 / $50.00. ISBN: 1-90438-531-1.

Reviewed by Conway W. Henderson, Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina Upstate. chenderson@uscupstate.edu.

Editors Mathias Klang and Andrew Murray, and associated writers—mostly lawyers and communications specialists—offer seventeen articles in HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE intended to shed light on the digital age in its dual role as promoter of human rights and as facilitator of the state’s ability to suppress these rights. Despite the great breadth of the human rights field, more than half of the articles deal either with narrow-based cases of censorship, involving firewalls, filters, and the like, or with privacy issues threatened by surveillance techniques. Taken together, some of these articles are fairly redundant and their subjects have been discussed in the public media for years. Chatterjee’s “Pixels, Pimps, and Prostitutes” on the sexual exploitation of women and Eneman’s “The New Face of Child Pornography” cover important human rights issues but do not say much that is new. The three articles by Paré, Couser, and Bing might well have been grouped together as sharing an interest in e-commerce. Bing raises the interesting specter of government and business decisions, previously based on human judgments, now converted to computerized processes operating without due attention to human interests.

It is clear from HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE that the authors are more taken with the intricacies of new digital technologies than probing widely and deeply for human rights implications. There are two articles, however, by Klang on “Virtual Sit-ins” and Brownsword on “Biotechnology and Rights,” which are particularly interesting and useful. Klang raises important questions about “cybersitting” on government websites as a form of civil disobedience and generally finds the criminalization of this practice, as a response to “nine-eleven” terrorism, to be overdrawn. Brownsword’s investigation of biotechnology refreshingly takes into account human rights treaties as he ascertains the dangers biotechnology might present to human dignity. Too many of the articles pay little attention to identifying and defining human rights standards before their authors dive into pools of technical minutiae.

What is really missing from this book is any sense of how much of the scope of human rights (and there are a great many human rights identified in numerous treaties) can be connected to digital technology. Have the authors together covered all the issues or do these articles represent only the specialized interests of a particular group of writers? Robin Mansell, in the introduction, bravely tries to make sense of it all but almost to no avail. Some help might have come from dividing the table of contents into meaningful sub-categories, but [*280] numerous articles on censorship and privacy would have skewed the categories. One unfailingly useful organizational method is to have one editor write the introduction, putting the work of contributors into perspective, with the other editor summing up the book’s contribution in a concluding chapter. In between, a forthright effort should have been made to assign a distinct human rights/technology issue to each author, thus covering more of the scope of the human rights field and also avoiding some unfortunate redundancy. An organizational strength that is present, and usually missing from edited books, is this volume’s index.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE almost ignores the grand view of what the digital technology means for human rights. Digitalized communications of many kinds have created the “information highway” and shrink-wrapped the world into the “global village.” Only a few of the articles touch on this great sweeping force of history. This still surging force has recently undercut European communism and threatened the communist leadership in China in the form of the Tiananmen Square student uprising. Everywhere free flows of information occur, restive populations arise. No dictator today is safe. The information highway does not always have to depend on CNN or the Internet, mostly luxuries of the modern world. As journalist Thomas L. Friedman wrote a few years ago, an information revolution can spring from low-tech media, such as the FM radio. He pointed out that the four most democratic countries in West Africa – Benin, Ghana, Mali, and Senegal – have private, flourishing FM talk radio that challenges their governments and holds them accountable.

Multi-media also encourage democracy and transparency within the emergent global civil society and global governance. International NGOs (INGOs) join forces through the Internet and demand reforms that serve people instead of leaving the world to the machinations of power politics conducted by states. The outstanding example of citizen activism on the world stage is the work of Jody Williams, through her leadership of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Williams and this INGO shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. Thousands of citizen-activists, aided by Canada, marshaled enough political clout via the Internet to produce the Ottawa Convention banning landmines.

All that information flows do for democracy, they do as well for human rights.

Digitalized information flows have helped push Samuel Huntington’s Third Wave of Democracy upon authoritarian beaches and helped sustain it there. One empirical study after another has found that the presence of genuine democratic governments—those selected by the people and answerable to the people—will enhance prospects for the enjoyment of human rights more than any other precondition. A few of the articles of the work under review brush up against this grand view of information, but none do it justice.

REFERENCE:

Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. THE THIRD WAVE: DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [*281] Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

*************************************************