Internet rights are human rights
This submission was produced in response to the call by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for input to a report on internet shutdowns and human rights that will be presented to the 50th session of the Human Rights Council in June 2022.
The Committee on NGOs is entrusted with facilitating civil society access so that the expertise and experience of civil society partners can enrich and inform UN debates. It needs members committed to fulfilling this mandate in a fair, transparent, non-discriminatory and apolitical manner.
In this open letter to the incoming president of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), APC and other organisations take the opportunity to voice a series of recommendations to ensure effective civil society participation in the upcoming 16th cycle of the HRC.
In this statement, APC calls on the Open-ended Working Group (OEWG) to recognise that existing and emerging cyber threats impact differently on groups subject to intersecting forms of discrimination, including women and people of diverse sexualities and gender expressions.
The inputs from the speakers collectively built on a key takeaway from this edition of GISWatch, that the burden of environmental destruction and pollution falls disproportionately on communities that experience discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion.
in 2021, we highlighted 27 stories of impact and change by our members, supported by APC subgranting. These stories demonstrate that listening to multiple voices and learning from positive impacts made locally are important ways to keep seeding and harvesting change.
A group of more than 140 members of the multistakeholder community have signed a letter addressed to Ambassador Burhan Gafoor, Chair of the UN OEWG, about multistakeholder participation in the upcoming sessions.
Technology is going to change faster than we can adapt to it or even understand it, and we are already seeing technological change outpace the capabilities of public policy. We need to adjust how we view and decide things so technology broadens our policy options rather than narrow them.
APC and other civil society organisations marked the conclusion of the UN General Assembly's 76th Third Committee session with these observations on both thematic and country-specific resolutions. We urge all states to implement the commitments made in these resolutions to their full extent.
APC will engage in five days of multistakeholder dialogue on how technology can support democracy and human rights, through leading two sessions and sharing remarks during the opening and closing plenaries of the event.

Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2022
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