Freedom of expression
How are APC members improving their communities' lives? In Pakistan, Media Matters for Democracy has been working on media building, fighting censorship and defending women journalists in an increasingly regressive context.
In this response to the call by the Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression for contributions to the thematic report to be presented to the 76th session of the UN General Assembly, APC addresses the issue of gender justice and its intersection with these rights from a feminist lens.
This statement was submitted ahead of the Human Rights Council 47th session to express grave concern over digital rights violations against Palestinians during the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in mixed cities in Israel and forcible displacement of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
APC joins with other civil society organisations to denounce the escalating situation of digital authoritarianism in India, including the efforts to intimidate web platforms into compliance with the government's censorship measures.
APC joins in the condemnation of the suspension of Twitter services in Nigeria, and considers that this measure not only limits Nigerian citizens' exercise of their right to access information, but also other rights including freedom of expression, privacy, and freedom of assembly and association.
APC sees RightsCon as a convening space for strategising and networking, as well as an opportunity to showcase APC’s work and perspectives on human rights in the digital space, a feminist internet, access and digital inclusion, social justice and environmental sustainability.
When looking through the risk and danger that seemingly small decisions about online social media profiles can pose to queer-identifying individuals, the utopic narrative of the “levelling field” that the internet creates begins to fall apart.
The undersigned human rights and digital rights organisations urge Google to immediately halt its plan to establish a new Google Cloud region in Saudi Arabia until the company can publicly demonstrate how it will mitigate adverse human rights impacts.
Together with other civil society and human rights institutions, members of the African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms Coalition demonstrated the gravity of online rights violations on the continent in the reports presented during the human rights situation sessions.
In early 2021, the Australian government enacted the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which requires Facebook and Google to pay Australian media for their news content.

Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2022
Unless otherwise stated, content on the APC website is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
