Human Rights Are Not Negotiable: Looking Back at Brazil's NETMundial

At the start of her opening address to the NETmundial conference in Sao Paolo this Tuesday, Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff ceremonially signed the Marco Civil, Brazil's long fought-for Internet Bill of Rights, into law. Even as she did so, activists from the floor below waved Ed Snowden masks and banners protested the bill's inclusion of a data retention mandate.

It was a prefiguration of the battle between high hopes, user rights, anti-surveillance activism, and the forces of compromise that would take place in this forum over the next two days.

Over a thousand delegates, from advocacy groups like EFF, companies like Microsoft, the governments of states from the U.S. to Russia, to technical Internet groups like ICANN and the IETF,  as well as videoconferencing citizens patched in from India to Argentina, took turns to make statements on the convention's main product, an "outcome document" that would describe the values and direction of Internet governance. After a day of the statements, the drafting committees of the document retired to a smaller room, equipped with snacks, alcohol and video projectors, where they began openly and publicly haggling over the details of the document, surrounded by crowds of eavesdropping delegates.

The intense monitoring of the drafters curiously mirrored the reason why such a strange mix of society had been brought here: the unchecked surveillance by the intelligence agencies of the United States and other governments, and the resulting challenge that spying has placed on the legitimacy of Internet governance venues like the United Nation's Internet Governance Forum.

President Rousseff's rousing attack on NSA spying last year at the United Nations's declared that it "affect[ed] the international community itself and demands a response from it." She called for the establishment of a "civilian multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet." Rousseff's plan was reinforced by a later meeting with ICANN's President Fadi Chehadé, the representative of the signatories of the Montevideo Statement, a collection of key technical groups associated with Internet governance, who had also expressed their concern that pervasive monitoring and surveillance undermined "the trust and confidence of Internet users globally."

The result was NETmundial, a Internet-mediated event with invited attendees from numerous camps, including business, civil society, governments and the Internet's technical community.

The inspiration for NETmundial's process was that of Brazil's Marco Civil itself, whose text includes important new guarantees of freedom of expression, protection of privacy and personal data, network neutrality and openness. The law was initially drafted in a decentralised, collaborative process that used some of the Net's own organizational innovations. Its passage through parliament involved the same political wrangling as any law does, however, with the result that some unfortunate compromises were made — including the bill's Article 15, which now compels Brazilian ISPs and other Internet companies to retain their customers' communications data for a fixed period.

The result was a document that emphasised and reinforced human rights at its core, yet mandated a level of compulsory private data collection upon Brazilian citizen, even as Europe's highest court was rejecting similar EU legislation as being an explicit violation of human rights. Clearly the process of compromise works against the defence of human rights as well as protect them.

Unlike the Brazilian law, the text developed at NETmundial was not be a law, but a set of non-binding international principles along with a roadmap for future developments of the Internet governance ecosystem. The original text was ambitious in its scope, including sections on the application of human rights online, support for the open and distributed architecture of the Internet including open standards, and aspirations for how governance of the Internet should be made more democratic and inclusive.

But as with the Marco Civil, compromises quickly pockmarked the NETmundial outcome document.

Perhaps the most troubled areas were those on intellectual property, which prompted as ever a flood of comments on behalf of rightsholders to the NETmundial online comment platform in the days leading up to the meeting, and intense lobbying by rightsholders like MPAA, generally supported by Western governments, at the event. The fruits can be seen in the final text, where strong statements of unqualified human rights and shared values have