With the recent attention drawn to massive ongoing surveillance of the internet, Brazil and Germany proposed a resolution to the United Nations (“U.N.”) General Assembly on November 07, 2013, that would extend a right to privacy to online communications. The resolution originated after revelations that the leaders of both Brazil and Germany were being spied on at some point by the National Security Agency (NSA). The proposed U.N. resolution would integrate the online right to privacy into the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as part of the overall right to privacy. The proposed resolution included declarative references against extra-territorial and illegal surveillance while calling upon all nations to end privacy violations, encouraging compliance with human rights obligations, establishing accountability and oversight for communications surveillance, and eventually authoring of a report on protection of the online right to privacy by the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights to the General Assembly.

The initial opposition to the resolution included the United States (“U.S.”) and its partners, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia (also known as the “five eyes”). Opponents of the U.N. resolution argued that no universal right to privacy existed and that governments did not have to recognize an individual’s privacy right outside of their own country. Were those arguments found to be untrue, then the present ongoing surveillance practices of the NSA would be found to be highly unethical and potentially a massive international human rights violation. This reasoning might explain the U.S. efforts to quietly amend the resolution instead of fighting it outright at the U.N. After all, the U.S. has never engaged in illegal mass online espionage practices; rather, it instead participates in lawful surveillance authorized by federal statute, Congressional oversight, and with approval by the Federal Courts. Assuming a compromise can be reached, then the U.S. and its partners can eventually claim that they are against illegal mass surveillance of online activities while continuing to engage in those same activities.

As lobbyists and diplomats became involved with amending the privacy resolution, the U.S. and its partners watered it down by removing language describing illegal surveillance and disclaiming extraterritorial surveillance as illegal. The most notable compromise made to the resolution was removal of language implying that domestic and international interception and collection of communications and personal data or “mass surveillance” could constitute a human rights violation. For the U.S. red lines to the proposed U.N. resolution, the blog turtle bay is alleged to have the information here. After the amendments were approved, the U.N. resolution extending the right to privacy to online activities could now be endorsed by the United States and its partners.

Despite the language weakening parts of the U.N. resolution, the overall integrity of the commitment to protection of online privacy remains intact. The resolution passed the U.N. human rights committee on November 26, 2013, with unanimous approval. The present draft resolution also has the endorsement of five important human rights and privacy organizations, Access and Privacy International, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. Given that the resolution currently has at least 50 co-sponsors means that the resolution will likely pass the General Assembly when it is voted on in December.

While passage of the resolution will not automatically reign in the NSA’s unscrupulous practices, it will keep the topic of mass surveillance fresh in people’s minds. The importance of the present U.N. resolution is to initiate an ongoing conversation over mass online surveillance so groups can develop better practices for promoting and maintaining freedom while balancing the need for governments to investigate illegal online activities. It is our hope that the U.N. resolution once approved will help establish and enshrine the right to privacy in online activities across all nations, so it can eventually become recognized as the universal human right it should be.