Blogging, video, and discussion of the conference may be followed at http://yaleisp.org. The best link for accessing these materials is: http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/a2k4main.

Twitter users are encouraged to submit questions and comments to panelists using the hash tag #a2k4. You can also follow this discussion even if you do not have a Twitter account.

Thanks are due to the Kauffman Foundation for their generous sponsorship of this conference.

We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of our A2K4 organizing partners:

3D: Trade, Human Rights, Equitable Economy; AAAS Science and Human Rights Program; Access to Knowledge for Development (A2K4D) Center, School of Business, American University in Cairo; A2K Research Program at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas School of Law in Sao Paulo; Association for Progressive Communications; Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; Centre for Technology and Society at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas School of Law in Rio de Janeiro; Centro de Estúdios Interdisciplinários de Derecho Industrial and Económico; Consumers International; Electronic Frontier Foundation; Human Rights USA; Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School; Intellectual Property Watch; IQSensato; Knowledge Ecology International; Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School; UCT Intellectual Property Law and Policy Research; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies.

Lea Shaver, director of the Yale ISP’s research program in Access to Knowledge, also contributed opening remarks…

Access to Knowledge has been a major focus of the Yale Information Society Project’s research for several years. A2K4 follows on the heels of three other major conferences: A2K, A2K2, and A2K3.

But for those who may be new to these events, a few words on what we mean by “access to knowledge” or “A2K.”

The unifying feature of the A2K community is a concern to preserve, protect, and advance knowledge as a public good, which all should enjoy access to.

“Knowledge” here refers not just to things like a Yale education, access to fine literature, or a high-speed Internet connection. The A2K movement is particularly concerned with the ways in which access to knowledge impacts the lives of the poor and vulnerable. For example: control over crop seeds, affordable medicines, and primary textbooks.

Historically, the access to knowledge movement emerged as a reaction to the 1994 TRIPs Agreement, which dramatically changed the way that intellectual property is regulated internationally.

The philosophy that TRIPs embodied may be described as “IP maximalism” — the belief that the more strongly intellectual property is protected, the better. The A2K movement emerged out of organizations that criticized that approach, pointing out a number of ways in which stronger IP protection was harmful to the public interest.

The best-known area of activism is around access to essential medicines, such as treatments for HIV, that was endangered by new patent rules. But the A2K movement is much broader; concerned also with the ways that IP rules limit access to educational materials, seeds, cultural works, and IT software and hardware.

The concerns of the A2K movement also extend beyond intellectual property. They encompass Internet governance, innovation and technology policy, and competition regulation.

As we’ll see over the next two days, access to knowledge impacts a number of human rights issues. This includes civil liberties such as freedom of expression and privacy. As well as issues of distributive justice such as access to education, health care, and science and culture.

So one goal for this conference is to advance A2K-related legal and policy issues that can improve the state of human rights around the world. A second goal is to explore how A2K advocates might take more conscious advantage of human rights approaches in their work.

One question on the table, however, is whether this is even a good idea. Just because A2K concerns can be articulated in terms of human rights does not compel the conclusion that they should. Indeed, there are very much two sides to this debate.

On the one hand, human rights offers an international normative and legal framework from which to critique the recent approach to IP. Because rights-based arguments have some qualities of a “trump” to them, they may open up new avenues for advocacy and legal challenge.

It is far from clear, however, that such efforts will be effective in shifting the dynamics of existing struggles over IP. Many in the A2K community are highly skeptical of human rights language, having heard many times the claim that intellectual property rights are human rights.

In the words of scholar Kal Raustiala, “It remains to be seen whether the marriage of human rights and IP will make international IP rights more socially just, or just more powerful.” Kal Raustiala, Commentary: Density and Conflict in International Intellectual Property Law, 40 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1021, 1037 (2007).

The dual-edged nature of this dilemma, however, only reinforces the conclusion that the A2K community cannot afford to ignore the human rights debate, any more than the human rights community can afford to ignore access to knowledge concerns.

This weekend’s conference is an opportunity to explore in depth the issues encountered at the intersection of access to knowledge and human rights. Our esteemed panelists will be addressing three central questions:

In what ways do intellectual property, Internet governance, technological regulation and innovation systems impact human rights — both civil liberties as well as socioeconomic entitlements?

How can leveraging rights-based methodologies, arguments, and institutions advance A2K goals? What new risks might these strategies carry?

As we move toward greater collaboration between the human rights and A2K communities, wherein lie the greatest opportunities and challenges, and how can we rise to meet them?

For the full agenda of the conference, as well as links to blog posts, archived video, and additional resources for each panel, please visit http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/a2k4main.

This panel explores A2K issues relevant to classic civil and political rights, particularly freedom of expression.

Political expression and dissent are increasingly exercised online, through technologies ranging from social networking tools, blogs, email, and cell phones to more concealed and complex technical approaches such as the use of distributed denial of service attacks to disrupt government servers. Some governments have responded to new forms of digital dissent with new forms of technological repression.

The same technologies that expand opportunities to engage in legitimate political protest have created unprecedented privacy concerns; of particular concern is the practice of deep packet inspection allowing scrutiny by governments, often through private industry, of the details of users’ text messages, web searches, and emails.

The panelists included:

Anupam Chander, UC Davis School of Law

Laura DeNardis, Yale Information Society Project

Theresa Harris, Human Rights USA

Eddan Katz, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Moderator: Nabiha Syed, Yale Information Society Project

Some of the questions to be pursued by this panel include:

What are examples of online technology and expression that may be empowered or made vulnerable? How are governments responding to these new forms of dissent? Is there anything truly new about these forms of protest versus more traditional forms?

What is the nature of the technical architecture that enables these new types of democratic expression and protest? In what ways can the same technologies be used to violate human rights? Is there a human right to any particular form of technology, or rights vis a vis technology?

What is the role of corporate social responsibility in relationship to Internet freedom? To what extent should we be concerned about private control over new forms of dissent and speech, as well as government control?

What is the role of government investment in telecommunications, universal access and closing the digital divide, and infrastructure design as human rights issues? Does freedom of expression require positive government efforts to extend technological access and what would these look like?

Laura DeNardis kicked off the panel by discussing her current research exploring the relationship between Internet technical architecture and political protest and expression.  The theoretical framework for her research emanates from her discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS).  This is a field that studies how cultural and political values shape technological and scientific innovations and how these technologies in turn can transform society.  In her research, particular STS influences include: material-semiotic approaches such as Actor Network Theory; theories from feminist philosophers of science; and critical STS theories emanating from the work of Langdon Winner and Michel Foucault.  Within this framework, she is studying the dissolution of boundaries between virtual and material realities of political protest and is asking two overarching questions: (1) How does this phenomenon require a reconceptualization of our understanding of 21st Century social action?  (2) What is our responsibility for not only using technologies but for preserving and promoting certain forms of technological architecture and legal structures to create what Jack Balkin refers to as an infrastructure of free expression?

In her upcoming book, Technologies of Dissent, DeNardis uses case studies to analyze these issues.  One of her case studies involves distributed denial of service attacks for political protest.   These cyber attacks were famously used in Iran, Georgia, Estonia and for Google’s Initial Public Offering.  She also focuses on how citizen journalism impacts political debates and elections (see, for example, Virginia Senator George Allen’s racial slur captured on YouTube).

Another area of her research involves Internet mapping technology.  She brought up the example of Proposition 8 and the public disclosure of contributors to this ballot measure.   An anonymous web site developer (or developers) created “Prop 8 Maps” a web site identifying the names and geographical locations of individuals who had contributed to the campaign to end legalized same-sex marriage in California.  The web site was a mash-up of Google mapping software and publicly available information about Proposition 8 supporters published by the state of California.  The web site provides a graphical depiction of donors in three areas with high concentrations of donors who funded the campaign to overturn same-sex marriage: San Francisco, Salt Lake City Utah, and Orange County California.  It led to the public shaming of Prop 8 campaign contributors.

DeNardis concluded her remarks by drawing some observations from her research: First, technologies of dissent seem to be a particular locus of conflicting values; Second, technologies of dissent sometimes amplify and remix publicly available information in ways that are attracting heightened legal and social scrutiny; Third, the use of Google mapping technology, twitter, and different forms of social media and Internet architecture as part of political protests emphasizes a somewhat increasing role of private industry in communicative freedom and reflects the need to examine voluntary corporate social responsibility and a possible role of government in scrutinizing this area; Fourth, although this is not unique to new technologies of dissent, it’s important to note the caveat that the same technologies that enable new forms of protest and expression can be used by governments and others to restrict these freedoms; Finally,  it’s important to note that the use of technologies of dissent is always accompanied or even preceded by social change.

Next up was Anupam Chander.   He spoke about what he called “the Web’s possible futures”: public discourse vs. government surveillance.  He began by detailing the rich history of governments crushing “seabeds of political unrest.”  He expressed concern about governments suppressing free speech by controlling technologies of dissent.  However, he pointed to a number of examples where the Internet is leading to rich public discourse and undermining repressive governments.  He asked what the US can do to make the Internet a vehicle for public discourse rather than a tool of government surveillance.

The third panelist was Theresa Harris.  She discussed how private corporations can assist in fostering public discourse and preventing government repression.  Technology companies have largely been using an international trade approach to business, and have shirked their corporate social responsibility.  In the interest of making profits, they are using a “business as usual”/”we’re just following local laws” defense in refusing to confront human rights issues relating to the technologies they produce.  Where companies know that their tools are being used by governments to abuse human rights, they have a duty to be more responsible.  Companies need to adopt a human rights approach.  Implementing corporate social responsibility lies in, among other places, domestic legislation and international treaties.

The final panelist was Eddan Katz.  He brought up Hillary Clinton’s recent speech about Internet freedom.  This speech underscored the salience of this issue in international affairs.  Katz framed the issue of Internet freedom as “preventing disruption of networks.”  Katz noted that anonymity can be problematic but is important for political expression by dissidents and therefore should be defended in many circumstances (there are technologies, like the Tor network, that can defeat Internet surveillance).

An important message in Clinton’s speech was the need for corporate responsibility.  Katz listed numerous examples of US corporations selling surveillance technologies to repressive foreign regimes.  Katz brought up possible approaches to address this issue, including an instrumental approach and a capabilities approach.  Katz cited a good white paper on this subject called “Surveillance Self-Defense International.”

Questions and Answers:

Chander: Suppression in the US (filtering and monitoring, for instance) is not the same as suppression in countries with repressive governments.  The US allows for more open debate.  Katz: There are many similarities between the rhetoric on the war on piracy and the rhetoric on the war on terror.

Q: How can we use new media to push for human rights?  Chander: Search engines such as Google have significant power they can wield to pressure totalitarian regimes to be more liberal. Katz: Disclosing business practices and pushing socially responsible norms can help improve corporate behavior. DeNardis: China’s standards policies are frustrating interoperability.

For twitter commentary on this panel from the audience, check out http://twapperkeeper.com/a2k4/ entries for Friday, February 12 at 16:00h to 17:30h

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As our contemporary information society continues to take hold on the African continent, there is a pressing need to recognize and formalize an “African information ethics”, that is, understanding and applying principles of information ethics (access to knowledge, intellectual property, information literacy, intellectual freedom, privacy) within the unique context of the African information and knowledge society.

This breakout workshop will explore the challenges and opportunities for the establishment of an African information ethics, discussing issues ranging from the incorporation of African philosophy into Western ethical frameworks, the development of information ethics curricula in African universities, and strategies for focusing attention on how the dilemmas triggered by the growing information and knowledge society within Africa impact the continent’s economic, social, and political development.

Panelists included:

Johannes Britz, School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee
Rafael Capurro, International Center for Information Ethics
Dennis Ocholla, University of Zululand
Moderator: Michael Zimmer, School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee

Michael Zimmer starts off by introducing the panelists. He is a former ISP fellow and explains that his background is in ethics and technology, focusing on privacy and several other areas that intersect with a2k.

He explains that the goal of the workshop is exploring how to integrate a2k and information ethics within the African context. Information ethics is a broad term that encompasses information privacy, access to information, and many other principles, and there are specific issues and challenges involved with applying these principles to Africa.

Unfortunately, Steven Mutula was not able to join the panel because of funding and access issues — these issues are part of the challenges facing those who wish to examine information ethics in the African contexts.

Rafael Capurro explains that he is “on his way to becoming an African, but it takes time.” His introduction is based on explaining global information ethics in general. His current research is based on an article that will be published in Ethical Space. The work started with how to get these ethical principles into some type of declaration, based on UNESCO work that began about 10 years ago. Since 2006-7, after WSIS, UNESCO began to promote the idea of a universal ethics declaration for the information society. A variety of regional meetings have been organized, and Capurro’s organization planned the first African regional meeting in 2007, financed by the South African government. This meeting led to the Botswana Tshwane Declaration on Information Ethics in Africa.

This meeting followed a regional meeting in the Dominican Republic in 2006, which also led to a declaration of principles. A separate meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2008 also produced a declaration, as did a meeting in Strassburg, in Europe.

The goal, after these declarations have been produced, was to fuse them into a global declaration on information ethics. He points out that if you compare the separate declarations, there are similarities with principles enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, a deeper analysis reveals different cultural assumptions and the importance of context.

One issue is the importance of privacy. Capurro points out that the Western concept of privacy is completely different than in many Eastern countries. Likewise, behind common technologies, there are often cultural or conceptual differences. For example, the idea of indigenous knowledge, access, multilingualism, etc., may be  much more important in South American countries than in, for example, Spain. Likewise, the value of human autonomy is more pronounced in the Strassburg Declaration, while the Hanoi Declaration mentions “deviant behavior,” a concept that was not developed in other declarations.

He separates the “declaration” from the legal discourse that surrounds it. The discourse is the continuous critique and criticism of the concepts — thus, “ethics” in this context is not a synonym for morality, because that would not allow us to differentiate between the object and the reflections on the object. To show an abstract declaration is not enough, because everyone will interpret it differently. What is needed is an in-depth analysis of the concepts, for deeper reflection and discussion. Currently, his organization is working on setting up a research network in Africa and in other regions for the purpose of creating a discourse on information ethics.

Britz began teaching information ethics in South Africa in 1990. He points out that the field of “information ethics” is very new — first used in 1983. Among his goals is to establish a research community on information ethics in Africa. Things are evolving rapidly in the field, and based on these experiences, he poses a number of problems and challenges:

1. The Palin Problem — she referred to Africa as a country. Africa is so diverse, and it is very difficult to speak of a “unified information ethics” that applies to the whole continent.

2. The Josiah Problem — It’s not who you are, it’s where you’re from. If you are African, and particularly black African, you are at a disadvantage. It is more difficult to travel, given immigration requirements in most non-African countries. It can be difficult for African academics to even get to other places to talk about this idea of information ethics.

3. Brain Drain and Brain Gain — Africans who get Ph.D.s abroad tend not to return. The diaspora is quite broad, and it is a challenge to effectively harness its power. Related to this diaspora is the second challenge: pay-as-you-go. Travel within Africa can be extremely expensive, even when the distances are not great. It is extremely expensive to arrange a conference or other gathering in many African countries. The economic dynamics make African research networks very dependent on sponsorships.

4. How to reflect on African information ethics, in general? Britz believes that religion will play a role. There is a wide variety of religious traditions and philosophical reflects. If you have a country with strong religious traditions, how do you reflect on information ethics problems that may challenge certain aspects of these traditions? It is important not to use purely European-based philosophers to reflect on these ethical issues.

5. The Writing Is on the Wall — There is not a lot published on this topic (African information ethics) — a few years ago, only 11 publications existed. Finding and disseminating these publications is a challenge.

6. Privacy, access, property rights, asymmetric information issues all exist, but it is a different context. In the US it is a problem of plenty; in Africa, it is a problem of poverty. This is reflected in the different understandings of similar problems, such as privacy. For example, in the indigenous world in Africa, there is very little discussion of intellectual property rights. Legislation may be transferred wholesale without adapting it to the unique problems in each country.

7. Electricity — part of the challenge inherent in these question is how to implement connectivity without electricity. But change is coming, and Britz asks an important question: “Do we move because we see the light, or do we move because we feel the heat — is the light the end of the tunnel, or an oncoming train?” It has to do with anticipating change. Africa will soon be swamped with new technology, but it is important to reflect properly on the ethical problems that may accompany these changes.

Dennis Ocholla begins with a story that emphasizes the speed with which things are changing in many places in Africa. He explains that his work has focused on unifying theories and work on information ethics in the African context. He conducted a study on the teaching of ethics in South African and certain other African universities. The study is available online and will soon be published in a form adapted to the US, in order to help the voices it represents reach a US audience.

Like Capurro, he highlights the difference between ethics and morals in this context. Approaches to issues including rights for women, civil rights, and general theories regarding rights and duties, vary greatly. He points out that the issues that are relevant to different groups may be distinct, based on their economic status or background. These issues all present challenges for the teaching of information ethics in Africa. His university study thus focused on case studies from universities with associated libraries in about 12 countries in Africa, to which he added his own knowledge gained through a number of years of direct teaching experience.

Some of the questions posed: Who is teaching information ethics? Why — what are the issues? When? Where is information ethics being taught? How is it being taught? To whom is information ethics being taught? It emerged that information ethics is often taught by people with little to no background in the subject — by people who wish to teach but alight on the subject by chance, without a deep knowledge of the topic.

What do they teach? There was a lot of overlap regarding what was taught in countries and universities across the continent. Other questions were the format of the course — semester, year, etc. Normally, the method used to teach is lectures, although the audience varied from first-year university to much more senior students.

From this initial work, the idea is to bring people back together to further explore the issue of teaching information ethics in African universities.

Discussion and Audience Questions and Answers:

Given that this work is aimed at developing not just a descriptive but a normative framework, what is the overall goal of the academic exercise of creating a normative framework? How does this work have an impact on policy and people’s lives?

Britz: Some aspects of this are descriptive — we do want to understand what is going on. Normatively, we also want to build this new field. However, there are practical effects as well. For example, the e-government and other workshops allowed these challenges to be specifically discussed an applied. One of the main topics of the upcoming Information Society summit in South Africa will be to discuss information ethics.

Capurro: Academic endeavor is often indirectly related to practice. Similarly, in Europe and many countries, there are well-established research groups on information ethics or related topics. They publish papers, and do research at both normative and descriptive level, but may not directly affect what happens in Parliament. Other organizations may be dealing with similar problems but in a political context rather than an academic one. In all cases, translating philosophical research into work that is relevant to a specific political context may be indirect, and while academics can advise, politicians may not have time to take all the advice into account. So some committees simply give policy advice, leading back to the necessity of educating leaders.

Similarly, context matters. The discussions of privacy in Germany and Japan are very different today, in large part because of the German experiences with privacy invasions during WWII. The approach to many topics across countries is similarly varied. It is for this reason that it is so important to have a framework that allows you to understand and approach similar problems in different social, economic, historical, and cultural contexts. There is no singular “ethics.”

However, he points out that even the word “ethics” is Greek, and that behind the word are 2500 years of Western thinking. It is a problem that hasn’t been solved.

If the focus is developing an African ethics based on African values, how do you allow for the existence of very different standards of ethics and standards among African countries? How do you build a common set of principles?

Britz: When they planned an African summit in South Africa, they recognized that they had to invite everyone in Africa. The highest cost of the conference was translators — this symbolizes the very different cultures, contexts, etc. in Africa. He refers back to the Palin Problem. The word Ubuntu in South Africa is not the same as the way it is used in other countries in Africa.

Ocholla: What exactly are the factors that make an African information ethics distinct? The distinction arises from culture, religion, language, colonization, and many other factors. Part of the work must be to demystify these differences.

Ubuntu is systems theory: part is a part of the whole, and the whole cannot function without the parts. This reflects differing values placed on individualism vs. communalism in different countries.

To a large extent, international norms dovetail with what worked in the US and Europe. Thus, political and civil rights are seen as more important — human dignity and autonomy are fundamental, while economic, social and cultural rights do not have the same clout. In what ways do you think that African information ethics can inform and support recognition and policy around economic, social, and cultural rights? Finally, could international consensus be a threat to the recognition of these differing policies?

Britz: The right of access to information is very strong in South Africa, but the evolving digital context also means that the nature of the right has changed. It has become an economic and social right, and needs to be incorporated into the right to participate in social and economic activities. Similarly, the right to indigenous knowledge is a collective right — it was blocked in Parliament because the communal, oral nature of the right was not compatible with individual nature of IP rights in other parts of the world.

Capurro: There is a relation between the ethical, legal, and scientific discourse. Ethicists are problematizing, clarifying, and suggesting possibilities — this is an important framework for the policy discussions, even where the moral responsibility for the decision rests with Parliament or the people. It is also important to consider the difference between “regional” and “national” frameworks and views in the African context.

What does information mean here? This is a departure from the understanding of African identities originally — there has been a disintegration of the post-colonial, nation-based conception of identity. How will this new focus on creating standards based on access to and interaction with information interact with the re-emergence of cultural and ethnic identities? Is the idea of creating common principles too homogenizing, and does it go too far toward suppressing differences not based on nationality?

Ocholla: The concept of place is important — your perception of ethics will be very different based on whether you come from a rural or urban context, as well as your language and many other factors. Islamic information ethics will be different from Christian information ethics. Part of what we need to demystify is what ties it all together.

Britz: There is a movement toward a political unity of Africa (e.g. changing the name of the African Union to United States of Africa). But is the African information ethics unique to African problems? We are exploring these notions because no one else has — what can African philosophers contribute to the debate?

Capurro: There is no such things as German physics, American physics. But ethics is different from the natural sciences — it is part of philosophy and connected to different cultural, historical, and social contexts; how does that make it different? How do we tackle these differences? When you cross from science to society, it is a different arena. How do we address globality without losing diversity?

Do you have any thoughts about how to incentivize more people to go into the field of information ethics in Africa, when economic and other pressures push them into other fields? Relatedly, how do we share the results of this research, when many places may lack the basic (electrical or other) capacity? Are there any non-electricity-based supports for access to this research?

Ocholla: The issue is to use appropriate technology for Africa. New technologies may arise, and there may be new ways to access information and other services. The issue on the ground is to popularize information ethics. We want to explore the effects of these technological, e-government, and other changes in Africa.

For twitter commentary on this panel from the audience, check out http://twapperkeeper.com/a2k4/ entries for Saturday, February 13 at 19:00h to 20:30h.

Back to A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights main page

Organized by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD)

The right to development (RTD), proclaimed in 1986, is “an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.”  It requires the international community to promote fair development policies and effective international cooperation.

The WIPO Development Agenda (DA), adopted in 2007,  is a landmark initiative to ensure that IP rights are addressed within the broader context of economic, social development and the public interest. From this perspective, the implementation of the WIPO DA has enormous potential for advancing the implementation of the  right to development. At the same time, a human rights based approach, exemplified by the right to development, can also positively contribute to the effective implementation of the WIPO DA. However, this interconnection remains relatively unknown. The WIPO DA implementation process is not closely followed by the human rights community and the relevance of the RTD framework is often not well understood in the IP community. How can this gap be bridged?

The aim of the panel is to examine possible linkages and synergies between the WIPO Development Agenda implementation process and the Right to Development in the context of the wider nexus between intellectual property and human rights. Achieving greater coherence between the two requires a sustained effort of dialogue, information and policy analysis and research. The review by the High Level Task Force on the RTD of the WIPO DA within the framework of its work plan for 2008-2010 could provide a valuable opportunity for this purpose.

Right to Development workshop from Jason Eiseman on Vimeo.

Ahmed Abdel Latif, International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development

James Love, Knowledge Ecology International

Violette Ruppanner, 3D -> Trade, Human Rights, Equitable Economy

Moderator: Kaitlin Mara, Intellectual Property Watch

Kaitlin Mara opened by framing today’s panel in the context of new initiatives in Geneva to start a dialogue not about violations of IP laws, but about the possibility for sharing access to knowledge and improving access around the globe. The purpose of the workshop is to talk about how theories of the right to development can be used to allow for new policies in IP.

Ahmed Abdel Latif was up first. He began by talking about the background of this panel. He felt that the conference needed a panel on the right to development. He thinks the recent movement of this right has been important in IP and thus needs more discussing.

What is the Right to Development (RTD)? It was promoted by developing countries – it isn’t in the UDHR or any covenants. It emerged by developing countries that wanted a development friendly norm in international interactions and relations. Their argument was that the individual fulfillment of rights isn’t enough to capture the evolution towards development. Development should be the ultimate goal of human rights. It was in 1986 that the UN General Assembly declared the RTD. There is now an annual report on the right to development.

In 1998 a working group was established on the RTD, but there was a polarized discussion on the RTD: the US was not on board with this right, the EU believed that human rights were the way to achieve this right, and the developing world wanted an international instrument to point to for this right or a binding norm. In 2004, the chair of the Working Group, wanted to operationalize the right to development. He decided to establish a high level ask force of five experts to look at how to practically operationalize the RTD.  Note that by 2005, the Millennium Development Goals had been adopted. Goal 8 related to development. The High Level Task Force was asked to look more specifically at this goal 8 – the RTD. The High Level Task Force is now talking about the implementation of the RTD. They have goals like promoting access to the benefits of science and technology.

Read the Declaration on the Right to Development

Violette was up next and thanked people for “hanging in there” on the day before Valentine’s Day. Today she will be talking about the Right to Food. A High Level Task Force member has said that the Development Agenda really presents the best opportunity for promoting the right to development. It is a breakthrough for bringing the RTD into the realm of technology.

The Right to Adequate Food is mentioned in a lot of different international conventions. Most generally it is in Article 25 of the UDHR and under Article 11 of the ICESCR.  What is the Right to Food? UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Shutter, says that the Right to Food is not about being fed, but about being able to feed oneself. Food must be accessible – each family must be able to produce food or be able to buy it. So how does this relate to IP? It can change policies on protection of plant varieties, it can help promote government accountability, it can change the possibilities for achieving policies, it can change the way technical assistance is given etc.  WIPO can play an important role in encouraging the interaction of IP policy into strategies for achieving the Right to Food.

Jamie Love was up last. Jamie started by saying he was contacted last year by the High Level Task Force to look into the RTD and health. He wrote a report on his findings. The RTD is a meta-right – it is an obligation on everyone, not just governments, to work towards the realization of all these other rights.

He raised several issues related to the Global Fund and the TDR. He wrote about the role of the Gates Foundation as a none-state actor on the RTD. He notes that the Foundation didn’t deal with IP issues, yet wanted sustainable solutions related to their health programs. They are a great NGO – but there are things that they aren’t really ‘stepping up’ on. He made 15 recommendations related to the importance of including IP policies in achieving sustainable development. He believed they should look at patents, and that they should partake in other UN initiatives such as the WIPO development agenda.

Question Period

What are the criteria for achieving the R2D and how do we measure the success of the agenda? How does the WIPO Development Agenda’s success compare to the MDG? Ahmed doesn’t think there is a proper index yet. He spoke about how the criteria of the Agenda took many years to articulate and agree on. But applying them might miss certain aspects.

What are the pros and cons of using R2D as opposed to individual rights? Is the R2D an alternative to individual rights (right to food, health, housing etc.)? Violette says the R2D encompasses all other rights – it is the same but it is expressed differently. Ahmed says it also adds because it encourages the entire international community to make policies that are development friendly. But how do you do that? Well that is hard – but this is an important global tool that doesn’t replace individual rights but it gives a meta-dimension. Jamie says the interesting thing about the R2D is it obliges countries and governments to work together to achieve development outcomes.

For twitter commentary on this panel from the audience, check out http://twapperkeeper.com/a2k4/ entries for Saturday, February 13 at 19:00h to 20:30h.

Back to A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights main page