Monday, September 27, 2021
United Nations Special Political Missions and Protection: A Principled Approach for Research and Policymaking
United Nations Special Political Missions and Protection: A Principled Approach for Research and Policymaking https://www.ipinst.org/2021/09/un-special-political-missions-and-protection#6
On September 14th, IPI together with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs cohosted a policy forum on “United Nations Special Political Missions (SPMs) and Protection: A Principled Approach for Research and Policymaking.” The session provided an opportunity to present and discuss IPI’s new policy paper that considers the need for increased analysis and operational roles of UN special political missions (SPMs) in protection.
SPMs regularly operate in conflict and post-conflict settings in which local civilian populations face the ongoing threat of armed violence. Despite this trend, understandings of the roles of SPMs in protection have remained ambiguous, leaving a conceptual and operational gap that deserves greater attention. As it looks ahead to articulate and implement a system-wide agenda for protection the Secretariat has an opportunity to articulate a more explicit and structured vision for the role of SPMs in protection.
This policy forum gathered representatives of the UN Secretariat and field missions, member states, and civil society to reflect on concepts, good practices, dilemmas, and lessons learned on protection in SPMs. Participants discussed how the UN could strengthen guidance and articulate a more explicit and structured vision on the protection roles of SPMs. The panel built upon the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs’ (DPPA) experience in field missions and consider how the role of DPPA and SPMs in protection relates to other conceptions of protection in the UN system.
Opening Remarks:
H.E. Ms. Yoka Brandt, Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the UN
Speakers:
Mr. Dirk Druet, IPI Non-resident Fellow and Affiliate Researcher at the Max Bell School for Public Policy at McGill University
Ms. Teresa Whitfield, Director, Policy and Mediation Division, UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs
Ms. Danielle Bell, Representative, OHCHR, and Chief, Human Rights Office, UN Assistance Mission for Iraq
Mr. Raúl Rosende, Verification Director, UN Verification Mission in Colombia
Moderator:
Dr. Adam Lupel, IPI Vice President and COO
It's bizarre we're at a point where reports are written on how human rights trump AI rights But that's what UN group has done
FULL ARTICLE : https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/16/human_rights_ai/
It's bizarre we're at a point where reports are written on how human rights trump AI rights
But that's what UN group has done
The protection of human rights should be front and centre of any decision to implement AI-based systems regardless of whether they're used as corporate tools such as recruitment or in areas such as law enforcement.
And unless sufficient safeguards are in place to protect human rights, there should be a moratorium on the sale of AI systems and those that fail to meet international human rights laws should be banned.
Those are just some of the conclusions from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC) in a report for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet.
"The right to privacy in the digital age" [download] takes a close look at how AI – including profiling, automated decision-making, and other machine-learning technologies – affects people's rights.
While the report acknowledges that AI "can be a force for good," it also highlights serious concerns around how data is stored, what it's used for, and how it might be misused.
"AI technologies can have negative, even catastrophic, effects if they are used without sufficient regard to how they affect people's human rights," Bachelet said in a statement.
"Given the rapid and continuous growth of AI, filling the immense accountability gap in how data is collected, stored, shared and used is one of the most urgent human rights questions we face."
The report is critical of the way governments and businesses have "often rushed to incorporate AI applications, failing to carry out due diligence," citing "numerous cases of people being treated unjustly because of AI" including being arrested due to "flawed facial recognition."
In July, the US House Committee on the Judiciary heard how facial recognition technology (FRT) is being used by law enforcement agencies in America. The hearing called on testimony from all sides of the debate as legislators seek to balance the benefits of FRT against issues such as the right to personal privacy and wrongful identification.
But it was the personal testimony of Robert Williams – who was wrongly identified, arrested, and detained all because of a "blurry, shadowy image" – that brought the debate into sharp focus.
Indeed, the issue of how AI is used in law enforcement and the criminal justice system has also been keeping the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee in the UK busy over the summer.
Most recently, Professor Elizabeth E Joh, of the UC Davis School of Law, told the committee that there are concerns over some predictive policing tools.
- If it were possible to evade facial-recognition systems using just subtle makeup, it might look something like this
- Right to contest automated AI decision under review as part of UK government data protection consultation
- Academics tell UK lords that folk aren't keen on predictive policing, facial recognition, heightened surveillance
- Facebook apologises after its AI system branded Black people as primates
In some cases, Joh explained, there have been calls for technologies such as facial recognition to be banned but that attempts to do so have been "piecemeal" and not on a national scale. And with respect to some predictive policing tools, she suggested they "may not be as reliable or as effective as promised."
It's a point picked up by the HRC report, which flagged that some predictive tools "carry an inherent risk of perpetuating or even enhancing discrimination, reflecting embedded historic racial and ethnic bias in the data sets used, such as a disproportionate focus of policing of certain minorities."
The report recommends calls for human rights to be centre stage in the "development, use and governance of AI as a central objective."
It also calls for a ban on "AI applications that cannot be operated in compliance with international human rights law and impose moratoriums on the sale and use of AI systems that carry a high risk for the enjoyment of human rights, unless and until adequate safeguards to protect human rights are in place."
Bachelet said: "We cannot afford to continue playing catch-up regarding AI – allowing its use with limited or no boundaries or oversight, and dealing with the almost inevitable human rights consequences after the fact. Action is needed now to put human rights guardrails on the use of AI, for the good of all of us."
Asked to comment on the HRC report, the UK Home Office declined to be drawn on the specifics but instead insisted that, when it comes to issues such as facial recognition, policy is free to change and that it is keen to ensure a "consistent approach is taken nationwide."
It pointed to last year's ruling by the Court of Appeal, which found that South Wales Police broke the law with an indiscriminate deployment of its automated facial-recognition technology in Cardiff city centre between December 2017 and March 2018.
As a result, the Home Office is updating its Surveillance Camera Code to reflect the judgment before facing Parliamentary scrutiny.
A Home Office spokesperson told us: "This government is delivering on a manifesto commitment to empower the police to use new technologies, like facial recognition to help identify and find suspects, to protect the public.
"There is a robust legal framework for the use of such technology, in keeping with last year's Court of Appeal ruling. The independent College of Policing has been consulting extensively on national guidance to ensure a consistent approach is taken nationwide."
No one from the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee was available to comment at the time of writing. ®
This report analyses the functioning and financing of the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council;
The Financing of UN Experts
This report analyses the functioning and financing of the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council; it reveals the insufficiency and opacity of their funding and exposes the methods implemented by some private funders to influence these experts. It also presents recommendations to restore the conditions that would better ensure their independence.
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SEE REPORT https://static.eclj.org/pdf/ECLJ%20Report%20-%20THE%20FINANCING%20OF%20UN%20EXPERTS.pdf?
https://static.eclj.org/pdf/ECLJ%20Report%20-%20THE%20FINANCING%20OF%20UN%20EXPERTS.pdf?
Angela's Ashes September 27, 2021 Diane Francis
Angela's Ashes September 27, 2021 Diane Francis 14 hr ago 15 3 Much depends globally on Germany and who will replace Angela Merkel as Chancellor. It appears that three political parties will be required to form a coalition, a process that will take two or three months. During this time the country will be in limbo and it may be Christmas before the next leader of the Federal Republic of Germany is chosen. For 16 years, Merkel has been Europe’s most dominant figure and Germany remains the continent’s economic powerhouse, generating one-fifth of its total GDP. She has been lionized as a leader devoted to cohesion, prosperity, and consensus-building. But Germans have a different view. Her party struggled in this election and she has left behind a mess for Europeans to deal with due to one reason: Her inexplicable capitulation to Vladimir Putin for years. Merkel’s first major blunder was the unilateral decision to take in one million Syrian refugees, thus opening up a floodgate of millions more who illegally invaded Germany’s neighbors and causing massive social, economic, and political dislocation and damage. This tsunami was due in large measure to Russia’s support for the Butcher of Damascus, but no condemnations or severe sanctions were directed at the Kremlin or Putin from Berlin. Likewise, no commensurate denunciations or punishments were leveled against Putin following the evacuation to Germany from Russia of Alexei Navalny where it was determined that he had been poisoned. For years, she has unflaggingly supported Putin’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline bringing Russian natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing Ukraine. It was obviously a weapon posing as a piece of infrastructure, but has been finished and awaits commissioning by regulators in Germany. But its existence has already plunged the European Union, NATO, and the United States into a crisis that threatens the survival of Europe’s geographically largest nation, Ukraine, if not the European Union itself. Her complicity with the Butcher of Moscow is strange in a country as guilt-ridden as Germany and given the fact that the greatest tragedy in world history occurred in 1939 when a Russian and German leader collaborated to commandeer the countries between them. For these and other reasons, their coupling has always been very odd – the unflappable German frau and a charmless and ruthless KGB agent with a nuclear arsenal. Putin’s pair of “captive” German Chancellors Merkel and Gerhard Schroder Of course, there are commonalities. Putin speaks flawless German and both lived most of their lives under Soviet domination. But Merkel was also outflanked by Putin who co-opted her arch-rival, former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, with gobs of cash, titles, and positions. Schroder heads the Nord Stream 2 pipeline scheme, was a director of Russia’s Gazprom, and is now Chair of its oil giant, Rosneft. He’s become very wealthy and, according to Navalny, is Putin’s “errand boy”. Merkel’s pipeline support flouted Brussels, where 26 members voted to stop the pipeline, then led her to squander Germany’s political capital in Washington where she convinced President Joe Biden to waive Congressional sanctions that would have stopped the project. By so doing, she also ignored the U.S. Congress which wanted it stopped, NATO objections, security red flags, EU anti-trust laws which forbid the pipeline to be owned by Russia, and most of all, Putin’s mobilization of troops around Ukraine and published intention to grab the 93 percent of Ukraine he failed to conquer in 2014. Merkel’s submissiveness to Putin has enabled him to outplay everyone in his geopolitical chess game, placing the West “in zugzwang” which is a German word used by chess masters that describes when an opponent cannot make any move without worsening his or her situation. That’s the state of play right now. The next de facto leader of Europe, a new Chancellor of Germany, won’t be named until winter sets in, making Europe desperate for Russian natural gas. In anticipation of this, Putin throttled back on gas supplies months ago to jam up prices and drive down the volume of gas in storage in order to put pressure on Germans to hook up the pipeline, which is now facing court battles in Germany. Furthermore, Ukraine has become Putin’s de facto hostage because Merkel has objected to Ukraine’s entry into NATO, despite its valiant and costly eight-year-old war against Russia on Europe’s easternmost flank. Putin has ignored demands by the U.S. to withdraw forces surrounding Ukraine. And Germany’s promise to the United States that it will prevent Russia from weaponizing gas, given that Moscow is doing this already, would be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody tragic. Germany’s armed forces, constitutionally, are nothing more than a domestic police force. This is the ultimate “zugzwang”: Stopping Nord Stream 2 spells disaster for Europe because Russia will cut back supplies even more. Commissioning Nord Stream 2 will allow Russia to invade Ukraine again because its pipelines won’t be needed to deliver Russian gas to Europe. Strategically, Europe is damned if it stops Nord Stream 2 and damned if it doesn’t. Finally, to top it all off, from the predator’s viewpoint, Germany’s next coalition of three parties guarantees its government will be as dysfunctional and divided as is the European Union’s. Emmanuel Macron, the French President with a powerful military, would love to fill Merkel’s shoes, and frankly, his belief that Europe must spend more on its own defense and be less dependent on the United States is a good idea. But this is not popular in Germany where military spending is miserly and its constitution forbids its armed forces from crossing its borders. So the likely successor, as Chancellor and putative head of Europe, will be the head of Schroder’s socialist party which supports Nord Stream 2 and will alienate all the EU members who were once Soviet satellites. An Italian official recently described his country’s European dilemma: “we’re closer to Germany than to France, but without all the ambiguities on Russia and China.” By “ambiguities” he meant Merkel’s excessive coziness with Putin as well as the reality that half of Europe’s trade with China involves Germany. Fortunately, there are remedies, especially if the Biden Administration realizes it made a mistake in waiving Nord Stream 2 sanctions and in stiff-arming Ukraine from NATO membership. And in the meantime, Ukraine is undertaking sweeping anti-corruption measures to please the U.S. and has enacted civil defense measures and more conscription to repel another attack. Congress, upset at Biden over the pipeline, just resurrected new pipeline sanctions, Turkey and Israel have signed defense agreements with Ukraine, a British warship plies the Black Sea, and America announced new weapons for Ukraine plus a commitment to conduct joint military exercises with Ukraine’s armed forces. But nothing short of a climbdown by Berlin and Washington from past decisions will stop a potential trainwreck in Europe. Angela Merkel’s acquiescence to Vladimir Putin has left the continent and its relationship with the United States weakened and, despite all the good work she performed, permanently tarnishes her legacy. https://dianefrancis.substack.com/p/angelas-ashes?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNDQ4MjI4NywicG9zdF9pZCI6NDE4MDc0NDYsIl8iOiJhVGd6UCIsImlhdCI6MTYzMjc5OTUyNSwiZXhwIjoxNjMyODAzMTI1LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjU3NTQ2Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.bW-n6WaoMMd5uJwxjGYd7ElnwttrAArDsHFbeh34S1o
Thursday, September 16, 2021
"The right to privacy in the digital age" How human rights trump AI rights But that's what UN group has done
Bloggers note : DO download the report...
"The right to privacy in the digital age" [download] takes a close look at how AI – including profiling, automated decision-making, and other machine-learning technologies – affects people's rights.
The protection of human rights should be front and centre of any decision to implement AI-based systems regardless of whether they're used as corporate tools such as recruitment or in areas such as law enforcement.
And unless sufficient safeguards are in place to protect human rights, there should be a moratorium on the sale of AI systems and those that fail to meet international human rights laws should be banned.
Those are just some of the conclusions from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC) in a report for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet.
"The right to privacy in the digital age" [download] takes a close look at how AI – including profiling, automated decision-making, and other machine-learning technologies – affects people's rights.
While the report acknowledges that AI "can be a force for good," it also highlights serious concerns around how data is stored, what it's used for, and how it might be misused.
"AI technologies can have negative, even catastrophic, effects if they are used without sufficient regard to how they affect people's human rights," Bachelet said in a statement.
"Given the rapid and continuous growth of AI, filling the immense accountability gap in how data is collected, stored, shared and used is one of the most urgent human rights questions we face."
The report is critical of the way governments and businesses have "often rushed to incorporate AI applications, failing to carry out due diligence," citing "numerous cases of people being treated unjustly because of AI" including being arrested due to "flawed facial recognition."
In July, the US House Committee on the Judiciary heard how facial recognition technology (FRT) is being used by law enforcement agencies in America. The hearing called on testimony from all sides of the debate as legislators seek to balance the benefits of FRT against issues such as the right to personal privacy and wrongful identification.
But it was the personal testimony of Robert Williams – who was wrongly identified, arrested, and detained all because of a "blurry, shadowy image" – that brought the debate into sharp focus.
Indeed, the issue of how AI is used in law enforcement and the criminal justice system has also been keeping the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee in the UK busy over the summer.
Most recently, Professor Elizabeth E Joh, of the UC Davis School of Law, told the committee that there are concerns over some predictive policing tools.
- If it were possible to evade facial-recognition systems using just subtle makeup, it might look something like this
- Right to contest automated AI decision under review as part of UK government data protection consultation
- Academics tell UK lords that folk aren't keen on predictive policing, facial recognition, heightened surveillance
- Facebook apologises after its AI system branded Black people as primates
In some cases, Joh explained, there have been calls for technologies such as facial recognition to be banned but that attempts to do so have been "piecemeal" and not on a national scale. And with respect to some predictive policing tools, she suggested they "may not be as reliable or as effective as promised."
It's a point picked up by the HRC report, which flagged that some predictive tools "carry an inherent risk of perpetuating or even enhancing discrimination, reflecting embedded historic racial and ethnic bias in the data sets used, such as a disproportionate focus of policing of certain minorities."
The report recommends calls for human rights to be centre stage in the "development, use and governance of AI as a central objective."
It also calls for a ban on "AI applications that cannot be operated in compliance with international human rights law and impose moratoriums on the sale and use of AI systems that carry a high risk for the enjoyment of human rights, unless and until adequate safeguards to protect human rights are in place."
Bachelet said: "We cannot afford to continue playing catch-up regarding AI – allowing its use with limited or no boundaries or oversight, and dealing with the almost inevitable human rights consequences after the fact. Action is needed now to put human rights guardrails on the use of AI, for the good of all of us."
Asked to comment on the HRC report, the UK Home Office declined to be drawn on the specifics but instead insisted that, when it comes to issues such as facial recognition, policy is free to change and that it is keen to ensure a "consistent approach is taken nationwide."
It pointed to last year's ruling by the Court of Appeal, which found that South Wales Police broke the law with an indiscriminate deployment of its automated facial-recognition technology in Cardiff city centre between December 2017 and March 2018.
As a result, the Home Office is updating its Surveillance Camera Code to reflect the judgment before facing Parliamentary scrutiny.
A Home Office spokesperson told us: "This government is delivering on a manifesto commitment to empower the police to use new technologies, like facial recognition to help identify and find suspects, to protect the public.
"There is a robust legal framework for the use of such technology, in keeping with last year's Court of Appeal ruling. The independent College of Policing has been consulting extensively on national guidance to ensure a consistent approach is taken nationwide."
No one from the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee was available to comment at the time of writing.