Seizing the opportunity to improve Uganda’s national digital ID system

TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Seizing the opportunity to improve Uganda’s national digital ID system

In 2014, Uganda introduced its first national digital ID system. Now, a decade later, as millions of ID cards are set to expire, the Government is planning a significant upgrade of the system and will soon begin a mass enrollment exercise to register all unregistered Ugandans. Given that many exclusions and harms have arisen from the current digital ID system, the Government’s plans to roll out a new system represent a key opportunity to learn from past experiences and ensure that the new system is more inclusive, equitable, and privacy-protecting.

In this document, we raise 5 urgent recommendations that the Government must adopt to put Uganda on the path towards a digital ID system that centers inclusion, equity, privacy, transparency, and accountability. Drawing on research and lessons learned from Uganda’s existing national digital ID system, as well as incorporating lessons from other countries’ experiences and from international best practices, we recommend that the Government should:

  • Improve communication and transparency about plans for the new digital ID;
  • Proactively facilitate participation, particularly of vulnerable communities and of civil society organizations, in policy and design choices;
  • Conduct a comprehensive Human Rights Impact Assessment to identify risks arising from the ID system and the registration process;
  • Take steps to ensure that marginalized and vulnerable groups are proactively included in enrollment and renewal processes;
  • Put in place concrete plans for a transition period to ensure that no rights are violated as the Government works to introduce new digital components

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list but instead focuses on short-term, actionable recommendations that will help concretely improve the Government’s approach in the immediate term and avoid further entrenching the well-documented problems and weaknesses that have affected the current system.

July 25, 2024. 

New Casebook—International Human Rights by P. Alston available in an Open Access Publication

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

New Casebook—International Human Rights by P. Alston available in an Open Access Publication

Philip Alston’s International Human Rights textbook is now available free of charge in a comprehensively revised edition and on an Open Access basis starting July 8, 2024.

This book examines the world of contemporary human rights, including legal norms, political contexts and moral ideals. It acknowledges the regime’s strengths and weaknesses, and focuses on today’s principal challenges. These include the struggles against resurgent racism and anti-gender ideology, the implications of new technologies for fact-finding and many other parts of the regime, the continuing marginality of economic, social and cultural rights, radical inequality, climate change, and the evermore central role of the private sector.

The boundaries of the subject have steadily expanded as the post-World War II regime has become an indelible part of the legal, political and moral landscape. Given the breadth and complexity of the regime, the book takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach.

imaginative and stimulating materials with thought-provoking commentary… a wonderful teaching tool, as well as a valuable starting point for research.

Judge Hilary Charlesworth, Judge of the International Court of Justice.

Features include:

  • A focus on current issues such as new technologies, climate change, counter-terrorism, reparations, sanctions, and universal jurisdiction;
  • Expanded focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and other forms of discrimination and the backlash against efforts to combat them;
  • Introductory chapters that provide the necessary overview of international law;
  • An interdisciplinary approach that puts human rights issues into their broader political, economic, and cultural contexts;
  • Diverse and critical perspectives dealt with throughout;
  • Sections dealing with political economy of human rights and the challenge of growing inequality;
  • Issues of international humanitarian law are widely reflected; and
  • Focus on current situations in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, Venezuela, and others

Major themes that run through the book include the colonial and imperial objectives often pursued in the name of human rights, evolving notions of autonomy and sovereignty, the changing configuration of the public-private divide in human rights ordering, the escalating tensions between international human rights and national security, and the striking evolution of ideas about the nature and purposes of the regime itself.

This book is a successor to previous volumes entitled International Human Rights in Context (1996, 2000 and 2008, all co-authored with Henry Steiner and in 2008 also with Ryan Goodman) and International Human Rights: Text and Materials (2013, co-authored with Ryan Goodman). “All four volumes were published by Oxford University Press, and I am grateful to them for reverting all rights to the author in order to enable this Open Access publication” says Alston. 

The 2024 comprehensively revised edition will be available free of charge and can be downloaded in either a single pdf file for the entire book or separate files for each of the eighteen chapters.

Recommendations to Funders to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Human Rights Field

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Recommendations to Funders to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Human Rights Field 

Improving and maintaining well-being is essential to individual health, to organizational functioning, and to the sustainability and effectiveness of the human rights field as a whole. There are many concrete, immediately actionable reforms that are achievable in the near-term and which address a variety of causes of distress, or which can support efforts to transform the field over the long term. Such steps should be taken while the human rights field works toward deep transformation. 

Human rights advocacy can be a source of significant joy, purpose, political agency, belonging, and community. Yet advocates can also experience harms, and trauma in their efforts to advance justice and equality, including those caused by heavy workloads, time pressures, discrimination and bullying in the workplace, vicarious exposure to trauma and human rights abuse, and direct experience of threats and attacks. Advocates can experience suffering, sometimes very severe, as a result, including demotivation, alienation, anxiety, fear, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. How advocates experience their work and any resulting harms can vary widely, and may be highly contextual and culturally specific.

Improving and maintaining well-being is essential to individual health, to organizational functioning, and to the sustainability and effectiveness of the human rights field as a whole. 

Positively transforming mental health and well-being in the human rights field will require significant reforms and both structural changes and close attention to the contextually-specific needs of individual advocates and organizations. The causes and dynamics at play are complex, and there are no quick fixes that can address the cultural shifts required. As efforts are taken to improve well-being, it is important that the field avoids tick-the-box or commodified approaches. Improving the wellbeing of human rights advocates requires a holistic response and a movement-wide prioritization of well-being, with careful attention to context, culture, and the diverse needs of advocates and organizations.  

Recognition of the deeply-rooted problems requiring radical change or of the complexities of the issues and the difficulty of defining a clear set of recommendations applicable across the board should not operate as an excuse to take no action now to improve well-being. There are many concrete, immediately actionable reforms that are achievable in the near-term and which address a variety of causes of distress, or which can support efforts to transform the field over the long term. Such steps should be taken while the human rights field works toward deep transformation. Some of these steps include the following recommended actions, which are drawn from our research with advocates around the world.

Carbon Markets, Forests and Rights: An Introductory Series for Indigenous Peoples

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT

Carbon Markets, Forests and Rights

An Introductory Series for Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples are experiencing a rush of interest in their lands and territories from actors involved in carbon markets. Many indigenous communities have expressed that to make informed decisions about how to engage with carbon markets, they need accessible information about what these markets are, and how participating in them may affect their rights.

In response to this demand for information, the Global Justice Clinic and the Forest Peoples Programme have developed a series of introductory materials about carbon markets. The materials were initially developed for GJC partner the South Rupununi District Council in Guyana and have been adapted for a global audience.

The explainer materials can be read in any order:

  • Explainer 1 introduces key concepts that are essential background to understanding carbon markets. It introduces what climate change is, what the carbon cycle and carbon dioxide is, and the link between carbon dioxide, forests and climate change. 
  • Explainer 2 outlines what carbon markets and carbon credits are, and provides a brief introduction to why these markets are developing and how they function
  • Explainer 3 focuses on indigenous peoples’ rights and carbon markets. It highlights some of the particular risks that carbon markets pose to indigenous peoples and communities. It also highlights key questions communities should ask themselves as they consider how to engage with or respond to carbon markets
  • Explainer 4 provides an overview of the key environmental critiques and concerns around carbon markets
  • Explainer 5 provides a short introduction to ART-TREES. ART-TRESS is an institution and standard that is involved in ‘certifying’ carbon credits and that is gaining a lot of attention internationally.

The Time is Now: Mexico Must Grant Haitians Refugee Protections under the Cartagena Declaration

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The Time is Now: Mexico Must Grant Haitians Refugee Protections under the Cartagena

This report published by Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova A.C. and the Global Justice Clinic shows why Mexico–and, by extension, all countries that have signed the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees–must grant Haitians refugee status. 

Haitians living outside of Haiti often lack access to basic human rights, face anti-Black discrimination, and in many countries, live under the threat of being sent back to Haiti. Pathways to legal status in other countries are essential for Haitians seeking safety, but governments rarely grant legal status to Haitians and, when they do, protections are often temporary.

Mexico is one of the many countries that Haitian people have migrated to in the past decade. Tens of thousands of Haitians enter Mexico every year. Mexico has incorporated the Cartagena Declaration–which provides a broader definition of “refugee” than the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1966 Protocol–into its domestic law, legally binding it to grant refugee status to people who, based on an objective analysis of the circumstances in their country of origin, meet the elements of the declaration. This report establishes how three of the Declaration’s elements–generalized violence, massive violations of human rights, and other circumstances that seriously disturb public order–are pervasive in Haiti.

  • The Global Justice Clinic and Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova A.C. launched the report in Mexico City in late April 2024, and met with representatives of Mexican government agencies, including the Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance) and the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Secretariat of Foreign Affairs) to urge them to apply the Cartagena Declaration to Haitian nationals.

Contesting the Foundations of Digital Public Infrastructure

TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Contesting the Foundations of Digital Public Infrastructure

What Digital ID Litigation Can Tell Us About the Future of Digital Government and Society

Many governments and international organizations have embraced the transformative potential of ‘digital public infrastructure’—a concept that refers to large-scale digital platforms run by or supported by governments, such as digital ID, digital payments, or data exchange platforms. However, many of these platforms remain heavily contested, and recent legal challenges in several countries have vividly demonstrated some of the risks and limitations of existing approaches.

In this short explainer, we discuss four case studies from Uganda, Mexico, Kenya, and Serbia, in which civil society organizations have brought legal challenges to contest initiatives to build digital public infrastructure. What connects the experiences in these countries is that efforts to introduce new national-scale digital platforms have had harmful impacts on the human rights of marginalized groups—impacts that, the litigants argue, were disregarded as governments rolled out these digital infrastructures, and which are wholly disproportionate to the purported benefits that these digital systems are supposed to bring.

These four examples therefore hold important lessons for policymakers, highlighting the urgent need for effective safeguards, mitigations, and remedies as the development and implementation of digital public infrastructure continues to accelerate.

The explainer document builds upon discussions we had during an event we hosted, entitled “Contesting the Foundations of Digital Public Infrastructure: What Digital ID Litigation Can Tell Us About the Future of Digital Government and Society,” where we brought together the civil society actors who have been litigating these four different cases.

August 28, 2023. Katelyn Cioffi, Victoria Adelmant, Danilo Ćurčić, Brian Kiira, Grecia Macías, and Yasah Musa

Shaping Digital Identity Standards: An Explainer and Recommendations on Technical Standard-Setting for Digital Identity Systems.

TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Shaping Digital Identity Standards

An Explainer and Recommendations on Technical Standard-Setting for Digital Identity Systems.

In April 2023, we submitted comments to the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to contribute to its Guidelines on Digital Identity. Given that the NIST guidelines are very technical — the Guidelines are written for a specialist audience — we published this short “explainer” document with the hope of providing a resource to empower other civil society organizations and public interest lawyers, to engage with technical standards-setting bodies to raise human rights concerns related to digitalization in the future. This document therefore sets out the importance of standards bodies, provides an accessible “explainer” on the Digital Identity Guidelines, and summarizes our comments and recommendations.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is a prominent and powerful standards body. Its standards are influential, shaping the design of digital systems in the United States and elsewhere. Over the past few years, NIST has been in the process of creating and updating a set of official Guidelines on Digital Identity, which “present the process and technical requirements for meeting digital identity management assurance levels … including requirements for security and privacy as well as considerations for fostering equity and the usability of digital identity solutions and technology.”

The primary audiences for the Guidelines are IT professionals and senior administrators in U.S. federal agencies that utilize, maintain, or develop digital identity technologies to advance their mission. The Guidelines fall under a wider NIST initiative to design a Roadmap on Identity Access and Management that explores topics like accelerating adoption of mobile drivers licenses, expanding biometric measurement programs, promoting interoperability, and modernizing identity management for U.S. federal government employees and contractors.

This technical guidance is particularly influential, as it shapes decision-making surrounding the design and architecture of digital identity systems. Biometrics and identity and security companies frequently cite their compliance with NIST standards to promote their technology and to convince governments to purchase their hardware and software products to build digital identity systems. Other technical standards bodies look to NIST and cite NIST standards. These technical guidelines thus have a great deal of influence well beyond the United States, affecting what is deemed acceptable or not within digital identity systems, such as how and when biometrics can be used. . 

Such technical standards are therefore of vital relevance to all those who are working on digital identity. In particular, these standards warrant the attention of civil society organizations and groups who are concerned with the ways in which digital identity systems have been associated with discrimination, denial of services, violations of privacy and data protection, surveillance, and other human rights violations. Through this explainer, we hope to provide a resource that can be helpful to such organizations, enabling and encouraging them to contribute to technical standard-setting processes in the future and to bring human rights considerations and recommendations into the standards that shape the design of digital systems. 

Fair Pay for Public Defenders: If Mongolia Can Do It, Any Country Can

HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Fair Pay for Public Defenders: If Mongolia can do it, any country can

On the first day of 2023, Mongolia’s public defenders received a 300% pay raise. A new law took effect on January 1st that ties the compensation of publicly funded defense attorneys to their courtroom counterparts, prosecutors. Although Mongolia ranks among the world’s poorest countries, it has achieved something that many of the world’s wealthiest states have failed to: pay equity between public defenders and public prosecutors.

Oyunchimeg Ayush (wearing blue in the photo), then the head of the Mongolian state agency responsible for public defense.

A central tenet of adversarial legal systems is that justice is best served when opposing sides are fairly matched. As the European Court of Human Rights put it, “[i]t is a fundamental aspect of the right to a fair trial that criminal proceedings…should be adversarial and that there should be equality of arms between the prosecution and defence.” Similarly, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights says that public defenders should be empowered to act “on equal terms with the prosecution.”

If the goal is a fair fight in the courtroom, it seems obvious that paying public defenders just a third of what prosecutors make would detract from that goal. Yet around the world, such pay disparities are commonplace, a phenomenon I saw firsthand as Global Policy Director for the International Legal Foundation, an NGO that builds public defender systems across the globe.

One reason for this disparity is that most domestic constitutions are silent on this issue. And even in the realm of international law, where the “equality of arms” principle is a well-established component of the bedrock international instrument on fair trial rights, courts have not interpreted this to require “material equality” between prosecution and defense. For example, this ICTR case found no fault with the fact that the prosecution’s team comprised 35 investigators deployed for several years, while the defense team had just two investigators paid to work for a few months. 

Instead, equality of arms is mainly conceived of in procedural terms, such as this HRC case where the court’s failure to allow defense counsel to cross-examine the victim was found to violate the principle. As applied to resources, equality of arms requires only that the resources available to the accused are “adequate” to present a full defense (as the Caribbean Court of Justice points out in §33).

Absent promising legal grounds, the battle for pay parity must be fought in the political arena. But there are major challenges here, too, mainly that elected officials are not usually keen on funding services for people accused of heinous crimes. Public defenders around the world have had to embrace vigorous strategies to compel political action, such as labor strikes and joining forces with prosecutors.

So how did Mongolia do it? Dedicated advocacy by a committed public official.

Oyunchimeg Ayush (wearing blue in the photo to the right), then the head of the state agency responsible for public defense, had grown tired of trying to recruit and retain qualified attorneys on salaries 70-80% lower than prosecutors and judges. She saw the unequal pay not only as unfair but as inefficient: high turnover increased recruitment and training costs and yielded a less-experienced workforce.

So, she started making her case for equal pay. She met with legislators, justice system stakeholders, and cabinet ministers, where she found a key ally in Khishgeegiin Nyambaatar, the Minister of Justice and Home Affairs. She also reached out to the ILF to ask for research on pay parity and examples of other jurisdictions who had achieved it. We pointed her to Argentina, which passed a parity law in 2015, and to the American state of Connecticut, which has had a parity law for 30 years and has been recognized for excellence. This partnership between local and international actors echoes the ongoing debate among human rights scholars like Gráinne de Búrca, Margaret Keck, Kathryn Sikkink and others about how human rights reform is actually achieved. Eventually, Mongolia’s Parliament, known as the Great Khural, amended the legal aid law to require that public defender wage rates equal those received by prosecutors. 

Mongolia’s achievement is all the more impressive in light of its economic constraints. The Mongolian government’s annual budget is roughly $6 billion. Juxtapose this with the American states of Florida and Oregon, whose failure to pass pay parity legislation in recent years was largely justified on budgetary grounds. Oregon’s annual budget? $67 billion. Florida’s? $101.5 billion

Though Mongolia’s achievement is monumental, even these reforms do not amount to true equality of arms between public defenders and prosecutors. In recent years, many commentators have argued that individual pay parity—between defense and prosecution lawyers—is insufficient to ensure an equal playing field. Instead, they argue that what is needed is institutional parity. For example, the leading international instrument on good practices for public defender systems calls for “fair and proportional distribution of funds between prosecution and legal aid agencies,” and the American Bar Association says that parity should extend beyond salaries to include workloads, technology, facilities, investigators, support staff, legal research tools, and access to forensic services and experts.

The inclusion of defense investigators is particularly important. Prosecutors aren’t the only government agents that help prosecute a criminal case. Much of the work of collecting evidence and facilitating witness testimony is done by the police. But police investigations are often subtly (or not subtly) shaped by the prosecution’s theory of the case, and police agencies have historically been less than eager to turn over exculpatory evidence. For this reason, public defender performance standards generally mandate that defense attorneys conduct their own independent investigations. A truer apples-to-apples comparison for public defense agency budgets should not only include the prosecution agency, but also some portion of the police budget, too. 

Mongolia’s revised law does not yet achieve parity on this institutional level, but individual parity is still a huge and significant step, one that is particularly remarkable in light of Mongolia’s economic constraints. Their achievement stands as an admonition to wealthier jurisdictions who claim that pay parity is too expensive. 

Congratulations to the members of the Great Khural, for passing this law; Minister Nyambaatar, for championing it; Oyunchimeg Ayush, for catalyzing this effort; and, above all, to the Mongolian public defenders whose pay finally reflects their vital role in achieving justice. 

May 19, 2023. Ben Polk, Bernstein Institute for Human Rights of NYU Law School. 

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of NYU, NYU Law or the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

Wrong Prescription: The Impact of Privatizing Healthcare in Kenya

INEQUALITIES

Wrong Prescription: The Impact of Privatizing Healthcare in Kenya

A collaboration between The Economic and Social Rights Centre-Hakijamii and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law.

The 49-page report draws from more than 180 interviews with healthcare users and providers, government officials, and experts, and finds that the government-backed expansion of the private healthcare sector in Kenya is leading to exclusion and setting back the country’s goal of universal health coverage. 

The report documents how policies designed to increase private sector participation in health, in combination with chronic underinvestment in the public healthcare system, have led to a rapid increase in the role of for-profit private actors and undermined the right to health. Privatizing healthcare has proven costly for individuals and the government, and pushed Kenyans into poverty and crushing debt. While the wealthy may be able to access high-quality private care, for many, particularly in lower-income areas, the private sector offers low-quality services that may be inadequate or unsafe. The report concludes with a call to prioritize the public healthcare system.

Public Transport, Private Profit: The Human Cost of Privatizing Buses in the United Kingdom

INEQUALITIES

Public Transport, Private Profit: The Human Cost of Privatizing Buses in the United Kingdom

The Human Rights and Privatization Project launched a report on the deregulation of local buses in the United Kingdom in July 2021. 

The report finds that the government’s 1985 decision to privatize and deregulate the bus sector in England (outside London), Scotland, and Wales has failed passengers and undermined their rights. Taxpayers are subsidizing corporate profits, while private operators are providing a service that is expensive, unreliable, and often dysfunctional. Fares have skyrocketed while ridership has plummeted, undermining efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions. This approach has also significantly impacted individual’s lives and rights. We found that people have lost jobs and benefits, faced barriers to healthcare, been forced to give up on education, sacrificed food and utilities, and been cut off from friends and family. The government’s new strategy for England leaves this deregulated system in place, and does not address its structural shortcomings. 

The report finds that running a bus service premised on profit and market competition, rather than on the well-being of the public, leads to violations of people’s rights and is incompatible with human rights law. It calls for public control of bus transport as the default approach, which would be more cost-effective and allow for reinvestment of profits, integrated networks, more efficient coverage, simpler fares, consistency with climate goals, and public accountability. Given the importance of public transport on access to essential services and rights, it also calls for a statutory minimum level of service frequency.