In the autumn of 2019, CGHR convened a student research team to provide background for the UN Human Rights Committee’s drafting of General Comment 37 on the Right to Peaceful Assembly. The Human Rights Committee produces a general comment from time to time to expand and reflect on how to interpret and promote a particular right. A key question about assembly was how it works in digitally-mediated spaces like social media, and what particular practices, opportunities and threats characterise the exercise of this right online.
CGHR’s aim in this project was to sketch out some of the key concerns around and to convene an expert meeting on the right of peaceful assembly online. For the first time, our students partnered with students at the University of East Anglia Law School, forming a group that brought a range of disciplinary perspectives to the issue. Led by Ella, Sharath and Eleanor Salter at Cambridge and Michael Hamilton at UEA, the Cambridge students were Katja Achermann, Camille Barras, Allysa Czerwinsky, Bronwen Mehta and Muznah Siddiqui, and the UEA students were Suzanne Dixon and Jennifer Young. The interdisciplinary spirit of the team was invaluable in distilling the many debates on the right of peaceful assembly online — be they legal, technical, political or sociological.
We were delighted that this project enabled the renewal of long-standing partnerships — including with Professor Christof Heyns, a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, and the Committee’s Rapporteur in drafting General Comment 37 — as well as the creation of new ones — such as with the European Centre for Not-for-Profit Law. The event was organised within the framework of the ‘Greater protection and standards setting: United Nations’ project, managed by the European Centre for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL), in turn made possible by the International Centre for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), and was funded by the Government of Sweden.
There are many contemporary, technology-driven challenges to traditional interpretations of human rights, and the right of peaceful assembly is no exception. This Research Pack aims to contribute to interpretations of the right of assembly by considering how new technologies and the increasingly digitally-mediated nature of interactions problematise existing understandings of the way in which individuals intentionally gather together with others. A question that runs through our research is the role for states and private companies in the non-interference in and facilitation of online assembly. We also disentangle some of the theoretical debates around publicly-accessible but privately-owned spaces, presence and participation, temporality and peacefulness with regard to online assemblies and provide a range of empirical evidence to inform these debates. A consideration of the right to freedom of assembly as practiced online has implications for the right to freedom of assembly face-to-face. This makes this Research Pack’s contribution multi-directional, informing the right to gather in all forms.
The use of information and communication technologies can help activists and protesters coordinate peaceful assemblies, and it can provide spaces for gatherings that transcend the constraints of location and time. But technology also brings threats to the right of assembly, including denials of access, the chilling effects resulting from new and exacerbated forms of surveillance and discrimination, and interference obscured by digital mediation. We hope this Research Pack presents a useful contribution to the work of academics and human rights practitioners working to understand and support the embodied exercise of the right of assembly in the different and often hybrid spaces in which it occurs.
This research informed our submission to the UN Human Rights Committee’s Draft General Comment No. 37 on Article 21 (Right of Peaceful Assembly), which you can read here.
In March 2020, Sharath Srinivasan presented on the submission to the UN Human Rights Committee at a special workshop in Glion, Switzerland.
This Research Pack, on the right of peaceful assembly online, is the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between staff and students at Cambridge’s Centre of Governance and Human…
Discursively repositioning assembly online as the digitally mediated freedom of assembly extends the protection of this right to more people and more practices.
The right of assembly in online spaces raises questions about the nature of presence and participation and faces challenges due to the commercial logics of online spaces.
