After Human Rights Council Resolution on Internet Rights, Some Tentative Answers

I've already blogged twice (here and here) about the interesting
resolution of the Human Rights Council on human rights on the Internet,
in which the Council confirmed that there's no need to reinvent the
wheel: offline human rights apply online.

But that's not the whole picture.

There are important questions of operationalization that have yet to be
asked and answered: 

• Who is responsible fore respecting, protecting and implementing which rights? 
• Do multistakeholder-based processes lead to more legitimate normative outcomes? 
• Is self-regulation sufficient for effective human rights protection? 
• How can international law be brought to bear on the Internet - with the goal of ensuring that state limits to Internet freedoms are, themselves, limited (Wolfgang Kleinwächter has edited an excellent multistakeholder-based collection of papers on what these limits may be [in German]).

Today, two pieces I've written elaborating on these issues were published.  A brief analysis in German in the legal section of the Austrian quality daily "Die Presse" and a longer discussion in English of the main points of the Resolution on the EJIL Talk! blog.

Here are the details: 

Matthias C. Kettemann, Grundrechte gelten auch im Internet [Fundamental Rights also
Apply to the Internet], Die Presse, 23 July 2012,
http://diepresse.com/home/recht/rechtallgemein/1269809/Grundrechte-gelten-auch-im-Internet







Matthias C. Kettemann, UN Human Rights Council Confirms that Human Rights Apply to the Internet, EJIL Talk,
http://www.ejiltalk.org/un-human-rights-council-confirms-that-human-rights-apply-to-the-internet/#more-5207