Digital technologies as a means of repression and social control
In the last several years, the EP has played a prominent role as co-legislator in relation to tightening export controls on dual-use surveillance equipment in line with the Commission’s Recast Dual-Use Regulation. The DROI Subcommittee on Human Rights heard evidence in 2020 on COVID-19 related disinformation. The European Parliament has put in place a special committee on ‘Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union including Disinformation’. While this is focused on policy concerns within the EU, its Rapporteur’s first working documents make several references to the need to connect this concern with more active external action directed at digital abuses 370.
4.7
Conclusions - assessment of the toolbox’s evolution
The EP’s 2015 study, mentioned above, was not a detailed study of all elements of the EU toolbox, or specifically of the external dimension of digital rights issues, but it did suggest some general steps forward. These have proven highly relevant to subsequent policy developments, as the EU has moved to take on board nearly all of the report’s main suggestions, namely: to ‘encourage’ other countries to respect digital freedoms; to build institutional knowledge on such issues; to bring digital issues into external dialogues (singling out Latin America in this regard); to make cyber-security more about rights and less about purely military-type security approaches; to support online protections for citizens outside of Europe; and to push for more UN work on digital privacy 371. As this chapter has demonstrated, the EU’s policy toolbox today reflects all of these ideas to a far greater extent than was the case before 2015. However, in the last several years, more specific issues have arisen in the EU’s deployment of its toolbox that raise further challenges for the EU to address and continue improving its policy instruments. New concerns have arisen over the effectiveness, comprehensiveness, and efficiency of the EU toolbox, while various thematic dilemmas have become more acute: Effectiveness: In recent years, the EU has retained – and even widened – its toolbox for human rights and democracy support against an extremely challenging global backdrop. Yet, the challenge of digitally-led authoritarianism has continued to deepen. As a result, the EU will need to look for ways to continue finetuning and adding to this toolbox. While the EU’s general approach to human rights and democracy has sharpened in some notable ways, it is more difficult to conclude that its toolbox is fully attuned to the specific features of digital repression and contemporary democratic backsliding. The EU’s direct financial support has had a very clear, tangible impact on protecting many individual civil society activists from repression. Its broader funding initiatives aimed at enhancing the positive digital capacities of civil society have been useful in laying the groundwork for pushing back against digital repression, but the impact here is almost impossible to quantify with any precision. The EU’s diplomatic pressure, dialogues, and attempts to build effective international standards are areas where the interviewees in this study felt that the EU’s effectiveness is the hardest to pin down, in terms of an identifiable impact on the regimes’ immediate political actions. While EU policies have improved, the desired results have not always been forthcoming, as regime attacks on democratic freedoms and human rights have become stronger and more far-reaching. Comprehensiveness: The EU’s toolbox has become more comprehensive in the last several years, as the EU has added a number of different strands to its efforts against digital authoritarianism. Digital rights issues have been incorporated, to some extent, into EU restrictive measures. Funding has increased for digital elements of external human rights and democracy. Online threats to democracy have become a staple of EU dialogues with third countries and within multilateral fora. EU cybersecurity cooperation has
S. Kalniete, ‘Working document on the state of foreign interference in the European Union, including disinformation’, Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation, 17 December 2020. 371 B. Wagnar et al, ‘Surveillance and censorship: the impact of technologies on human rights’, EP Directorate-General for External Policies, 2015. 370
71
