Organiser:
Katarina Markovich is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law University of Turku. She is a
human rights lawyer with ten years of working experience as an attorney and holds a LLM in International Human Rights
Law from Lund University, Sweden. Katarina's research interests include philosophy of law, law and technology,
international law and human rights.
Her doctoral dissertation is focused on the nature of internal conflicts in human rights and States' exploitation of such
conflicts that results in actual violation of human rights. ?
Theme: Data Protection: a shield for whom?
Alongside with unprecedented flow of information, the Internet provides a unique opportunity to gather private data of every user all over the world. It is only logical to expect of states to seek to gain control over cyberspace. That, although justifiable in some cases such as crime prevention and state security, in practice often leads to violations of human rights. The tendency is equally strong in authoritarian and democratic regimes. Russia is about to ban anonymizers, while the UK is drafting the law that forbids encryption.
The new laws provide states with rather broad opportunities to target whistleblowers, journalists, opposition and human rights defenders, thus affecting democracy all over the world. However, it is not only about activists, it is about all of us, as each and every one is a subject of mass surveillance that, as it was declared by the European Court of Human Rights, is not in itself a violation of human rights.
In my talk I am going to discuss who has our data and why. I am going to look at examples from different regimes to see if there are any real limits to states usage of internal conflicts in human rights in order to intervene with rights of individuals.
