Stop relying on due diligence: Manushya slams Big Tech’s pseudo-human rights compliance at the UN Expert Consultation on Technology and the Right to Freedom of Association 🇺🇳

At the UN Expert Consultation on Technology and Right to Freedom of Association held in May, Manushya Foundation’s Digital Rights Advisor, Dr Jean Linis-Dinco, named the elephant in the room that many in the so-called digital rights movement refuse to acknowledge: the struggle for digital rights has been pulled into the orbit of the very corporations that profit from repression.

The consultation will inform the UN Human Rights Committee’s development of General Comment No. 38, which will guide how states protect the right to freedom of association under Article 22 of the ICCPR, including in digital spaces.

Jean made it clear,

“We need to stop relying on corporate human rights due diligence assessments… Due diligence is a weak, toothless process that only requires corporations to identify and assess their human rights impacts, but it does not require them to stop producing those impacts and pay.”

We have seen this in practice:

🔺 Meta has assessed its own role in the Rohingya genocide and in the suppression of Palestinian civil society.

🚫 Amazon ‘has built one of the most sophisticated union suppression operations in the history of industrial capitalism, so extreme that workers have been peeing in bottles.’

And still, due diligence here is working as expected, all against working-class people.

We must also be honest about our own movements. Jean warns, “Civil society organisations are being drawn into the BigTech orbit, sitting in corporate boardrooms offering support to BigTech as if that changes things.”

#WeAreManushyan ♾️ Equal Human Beings