A/HRC/28/39 know the nationality of the sender of a digital communication. On the question of whether control over telecommunications infrastructure could qualify as State jurisdiction for the purposes of article 2 of the Covenant, Ms. Cleveland stated that because digital communication transcended geography, some conception of the extraterritorial application of human rights was necessary to ensure that human rights could be protected online as well as offline. She noted that there were various approaches to extraterritoriality, most of which focused on the concept of jurisdiction outside the territory as involving some form of effective control over a person or a territory, and that under that approach, it was possible to view the exercise of control over Internet infrastructure as the exercise of control over a territory that had effects on the rights of individuals, wherever they might be located. 49. It was noted that the responsibility to respect the right to privacy lay with a number of different actors. Some delegations underscored the lack of effective oversight as having contributed to a lack of accountability for unlawful intrusions on the right to privacy, as well as the shortcomings of relying on internal safeguards without independent external monitoring. The need to protect the rights of victims was underlined. One delegation noted that it was up to each State to develop independent and effective national oversight mechanisms, to ensure the proper application of the rules that govern electronic surveillance. One non-governmental organisation stated that there had been cases of mass surveillance for the purpose of arresting human rights defenders or identifying participants at peaceful assemblies, where “rubber stamping” by the courts had been instrumental, or where personal data collected by telecommunication companies through real-name verification systems had been provided to intelligence and investigative agencies in the absence of any court examination. The need for effective oversight regimes, with attention paid to the rights of victims to an effective remedy, was stressed, including the involvement of an independent and impartial judiciary as a key safeguard. 50. In response to questions about procedural safeguards and oversight mechanisms to ensure that the law was effective and applied in practice, Ms. Nyst explained that an essential precondition to greater and more effective oversight was the end to pervasive secrecy. Governments needed to be more transparent about the activities they needed to engage in to provide security and they must not compromise the infrastructure in a way that was beyond control of the public. She also noted that all individuals, particularly judges and lawyers, should gain a better understanding of how Internet technology worked, which would help them to better understand how surveillance worked. She underscored the importance of ensuring that any surveillance was authorized by an independent and competent judicial authority. She added that it was essential that individuals be notified of the fact that they had been subject to surveillance, in order to be in a position to obtain redress. She also noted the need for more rigorous independent oversight mechanisms, with technical understanding of how surveillance worked, to enable an examination to be made of the human rights implications of surveillance by the security services. Finally, she noted that a special procedures mandate holder with technical expertise could provide guidance about good practices and about what the human rights framework required to ensure the protection of the right to privacy. Ms. Botero added that there was no uniformity in the domestic standards that regulated surveillance and said that a good practice at national level was to have an expert body that would focus specifically on technology and human rights in the context of surveillance. She noted that oversight could be institutional, judicial, interorganic and through an ombudsperson, that procedural guarantees should include prior judicial authorization of surveillance measures and that the legal basis and criteria for the decision should be public. 51. Turning to a question on the obligation of States to provide an effective remedy for violations of the right to privacy, Ms. Cleveland noted that while article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provided an obligation for States to grant an effective remedy, this was a very difficult question, owing to the secrecy of 13