A/HRC/29/32 rights, including economic rights, privacy, due process, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and the right to life and bodily integrity. Because of their importance to the rights to freedom of opinion and expression, restrictions on encryption and anonymity must be strictly limited according to principles of legality, necessity, proportionality and legitimacy in objective. The Special Rapporteur therefore recommends the following. A. States 57. States should revise or establish, as appropriate, national laws and regulations to promote and protect the rights to privacy and freedom of opinion and expression. With respect to encryption and anonymity, States should adopt policies of nonrestriction or comprehensive protection, only adopt restrictions on a case-specific basis and that meet the requirements of legality, necessity, proportionality and legitimacy in objective, require court orders for any specific limitation, and promote security and privacy online through public education. 58. Discussions of encryption and anonymity have all too often focused only on their potential use for criminal purposes in times of terrorism. But emergency situations do not relieve States of the obligation to ensure respect for international human rights law. Legislative proposals for the revision or adoption of restrictions on individual security online should be subject to public debate and adopted according to regular, public, informed and transparent legislative process. States must promote effective participation of a wide variety of civil society actors and minority groups in such debate and processes and avoid adopting such legislation under accelerated legislative procedures. General debate should highlight the protection that encryption and anonymity provide, especially to the groups most at risk of unlawful interferences. Any such debate must also take into account that restrictions are subject to strict tests: if they interfere with the right to hold opinions, restrictions must not be adopted. Restrictions on privacy that limit freedom of expression — for purposes of the present report, restrictions on encryption and anonymity — must be provided by law and be necessary and proportionate to achieve one of a small number of legitimate objectives. 59. States should promote strong encryption and anonymity. National laws should recognize that individuals are free to protect the privacy of their digital communications by using encryption technology and tools that allow anonymity online. Legislation and regulations protecting human rights defenders and journalists should also include provisions enabling access and providing support to use the technologies to secure their communications. 60. States should not restrict encryption and anonymity, which facilitate and often enable the rights to freedom of opinion and expression. Blanket prohibitions fail to be necessary and proportionate. States should avoid all measures that weaken the security that individuals may enjoy online, such as backdoors, weak encryption standards and key escrows. In addition, States should refrain from making the identification of users a condition for access to digital communications and online services and requiring SIM card registration for mobile users. Corporate actors should likewise consider their own policies that restrict encryption and anonymity (including through the use of pseudonyms). Court-ordered decryption, subject to domestic and international law, may only be permissible when it results from transparent and publicly accessible laws applied solely on a targeted, case-by-case basis to individuals (i.e., not to a mass of people) and subject to judicial warrant and the protection of due process rights of individuals. 21

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents