we have the enviable slot to to entertain you following lunch and we've been talking about our commitment to be a  snappy panel we're looking forward to the conversations with you we are talking about a theme which is fairly dark and which  notes some of the underlying regression in protection of rights and in a very serious way but we will be looking for those moments of light and we'll look forward to you to ask those questions that we've been hearing about where do we see the light at the end of the tunnel so let i will start by introducing the panelists and i will tell you what we've agreed as our ground rules each speaker will speak for seven minutes except for joelle who was our last speaker on blasphemy will have a just a few more minutes i will start playing a tone after when there's one minute left for each ourselves to time and have the time for conversation after so our first speaker today is adam weiss who we honored last night with the columbia columbia freedom of expression award we'll hear a bit about the cases that have gone into the reason that the award was conferred adam has been the legal director of the european roma rights center since two thousand and thirteen prior to that he was with the air center based in london throughout his career he's been working particularly on behalf of migrants and the rights of the vulnerable at european roma rights he's been working on behalf of but other also other despised or vulnerable communities next we will have speaking alexandra birkhoff's who is the director of the sofa centre for information analysis based in moscow and he is a vice president of panorama information and research centre from one thousand nine hundred and ninety one to two thousand and two he's worked on issues of political extremism nationalism xenophobia has authored a number of articles and books including state bernard harcourt who is joining us from columbia glad that he has has walked across the courtyard salta becker professor of law professor of political science executive director of the eric holder initiative for civil and political rights and founding director of the columbia center for contemporary critical thought he is scholarship intersect social and political theory and he has authored a number of books his recent is called the counter revolution it will be on display and it's been creating quite a buzz and we will hear about the the theories and tactics that he's exploring in that book next to speak will be fisa patel she is the director of the brennan center is liberating and national security program she has led advocacy campaigns on a number of issues including opposing dragnet surveillance of muslims and state laws designed to incite fear of islam she campaigned for legislation to create the independent inspector general for the new york police department she's written a number  of articles and books and is a frequent commentator following fisa will have yasmine ahmed from the uk director of rights watch uk since april two thousand fourteen before that she worked for the uk foreign and commonwealth office for the australian attorney general's department on issues concerning asylees and refugees at the icty and at the serious crimes unit for t be jo elf is a researcher and analyst based in geneva with fifteen years of experience on human rights and foreign policy before working in geneva she was based with human rights first here in new york and also with the alliance of liberals and democrats at the european parliament she focuses on security conflict human rights and identity issues and most recently been working on freedom of religion and belief and how it's being tested so we will start with adam weiss to hear from the the view from hungary thank you so much and i'm setting my stopwatch so i don't go over time thank you so much to the organizers for letting me come in and speak with you not only for professional reasons but also because it means that my mother can be here to see me speak which is unusual and i'm pretty sure she thinks i work for the c this is good to clear my name i want to do two things in my in this time that i have i wanted to discuss who is a radical or who is a radicalized person in central and eastern europe and i'm really thinking about hungary in  particular but the region more generally and the second thing i want to do is talk about what european law has to say about the rights of these people who were viewed as radical and the rights of the people that they are or viewed as targeting  i think in central and eastern europe and in hungary in particular there are three kinds of or three groups of radicals or radicalized people the just kind of a fantasy group it's the radical immigrant the radical muslim who exists in the mind of politicians you want to close the region to all refugees to all people who are migrating to all migrants which has become a really a dirty word in hungarian in particular i say that this is a fantasy because i don't think that these people exist in hungary or other countries in the region but there is one example one scapegoat a person named achmed h and if you google achmed h hungary right now you'll get a lot of information about this person who is a syrian citizen and a recognized refugee in cyprus who lived for a long time in cyprus and is currently serving a prison sentence in hungary for terrorism offenses it's a grotesque case that will eventually i think soon enough make its way to the european court but he was essentially imprisoned for holding a bullhorn during a difficult situation at the hungarian border and calming calling people to calm down the second group i think is the actual radicals or radicalized people probably people that we would all agree meet that definition i meet the definition of that of those terms these are people i would call them white nationalists although that's the american way of referring to them i don't think in europe they'd be called white nationalists they might be called far right wing extremists or racist extremists i'm talking about organized groups who hold a racist ideology and who engage in organized activity in order to intimidate ethnic minorities in hungary in particular there are organized groups that have marched particularly in romani neighborhoods who have threatened people who wear military or military style uniforms who have names like the hungarian guard or names that include words like protection and national they've calmed down recently i don't completely know why but when i first started working for the erc these marches were quite common they were still going on back in two thousand thirteen in hungary in the czech republic in slovakia we haven't seen many of them lately that's not to say that there aren't plenty of racists operating in these countries and plenty of hate crimes but this kind of organized marching it doesn't happen so much anymore but one story that i'll come back to you was a march that took place in two thousand and eleven in a hungarian town called ginger sparta in the roma neighborhood where these i would call them white nationalists or extreme right wing organized militants we're marching in a romani neighborhood and threatening the people there and the third group is a kind of constructed group of radicals these are the ngo people these are people who dare to counter government narratives particularly right now on migration and what's happening to these people is that they are being cast as enemies of the state particularly in hungary they are and i think that they are a kind of constructed radical that the radical narrative is the they're viewed as people who were kind of activated or contaminated people who work appear to be among us but are somehow touched by outside forces the outside force mainly being george soros and the open society foundations they're viewed as people their main crime is in hungary's that they want to break down the fence there's a fence along the southern border whoops with serbia to stop the flow of people coming into the country to claim well to make their way into the eu to claim asylum and they're being intimidated right for was not on that list but if you go on our website you won't find our staff page active right now because like many of the other ngos in hungary we took down that page which only fuse the cia theories that my family has about me but the other attack is through n laws so there are laws being proposed in hungry there's already one that went through about foreign funded organizations so foreign funded organizations have to register and be labeled as such and there will be another law that will be passed soon that will tax the income of ngos the grants they receive so those are the three categories of radicals and quickly because i see my time is running out i want to say how the how european law applies to these groups well for achmed and the fantasy group i think this will be a test for european justice when off money just cases come when his case comes before the european court of human rights in terms of the white nationalists we have an eu framework decision that requires you member states to criminalize incitement to racial  hatred but in terms of the european court of human rights and what that court has done on these issues i think we have an almost kind of american story here we have a case in hungary vona versus hungary where the authorities shut down one of these groups and the european court of human rights said that's fine for you to do that that group doesn't have a right to exist a racist group and actually quoted us supreme court case law of virginia versus black on that but we also have a case about that march i mentioned in gingers palta about a woman who a romani woman threatened in her front yard by an axe wielding thug and the court basically found that the hungarian authorities did a pretty good job of keeping the peace during those marches so they found a violation but it was a fairly minor violation i can tell you more during question and answers and what about this third group the ngos the the people being radicalized or being being cast as radicals by the authorities well there's plenty of echr case law protecting people who challenge the state but i don't know how people can take advantage of that case law in the in order to combat the ways that they're being intimidated right now so what can they do against the publication of names in the magazine for example and what can we do about these laws that are being passed basically to try to shame intimidate and shut down ngos here we find ourselves falling back on strange provisions of european union law for example on the free movement of capital so the right of people to make donations across borders within the european union we're in another realm in a strange realm and i think we're gonna see some tests for european union law as these these radicals in hungary in particular try to protect themselves that's my time so i'll finish there thank you and of course the point of the the short intro statements is that there will be time to to to delve more into the depths of stories so next is alexander and i think you're welcome to stay at your at your table there tell us affects freedom of expression the core thing here is the definition of extremism and the law which is very wide and starts from terrorist activity and down to such things like incitement of social examples of excessive limitations of freedom of speech and these cases attract most attention that they are discussed more or less but i have to underline that statistically jihad and other really radical really radical groups but of course also some others but the problem is also in numbers we have more and more criminal prosecutions for speech just in the beginning of this decade we had about a hundred sentences per year for public statements then it grew up especially and starts to investigate it no they follow the activists radical or not radical activists and then they look for some materials to create against a case against him or her and at the same time literally the same except of counting criminal cases so the number of criminal cases is naturally growing from here to here from pure legal point of view it means that when police investigates the case they this law enforcement in internet is initially based on the very original russian idea to create a list of banned materials which supposedly is illegal to distribute the problem is that it's easy to ban but it's difficult to enforce it somehow if it's available online so the next step was to start procedures to block access to let's say bad materials online mostly maybe several years ago and nobody can find it maybe you know about this epic battle between our government and telegram messenger which did not provide keys and the government tries to block and block messenger in fact it blocks everything around except of it but anyway and now we have the new bill related to social networks because it's impossible to block  from the governmental side certain posting in social network this bill is based on the german law which is rather well known but russian version is wider of its momentum and it's still implemented but not so dangerous but there are new mechanisms which i invented for example ngos may be taken to court and  in the current atmosphere of anti western mobilization they invent new and new laws they invent let's say more laws than law enforcement system can implement so something new happens practically every month and it may then follow in fact i don't know how far it may  info actually but not before you get up i just wanted to follow up on some of the connections between hungary and russia i alexander mentioned a number of trends and i wondered adam if you might comment on how those play out also in hungary so the criminalization of the dissemination of materials the shift to more censorship of online speech space and civil society the requirement to self label as foreign agents i'm wondering adam if you could comment on how if if such laws have had an impact yet in hungary because obviously you are still functioning there in moscow if you could give us a sense about the number of organizations that have left and to compare what is the level of civil society activism today say with five years ago but first i'll go to adam for a few comments sure i think it's i think there is a parallel with this this this fear about the internet and a desire to attack the internet or the use of the internet in order to spread messages that go contrary to what the government wants there isn't anything that i'm aware that looks to criminalize but there is an attempt to use civil mechanisms to restrain use of the internet actually one of the few successes of recent years in hungary was that when the authorities wanted to put in place attacks on internet use which would have been unique in the world there was a massive protest people got into the streets and it's probably the only time i can think when the government backed down on one of its legislative proposals it shows what can make what can make them back down but also what will make people mobilize but the i didn't get to it but we wanted the cases that we were involved in for which we were  given that honor last night is a case called motiroti versus hungary in which we intervened as a third but um the use of the civil courts to punish people for linking to material in that case it was a  the the applicant in the case is a company that owns a web portal that included a hyperlink to a video of a roman ii man comparing racist thugs to yogic members yogic being a notorious political party in hungary and yobics successfully sued for defamation saying the people the racist thugs were not yogic members you've defamed us and the hungarian courts accepted that argument and it's now pending in the european court of human rights so i do think that there is a parallel it hasn't become quite as weapon hungary as it is in russia perhaps the hungarian authorities aren't as keen to do something so obviously contrary to basic principles protected under the european convention on human rights but it's certainly  say not really much because the pressure is perceived is very tough if you see this all this law if to take them seriously but they are implemented so selectively that it's it's sometimes looks like a game not some systematic clash between two parts of society and it's all about it was completely strange decision let's say slogan christian orthodox slogan which sounds orthodoxy or death supposedly that we will stay orthodox till death  oppositional activists who oppose him and and they published photo in the social network with this parliament member and for publishing this photo they paid fines because it was banned we'll have a chance to come back to the eastern europe russia context but now moving on to the us and the uk we will hear from the next three speakers first from bernardo harcourt and then we'll hear from our other two panelists each will have seven minutes and will have a bit of a discussion among them before moving on to our last topic which is blas thank you and sorry i was rushing up here but with my seven minutes i didn't want to i didn't want to lose any of them you know they're very valuable because i want to make five points in seven minutes it's not going to be easy let me start first i'd say that there has been a dramatic and troubling rise of radical speech and radicalizing speech in the united states in the last year and a half dramatic and troubling and as exhibit a i would quote for instance the statement that president donald trump as candidate placed on his website on his campaign website which was the following donald trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the united states until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on i think that's exhibit a of a kind of a radicalized discourse as justice kagan asked of the solicitor general yesterday if they had substituted the word jews they're a complete shutdown of jews entering the united states i think people would have reacted differently  the radicalized discourse is having its effects and in part in large part because of the circulation of discourse on the internet and this is i'd like to pick up on alexander's point about the importance of the internet here in shaping the flows of discourse now i'd say that i'd say that the internet this is the second point has kind of changed the landscape entirely when we think about freedom of expression because now we need to be thinking about flows of discourse and ways of shaping and regulating those flows of discourse rather than individual acts individual speech acts individual acts of expression so we've moved from one world to another where today what is more important is not the ability to make a free expression but the ways in which those expressions are then kind of flow through the internet are managed are regulated contained promoted etc and that i think is the biggest challenge in the digital age because in the digital age we can finally see much more clearly than we did before the ways in which the regulatory mechanisms work for flows of discourse including flows of radical discourse so and of course here exhibit b would be the way that facebook deals with and the algorithms that facebook uses to decide what goes in our news feeds right and so those we can study now in a way that that exposes the the management and regulation of flows of expression now that has significantly altered the digital age and and and those regulation of flows have significantly altered the way that we regulate radical speech today or try to deer addict lies people as well  and so what's going on right now our new forms of de radicalization by shaping speech and expression through a model of  and which of course goes on in different forms at the center for global engagement what it did was it tried to deer attica lies by identifying speech identifying content that was more moderate using algorithms to identify vulnerable individuals to radicalization and then enhancing that third party content all of this is what what is done in digital advertising right i mean and explicitly it was modeled on digital advertising enhance the content of third parties by including photos for instance you know if you tweet you need to include a picture then people will click on it more direct those enhanced third party contents to the targeted individuals and then in the same way that google amazon etc monitors whether we click are things determine whether or not the individuals were targeted using these algorithms are actually  watching listening reading that information those are new forms that are then made possible by the digital age but changed entirely the way that the flow of expression is  regulated another fourth point a major way in which the the flows are changing has to do with the use of the internet as a medium  achieve the forms of distraction that are essential to this new mode of governing that that we are we are part of right now this what i call the counter revolution what i call it what i refer to as the counter insurgency model of governing because as you know that that model of governing rests on three principle strategies the first is total information awareness made possible of course as it result of our total information awareness second targeting and excluding the what are considered to be the radical minority but third and more importantly which is the classic strategy of counterinsurgency theory is to win the hearts and minds of of the passive masses of the general population and in order to do that to win those hearts and minds we increasingly use distraction techniques and and  part president trump is of course the the master at this at having developed a kind of daily reality tv episode a way of governing a kind of apprentice governing where everyday we're distracted by a new departure or someone else leaving the white house some other scandal that then kind of it leaves us unable essentially to address the real substantive issues that confront us  final point then is that all of these are feeding into a new way of governing the american people at home a way that was born abroad and that we've domesticated and brought home and it's called the counter revolution thank you well good afternoon everybody so i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the work i've been doing which looks at how radicalization is framed visa vie muslim american communities  trajectory encompasses both speech and actions so the classic sort of theory that was put forward by law enforcement agencies such as the nypd and the fbi in the sort of early to  mid s was that you had a population of mostly young mostly male muslim americans who were vulnerable to becoming terrorists and they you know may have had what they call  cognitive opening and perhaps hurt some information that radicalized them and that information could have been you know stories about you know what the united states was doing muslims and then these people sort of according to these theories sort of moved on in a kind of a funnel shape or stairwell or you know you can pick your metaphor to eventually becoming violent now the consequence of this was the push to create predictive tools so tools that would identify amongst a non violent non criminal but minority and distinguishable population who was going to be the next guy who strapped a bomb onto his chest in blue ops thing the problem was that they were looking at very very large sets of people trajectories were not predictive in any way there were never any control groups sample sets none of the sort of scientific stuff that you would expect and because they landed up basically targeting wide swaths of perfectly normal behavior and speech among muslim americans so some of the early sort of predictors that they used were things like growing a beard which suggested you were becoming more religious and therefore you are likely to become eu laughs but it's actually in their documents right or and i always thought this was perhaps a good thing giving up smoking and drinking because that suggested you relieving your heathen lifestyle behind  order to become you know more religious more devout and more likely to be a terrorist but it also included you know political speech you know if you were concerned about american foreign policy if you were worried about you know what do drone strikes do to people in pakistan all of these kinds of things were mashed into this discourse about how to predict and this is at the point i want to make again and again this is not worried about descriptive analyses i'm saying this is how to predict who's going to become the next terrorist and then you have all these sort of theoretical discourses which were boiled down for use for police departments right and for the fbi and let me tell you there's a big difference between a nice academic paper and the checklist that the guy on the street wants to have and that's why we get to growing a beard or you know stopping listening to rap music i mean it was really ludicrous so this was kind of the construct that we went into through the sort of mid s you know there was a lot of pushback from civil society against this construct because it was so obviously aimed at both muslim religious observance but also at political speech so the construct became refined and over time you go into the obama administration everybody thinks things are gonna get better they don't all they do is that they become more sophisticated and more coded in the ways that they talk about which is essentially religious and ideological profiling so instead of having you know you know growing a beard you have you know believes that the west is at war with islam well you know i would say that that's maybe not an unreasonable belief as we are in wars in several muslim countries around the world it certainly doesn't indicate whether or not you're likely to become a terrorist but it that some of the things have been really remarkable things like you know is concerned about human rights in the middle east i mean these are things we debate on the pages of major newspapers every day it is truly absurd but it also gets even more coded because it becomes about mental health and that's the most recent evolution we've seen which is that you know terrorists are basically or muslims are basically vulnerable to propaganda from isis and it's kind of a mental health problem and so once we identify people who we think are vulnerable we are going to give them counseling because you know it's not political violence it's a kind of infectious ideology and that's sort of the the most recent iteration that we've seen in all of this i want to make one more point which is that you know the brand center where i work recently we conducted an an alysis which we haven't yet published of the most recent countering violent extremism grants which were granted by the department of homeland security last year and one of the really alarming trends that we've seen is that you know the the violent extremism narrative has extended no it hasn't extended to white nationalists as you might expect what is extended to is every other minority community in the united states so basically about sixty percent of the grant applications that were approved start from the assumption that the experience of discrimination whether you're black whether you're gay whether you're a refugee or whether you're an immigrant means that you  becoming a violent extremism just think about how that flips on its head everything that we work for when we work in the anti discrimination space and what that means in terms of the speech of communities that are already the most targeted across a range of measures and whose speech is probably the most difficult to elevate in our societal discourse the so with that you can tell it doesn't make me happy but let me tell you just quickly that we do have something which makes me really happy which is that there is an incredible amount of grassroots energy pushing against these very constructs which really started amongst muslim communities who are incredibly savvy about what these kinds of constructs mean for their communities and actually really amongst the younger generation so there are you know young people who organize at universities which want to take funding from the government to conduct this kind of programming you have a lot of organizing going on in places like minneapolis which has a somali community that's been very targeted by this los angeles again there's huge amounts of energy at the grassroots level and i think that you know that and combined with sort of having an administration that is so overtly xenophobic and anti muslim really kind of brings all of these things together and i think that we have a really strong pushback against these constructs in the uk we'll be interested in similarities and differences and i think that you will also show us a brief video about the countering violent extremism measures that are being undertaken reality i'm the executive director of an organization that works on counterterrorism and human rights one of the geographic areas that we focus on is the united kingdom and one of the areas that we focus on is countering violent extremism in two thousand and sixteen we produce report preventing education which is about the impact of cve in schools in the united kingdom that can be accessed on our website and also the video that i'll be showing you later now what i hope to do today is run through very quickly give you a  uk's countering extremism strategy and then look at the way that it's impacting on freedom of expression i'll look briefly at a judgement that's come out last year which looked at freedom expression and the policy and then finally just briefly if i have time talk about the export of the uk government's strategy around countering extremism so first the prevent strategy which is the name of the strategy the countering extremism strategy in the united kingdom is part counterterrorism strategy in the uk it was the the the strategy overall was published in two thousand and three but prevent wasn't published until two thousand and six really that there were people not only outside but within the country themselves who were being they were carrying out terrorist activity and i think they wanted to not only do something but seemed to be doing something as well which i think's a lot around the terrorism narrative what we see is though a policy which initially came out that targeted war was and was openly about muslim communities the government funded muslim community groups to do work within their communities a lot of criticism about that around that the communities themselves were becoming surveillance tools for the state and the state was sucking up a lot of information about these communities in two thousand and eleven the government actually expand strategy so it included right wing extremism as well however it has never applied to northern ireland which is one of the places where there's a lot of extremism by the uk's definition of terrorist activity which is quite an interesting said i think what's really interesting is the uk government in the uk government strategy and their policy we're not dealing with countering violent extremism we're talking about countering extremism we're talking about persons ideologies and belief well before there's any intention of or any complicity in or any carrying out of criminal activity we're dealing with a creep pre crime space we're dealing with thought police and that's really important to frame uk government's policy around this now i think a number of other governments still frame er is countering violent extremism but in essence when you look you see it actually what we're dealing with is countering extremist thought not actual behavior that will potentially lead to or does is in any way connected to violence and as pfizer quite rightly pointed out the whole policy reports one on measuring the world's blasphemy laws interesting methodology question that i had is there a strong correlation between what you consider to be good blasphemy laws and more protection of freedom of expression and practice or are the contextual factors even more important and then your second report anti blasphemy offensives in the digital age when hard liners take over i think you've got some interesting recommendations there to the tech companies and liberal democracies if we can find any left okay thank you very much hang in there you're having a coffee break very  because they play states as the arbiters of truth and what is acceptable and what is unacceptable and what is offensive and what is not and basically they protect religion rather than protecting individuals now those who  sanctioned are often citizens who are in minority positions not unlike what we discussed this afternoon we are talking in particular about political dissidents about bloggers and there are some very interesting bloggers in the room i call upon hussein for example to you know to discuss his blogging experience if he has time during the panel discussion secularists religious minorities their opinions have resulted in arrests in arbitrary detentions they attacks and just to give you one example of religious minorities that are persecuted in the name of of anti blasphemy allegations to be christian in pakistan to be baha'i in iran to be you you have a much higher likelihood of being prosecuted by the state and you face tremendous legal pressures and the second imminent threat that you have is that you can be attacked by mobs or individuals and you can face tremendous social pressures and what is considered moral or indeed radical in a given society so on one hand the legal pressures that you face and on the other hand the societal presses another category of people of language and tones are a luxury that democracies frequently take for granted and we all have to be careful about them in some states the focus shifts to how islamist groups feel offended by the supposed crime of discussing or critiquing religion and as i mentioned crowds have descended on towns as well the scenario has already played out in places like indonesia pakistan egypt nigeria and there have been radicals and they're the ones to watch out for and they're the ones who seemingly incite to violence and and so this is a bizarre because our moral compass literally turns upside down in the sense that those who are claiming to fight against radical blasphemous are the radicals themselves and so my key message if there's one message that i'd like to convey is that the  extremists take justice into their own hands in the name of fighting radicalism and anybody who does not follow the state sponsored religion in a specific way is accused of being a radical which is very ironic now i've been asked to describe the two reports that i wrote on the question of blasphemy i don't know how much time i have but i have never described these two reports in it's such a small amount of time so let's try and go for it so the first one was the one that i wrote for the u s commission on international religious freedom and we compiled seventy one anti blasphemy laws from around the world from regions as diverse as the middle east and north africa asia pacific europe sub saharan africa and the americas and we examined the wording of the language of each law and why was that important of course the language of the law is important but in in in particular it provides insight to how a government perceives the question and so that's that was our interest the intent of the state's role in regulating in regulating such speech and we try to grade these these laws so to speak and we developed a set of indicators and we asked a set of questions for example does this law respect freedom of opinion expression does it respect freedom of religion or belief is the law vague it'd be subject to an abuse what is the punishment described in this in this law is it the death penalty is it a fine is it imprisonment does the law discriminate between different faiths or not and and yes so so the higher the score you get the more dangerous and risk abuse the the law of that country is now our findings the most common punishment among blasphemy laws from around the world is imprisonment with eighty six percent of all impro impose as a maximum penalty a prison sentence all laws without exception deviate from international standards on freedom of expression which means  wish freedom of expression wasn't really a game changer in this situation of measuring blasphemy laws because they all violate freedom of expression to answer your question and so as a result of that we couldn't you know assess if one law was more dangerous than another because basically all of them you know miss the points the states with the highest scores which are basically subject to greatest risks of human rights abuses are number one iran as being the highest risk country in the world number two pakistan number three yemen somalia and then cat are the states with the five lowest scores subject to the least risks of human rights abuses are number one as the lowest risk country spain the philippines gree onna and saint lucia so the three main indicators that steeply increased or decreased was not freedom of expression as i explained to you but it maximum sentence in iran and in pakistan obviously their schools went immediately much higher discrimination against groups so for example if country x says x is the is the state religion to all followers who follow a different religion and not allowed to do so that that immediately puts the population in a different in a different position but a lot of this report also stresses that no laws operate in a vacuum and political context and implementation is extremely important public and social attitudes towards religion the independence of the judiciary in the rule of law law enforcement state responses to violence you name it  just one last comment on this report we did have some surprises you know so we had surprise it of bangladesh take bangladesh bangladesh is a country where many times we hear about the brutal killings of atheist bloggers for quite a while but they bangladesh had had a quite low score or so you know we thought to ourselves how is that possible bangladesh is a low score in the situation we read about all the time in the media that is because implementation precisely so you can't just look at the letter of the law you also have to look at implementation now i'd be happy to take more questions on this report but i'm going to move on to the next report to present you the findings of  the one example of offensive behavior on social media activities could be posting a picture or a status on your beliefs on facebook or liking a facebook post of a friend or sending a so called blasphemous responsible for those actions of course the internet has created this illusion of freedom where internet users feel that they're empowered to openly voice their opinions and and maybe they anticipate less the consequences of their speech and they would be more aware of their speech if it was offline another another point which is very important is how expressions on the internet  in bangladesh egypt indonesia iran kuwait mauritania pakistan saudi arabia tunisia turkey and the united arab emirates but i'm aware that since july two thousand and sixteen there are many more cases such as in algeria bangladesh india jordan pakistan so i have two more two more points to make the i'll just give you one example i'd like to if for example i don't know if some of you remember this a video game that was very popular in two thousand and sixteen called pokemon go right yeah so in in two thousand and sixteen three things it this is quite comical if not obsessing because in three different states pokemon go was was attacked on accounts of of blasphemy so in september two thousand and sixteen an indian lawyer told the court that pokemon go is blasphemous and should be banned because the game offends religious followers who don't eat animal products by giving players virtual eggs all right in september two thousand and sixteen it was reported that russian youtuber could face five years in jail after he filmed himself playing pokemon go in a so here we have three different countries three different religions we have india russia saudi arabia and they're all using religion and technology to pursue a national agenda so i think that's definitely worth speaking about and my final comments  i would just like to say that the tech industry is not responsible for state persecution it cannot prevent via write violent riots from erupting a and and it cannot prevent violence and this is a big but everything that the tech industry does is setting a precedent and and the world is watching and we're right now in the middle of it all as we discussed yesterday and companies should not be expected in my view to encourage or to set international standards because that's what the job is of human rights lawyers and while other experts it's not the job of companies but they've committed to respecting them and so  they support domestic laws now if the domestic law in place is the death penalty for blasphemy you understand what the problem is so we i personally believe that compliance to any domestic laws problematic and that the only solution is to uphold international standards so so that's that's my point for blasphemy and i'm happy to take any questions great thanks agnes let me ask you about time we started twenty minutes late at snap ten minutes to four zero i can see the panelists for the next panel are here will you give us two ten minutes after two or at ten minutes after four so we have twenty minutes i'll look forward to taking lots of questions and then we'll group them according to them to our sub panels  various items which anyone comes across either in relation to terrorist financing or if you have a belief that you have information which may assist in the prevention of terroris well this is just something i've been thinking about a lot you know when we talk about violence against women when we talk about terrorism like these sociological studies are frequently cited about speech not impacting behavior right you know you can say that says so and so movie inspired me to do such and such thing right and so i wonder whether it's something that we're not addressing adequately in terms of whether it's in etc and i would love for sort of any thoughts you may have because i think one of the sort of important functions of this space is to identify gaps in research because you know thank you very much i thought it was very interesting in terms of all the linkages between the various presentation and i just wanted to maybe share  the mainstream norms or by or by government so at the moment and it's not quite the same but you know i was in el salvador not very long ago that flows from it and and this terrorism legal framework which in my opinion is emerging as i was talking about yesterday as some house and in between legal last let's say five years or so in a number of text easy extension months or three months after three months after three months but at the first phenomenon and the second one when that cannot go on what feels to me that we are entering into a very dangerous moment of social engineering driven by people with enough power to actually try  on the flow of discourse we don't pay attention enough to the question of the virality and the speed at which information is spreading i just wanted to spot the expression because i think it's a very accurate one this was really about the clear abuses in situations where the measures are disproportionate either in the law or in the implementation where there's a sort of an alibi because of terrorism because of the pressures and so on and this is all relevant but i want to highlight what i was referring to yesterday the distinction between this kind of problem which is a very traditional human rights fight against abuses from governments and and repressive regimes and the other question that is sometimes left a little bit unaddressed in this environment which is how do we deal collectively with the actual abuses by the actors will purposefully are exploiting and trying to exploit the lines of fracture to create violence and that sort of thing and i want to throw back without having the answer myself the question that emerged at the very beginning of this conference by in the presentation of the ranking digital rights by rebecca which what do we want people to do so that we can fight the real abuses that are actually harming human rights when there is our esmond against women or minorities discrimination incitement to violence and etc this is a big human rights problem that we are confronted with because precisely there is a new environment a new technological environment so i want to throw back the question that we sometimes eluding which is that the gov the good ones if the are any left yeah there are some left and anyway there are people inside the government's who are trying to deal with those issues and they're really looking for answers and it is very difficult to provide answers but i think this community contribute to make to help the actors who want to find the proportionate responses to those who are trying to abuse the instruments first point sort of connecting some of these things and a challenge from a freedom of expression perspective is the way that this concept of of cve which which doesn't have a basis in evidence and logic has already been like rubber stamped and mainstreamed by the united nations through this extra generals and plan of action illness and i think one of the challenges with that in particular is that it's the states that we normally call on to stand up for freedom of expression like them norway switzerland the us the uk and others that are very much on board with that agenda collaborating with egypt and saudi arabia to see the implementation of this at the national level and that's something that article nineteen interested in engaging in more and i think another trend in relation to thanks we have just seven eight minutes for final comments and i propose to ask the speakers to speak in the order in which they made presentations except revise i think that you maybe need to leave first so if you wanted to to start and just noting a couple a number of common themes in our conversation the questions of the identifying gaps in research the link between speech and violence does standard human rights law provide us some guidelines what do we want people to do or are we instead engaged in making very clear about what governments may not do cannot do the the the notion of social engineering and is this one of the dangers that we're facing so i turn it over to you fine so to start thank you i think the questions are a whole panel discussion of themselves but but really quickly i think this idea about the connection of speech to violence and you know you brought up the domestic abuse context as well and certainly you know one of the things we've seen in the context of mass violence recently is this attempt to draw a link between domestic abuse and somebody who goes on to commune oh to commit an act of mass violence and i think the thing i would say is you can look at these connections in a descriptive way and you may find some trajectories like that but the reality is that what governments try to do is use them in a predictive way and you certainly have far more people in this country and other countries who abuse their wives or husbands by far than the ones who go out and commit mass attacks i mean the numbers are just completely disproportionate you have you know millions of people who have watched our lackeys videos but only a handful who actually carry out violent attacks so i think you always have to think about it's not that words don't matter words obviously do matter but what i'm concerned about is the use of words as being a predictor of particular kinds of violent behavior and i think that's a very distinct question that being said i nonetheless tend to be a pretty much a free speech absolutist and i don't think you should take down all walkie videos for a number of reasons mainly because of this but also because i think they provide us with a historical record and with a you know something to research and one of the things just coming to content moderation i think andrews comments were really well taken you know we were i was having a discussion recently with somebody who's been working in the human rights field in cambodia and you know because you have so much content being taken down one of the concerns is that your documentation about human rights violations is actually being taken down in the process as well so the the downstream consequences of our attempts to have a kind of nicer or less radical society i think are enormous and i don't think people have really thought through that lastly i think on yes raise a really interesting question about you know data analysis to predict behavior which is very very problematic now primarily but you know in part because you know the technology isn't where they say it is and second because of the sort of discriminatory way in which most algorithms operate but the idea that you can sort of use technology to change behavior i guess i'm just a little bit skeptical given the fact that i don't think they're that great at predicting behavior either but when you get beyond sort of simple decisions like the consumers make and i think you know we can very easily take this you know oh well you know they're so great at figuring out how to target ads which they're not by the way i've been getting asked for male adult diapers for like three months on facebook so just saying but but i'm not sure that that translates into more sophisticated complex nuanced situations and you know barnard mentioned the jack the global engagement center i mean pretty much everything i've seen about the state department's attempts to change hearts and minds have been that they've been a dismal failure or else they've haven't bothered to measure the impact and just because somebody clicks on a link doesn't mean you change their mind and you're talking often about deeply held political and religious views so i think it's a little i don't think that these things are the the promise of ai i don't think as quite as as much as we so we'll we'll try and be lightning speed here in in our final comments and i hear from magnetics that we really do need to be off the stage very shortly but please adam we'd love to hear from you sure the one that threatened i'm an anti racism activist so the thread that i was all racial minorities are somehow susceptible to being radicalized because of their resentment which i think is such an interesting idea because it amounts to a recognition by the people in power that racial minorities have something to be upset about and maybe there would be a way to harness that recognition into something more positive and i think probably something that certainly i've got to do with with my colleagues and other people who work in the anti racism area need to do is find a way of positively framing expressions of resentment by venting insurgency yes it happens very frequently but i think there is another clause no mistake it's some generalization communities and there are some communities which are in between and it's very difficult from for a person outside really to understand it and some people prefer not to see one side some people prefer not to see other side and because this end the society in general usually wants more simple picture it's me it's natural some so i think it's not enough just to protect freedom of expression as a situation it's it's it's we need to suggest maybe another not not so simple but  but it's too difficult tasked for police to differentiate such things they cannot do it so it's it's not up to enforcement i think to do that we have to limitate them first and the and this has to do with the flows of discourse but it's on a model of consumption that we're becoming more and more sophisticated at and in turning us into consumers we're able to shape us in turning and politically we are able to do that as well it has to do with production prediction and i agree entirely with yasmin about the problems of prediction actually one of my books was called against prediction so i'm totally on board with that but i think it's even getting worse as a result of artificial intelligence so that's all i would say is that the because of data mining and artificial intelligence what we're doing is we're replicating patterns through artificial intelligence that even make it worse than the kind of predictive tools that we had at the beginning of the th century and that we still use today thanks jasmine just very quickly again i i think we really need to be really careful about talking about this the link between expression and violence and really thinking about what we mean by expression ideologies holding a holding a particular view or having an ideology i just think and and that as pfizer said that playing some kind of predictive role in determining violence i think there's a really big issue there and i think again i'm inner expression advocate but i think we we really need to think i think this is a theme that's come out of this conference really is about the extent to which we see there needing to be more restrictions on freedom of expression and when that's appropriate and just i think being careful well as a community when we're doing that because of the broader implications because i think one of the things that's underlied the idea of freedom of expression and the idea that it has very minimal restrictions is that freedom of expression itself is an incredibly important counter to some of the social ills that we've been talking about and i think not forgetting that point is really important whether it's problematic political discourse whether it's issues around gender having an open space of dialogue is actually incredibly important and it's the foundation so i think obviously everyone does but just really just keeping that extremism or extremism and say what is the problem that we're seeking to identify here if the problem is that certain people hold extreme hold a conservative views or problematic views and that we agree that that links to terrorism then i agree we need to say what is the solution to that and look at the solution but i actually think we need to take a step back and say what is the problem and reanalyze that and think about  that without diving in first of all when trying to answer the question having said that when we say what are the solutions i think we do have to acknowledge that in the area of cve there are already a plethora in all countries of criminal laws that incitement and a whole host of ancillary offenses so the question is do we need more than that is it legitimate from a policy and a legal perspective we need to be asking that question before coming up with  and states are then having to implement these policies that are required of the and there's very very little discussion around what the human rights impact is of these policies often as i said because they're concede of  and social media so governments one recommendation in my context at least repeal blasphemy laws just repeal them how on earth are you meant to have a discussion about violence in the name of religion without having a religious exchange how is that possible so the whole debate about violence in the name of religion is hijacked because of that question so for example after the attacks in january two thousand and fifteen on the recommendation to social media companies protect users and enforce international standards on freedom of expression that's it if a comment around religion does not incite to violence it is not radical speech