Hi All,
Yesterday was the 50th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human
Rights, and I wanted to congratulation us. Within ICANN, the NCUC,
since its founding, has been the voice of the UN Declaration of Human
Rights, especially Article 19, and it has been a difficult, but
wonderful responsibility. As you know, Article 19 proclaims the right
of freedom of expression:
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this
right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers.
Since our first NCUC resolutions in August 1999 in Santiago, Chile
(1999), the NCUC has urged ICANN to protect freedom of expression and
personal privacy. We have worked so hard to protect the rights of
noncommercial speech, speakers and domain name holders. It has been our
job, and responsibility, to remind the commercial community, and the
rest of ICANN, of the importance of personal, political and religious
speech. They often forget (or never knew) that for its first few
decades, the Internet (under DARPA and NSF) barred commercial speech.
The only Internet speech allowed was noncommercial, educational and
research -- a ban that continued into the early 1990s.
Many proposed policies -- including the UDRP (as first drafted) --
would have been tremendously damaging to noncommercial speech. We
fought them and committed the Constituency to protecting highe values,
those of the Declaration of Human Rights.
My great thanks to our officers and GNSO reps for the wonderful job of
NCUC. Under difficult circumstances and almost always as a minority
voice, we fought for international human rights and giving meaning to
Article 19 in the Internet Age. We have made a unique and critically
important contribution to ICANN. We have made the Internet a better
place for our children.
I think Eleanor Roosevelt, chairman of the UN Declaration of Human
Rights Committee (and my personal heroine) would have been proud. I
wish our current officers, GNSO reps and members the best in the
struggles ahead. Preserving human rights is an awesome task.
Best,
Kathy Kleiman, Esq.
Co-Founder of ICANN's Noncommercial Users Constituency (back in the old
days of 1999)
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From the UN website:
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations
adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the
full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this
historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize
the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated,
displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other
educational institutions, without distinction based on the political
status of countries or territories."