Kategorie: Humans

All charges against Öztürk Türkdoğan, the co-chair of Turkey’s most prominent human rights organisation and a respected lawyer, should be immediately dropped, Amnesty International said today ahead of the start of his trial tomorrow.

Öztürk Türkdoğan, the co-chair of the Human Rights Association (IHD), faces baseless charges of “membership of a terrorist organization”, “insulting a public official” and “insulting the Turkish nation and the Turkish state” for public statements he made in relation to his association’s human rights work.

“The prosecution of Öztürk Türkdoğan is an undisguised attack on this one human rights defender and also on all those who speak out for human rights in Turkey,” said Julia Hall, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Research for Europe.

“With these spurious charges against the co-chair of Turkey’s longest-standing human rights organisation, the prosecuting authorities send a chilling message that increases the climate of intense fear among Turkey’s already beleaguered human rights community.”

According to IHD’s records, over 200 separate criminal investigations and prosecutions of IHD members and elected representatives of the organization are ongoing across Turkey.

“The criminalization of human rights defenders and of the Human Rights Association are the true insults here. The authorities’ unrelenting attack on Öztürk Türkdoğan and Turkey’s civil society movement has to end,” said Julia Hall.

“Turkey must immediately drop all charges against Öztürk Türkdoğan and create an enabling, protective environment for civil society in line with its obligations under international human rights law.”

BACKGROUND

In December 2021, the Turkish authorities initiated three separate prosecutions against Öztürk Türkdoğan.

He was tried under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code allegedly for “insulting” a public official in a statement published on the IHD website on 29 June 2018. The first hearing of this prosecution, in which the Minister of Interior is the alleged victim, was held on 18 February 2022. The next hearing will be held on 11 May.

He was also charged with “membership of a terrorist organization” under Article 314/2 of the penal code after the authorities detained him and searched his home on 19 March 2021. During the search, his phone and laptop were confiscated. The first hearing for this case will take place on 22 February 2022.

For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact: Stefan Simanowitz, press@amnesty.org +44 (0)20 3036 5599

The post Turkey: Baseless prosecution of Öztürk Türkdoğan an “attack on all those who speak out for human rights” appeared first on Amnesty International.

A new investigation has revealed how NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware was used to infect the devices of three activists in Bahrain, demonstrating yet again the grave threat which Pegasus poses to critics of repressive governments.

Ali Abdulemam from digital rights organization Red Line 4 Gulf, with technical support from Amnesty International and Citizen Lab,  found that a lawyer, an online journalist, and a mental health counsellor, all of whom have been critical of the Bahraini authorities, were targeted with Pegasus between June and September 2021. The three cases were first identified by Citizen Lab and independently confirmed by Amnesty International. The Pegasus Project consortium had previously identified Bahrain as a potential client of NSO Group, with hundreds of Bahraini phone numbers included on a leaked list of 50,000 potential Pegasus targets.

“Bahraini authorities have pursued their crackdown on dissent in recent years, tightening their monitoring of digital media, which was the only space left for open discussion after the government outlawed the legal opposition groups. This chilling breach of the right to privacy comes in a context of harassment against human rights defenders, journalists, opposition leaders, and lawyers,” said Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

“Time and again, we have seen how NSO Group’s spyware provides a useful tool for tracking activists and government critics. We are calling on the Bahraini authorities to immediately cease their use of surveillance technologies, and for NSO and other spyware exporters to cease supplying states with this dangerous software until an international regulatory framework compliant with human rights obligations is put in place.”

NSO Group, the Israeli tech company behind the Pegasus spyware, only supplies government clients.

Mohamed al-Tajer is a lawyer who has represented the families of two victims who died due to torture by Bahraini security forces in 2011. Forensic analysis by Amnesty International and Citizen Lab showed that Mohamed’s phone was infected with Pegasus software in September 2021.

Mohamed said he was shocked and saddened by the attack.

“After all of the years of my career as a lawyer, there was nothing I could have done to protect myself from a zero-click hack. The state can hack into your device and gain access to all of your personal information, work information, financial information, emails, and personal and family photos.”

We are calling on the Bahraini authorities to immediately cease their use of surveillance technologies, and for NSO and other spyware exporters to cease supplying states with this dangerous software until an international regulatory framework compliant with human rights obligations is put in place.

Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International

The second target, Sharifa Swar, is a mental health counsellor who has published allegations on her Instagram account that the Ministry of Health is complicit in drug trafficking. Forensic analysis of her phone showed Pegasus infection from June 2021. She left Bahrain for the UK in December 2021 and has applied for asylum there.

The third target is an online journalist who requested anonymity due to fear of government reprisal. They are well known in Bahrain for covering news about the uprising in Bahrain in 2011, and about ongoing protests. The investigation found that the journalist’s phone was infected in September 2021.

“Two of these individuals were targeted after credible complaints, from Citizen Lab and Red Line 4 Gulf, that Pegasus was being misused to unlawfully target Bahraini civil society, and yet NSO continued to help spy on Bahraini citizens. The continued Pegasus attacks against Bahraini civil society shows that NSO Group cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. We urgently need to rein in the out-of-control spyware industry,” said Lynn Maalouf.

“Bahraini authorities must conduct a thorough and impartial investigation to identify those responsible for the violations perpetrated through this unlawful cyber surveillance.”

Background

This investigation was carried out as part of the Pegasus Project, a consortium of global media coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media non-profit, with the technical support of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, which conducts forensic tests on mobile phones to identify traces of the Pegasus spyware.

Previous forensic work by Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders has shown that three other Bahraini activists were hacked by Pegasus between 2019 and 2020: Yusuf al-Jamri, an online writer in exile in the UK; Moosa AbdAli, an exiled activist in the UK; and Ebtesam al-Saegh, a human rights defender still in Bahrain. In addition, over two dozen members of the Bahraini government, including more than 20 MPs, cabinet members, and royal family members are known from the Pegasus Project data to be potential targets.

NSO Group’s targeted digital surveillance tool is inherently prone to human rights violations, given its design and the lack of checks in place to ensure its proper deployment.

Pegasus severely impacts the right to privacy by design: it is surreptitious, particularly intrusive, and has the capacity to collect and deliver an unlimited selection of personal and private data.

Amnesty International, Forbidden Stories, and the Pegasus Project have shown how Pegasus has been used to spy on journalists, activists, and human rights defenders in countries all across the world, from Latin America to Asia.

The post Bahrain: Devices of three activists hacked with Pegasus spyware appeared first on Amnesty International.

You may have heard that Google and Facebook’s business model is built on gathering and monetising huge amounts of data about people – but what does that mean?

Google and Facebook’s services dominate the internet. Their services range from browsers (Chrome), mobile operating systems (Android), video sharing platforms (YouTube), messaging services (WhatsApp), social media (Facebook, Instagram), to Google Maps, Google Search, Google Calendar and Google Photos.

 Advertisers are willing to pay more for detailed inferences and predictions about people – so Google and Facebook are constantly trying to find out more information about you to build as accurate a profile as possible.  Our profiles include predictions of our moods, ethnicities, sexual orientation, political opinions, and vulnerabilities. In short – the more targeted an ad is to you; the more money Facebook or Google makes.

Many of us accept that giving some information to Google and Facebook is part of the deal of using their platforms. The problem is that the tracking is far more invasive than we realise, and amounts to ubiquitous corporate surveillance of our digital lives.  

How far does Google and Facebook’s tracking reach?

Part of the reason the tracking can be so invasive is because of Facebook and Google’s dominance over the digital world, meaning its almost impossible to avoid. 

For example, most smartphones use Google’s Android operating system. One study found that an idle Android phone sent Google 900 data points over the course of 24 hours, including location data. Facebook also tracks users on Android through its apps, logging people’s call and SMS history.

A 2018 study found that Facebook trackers are embedded in almost half of all free apps for Android. Trackers from Google’s parent company Alphabet are embedded in nearly 90% of all free Android apps.  Both companies also constantly monitor which websites people are visiting, with Google trackers embedded in 86% of the top 50,000 websites according to a 2020 study.     

What kind of data is being collected?

When you create a Google account, you give Google some personal information – such as your name and your password. But Google also tracks a huge range of activities: the places you go, the purchases you make, everything you do on the web while using Chrome, everything you search for while signed into Google, everything you do inside Google’s apps, all your Google assistant commands and your YouTube search and watch histories.  

As a default, Google stores search history (including deleted searches) across all an individual’s devices, data on every app and extension they use and all their YouTube history.

Similarly, Facebook collects a huge amount of data about its platform users, including about the content you post, such as the location of a photo or the date a file was created. According to Facebook’s privacy policy, the company also collects data on the people you communicate with the most and the pages, accounts, hashtags and groups you are connected to.

Facebook can track you via web browsers, user IDs, consecutive logins, the time at which you logged in and which chat tabs are open. Even if you are not browsing Facebook, Facebook is watching what you are doing.

Facebook also collects data on people who don’t even have a Facebook account. It owns WhatsApp and Instagram and can pull data from those platforms as well. Like Google, Facebook’s reach goes far beyond Facebook itself – the two companies sit at the heart of digital advertising, tracking people across the digital world and combining the data with the information obtained through their platforms.

These companies can gather information about almost every aspect of us, and they are constantly working to expand their reach – including into our innermost thoughts, with innovations such as brain-computer interfaces.

Predicting our behaviour

Data-gathering practices like these mean that Google and Facebook can infer information about you that you haven’t knowingly or willingly given to them.

This includes details like hobbies, career, interests, location, relationship status, possible weight, income, who you talk to and what time you go to sleep. It can also include extremely personal and private information, such as whether you have searched for incest/abuse support, incontinence, infertility, mental health or STDs.

All these details are used to create a detailed profile about you, which can then be used to target you with specific ads.

You can even be targeted based on your vulnerabilities.

Googled a question about financial help? See an ad for a loan company.

Watched a YouTube video on mental health? See an ad for antidepressants.

Recently updated your Facebook relationship status to ‘Single’? See an ad for a dating app.

AI systems are making it easier than ever for the companies to make predictions about us – in 2018, Facebook stated that one of its machine learning frameworks was making up to 200 trillion predictions a day. These predictions are used to target ads towards us – the platforms understanding of our behaviours, and the details of our lives are being used to create profit. And that profit-making drive is pushing the platforms to find more ways to gain increasingly personal information about us.

Facebook and Google’s business model is based on ubiquitous surveillance of our digital lives, which  is an assault on our right to privacy and threatens a range of other rights.  Our lives are tied to the internet – so it’s essential that we have basic human rights protections online.  

With such enormous profits at stake, Big Tech companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves – governments need to step in and make sure that laws affecting the tech sector take a human rights-based approach, so that everyone can access the internet and enjoy their human rights.

The post What is Big Tech’s surveillance-based business model? appeared first on Amnesty International.

Responding to the Kuwaiti Constitutional Court’s decision today to overturn Article 198 of the Penal Code, which criminalized “imitation of the opposite sex”, because it violates Article 30 of the constitution that guarantees personal freedom, Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director, said: 

“The Kuwaiti Constitutional Court’s decision to overturn Article 198 of the Penal Code is a welcome development and a major breakthrough for transgender rights in the region. Article 198 was deeply discriminatory, overly vague and never should have been accepted into law in the first place.

“The Kuwaiti authorities must now ensure that Article 198 is repealed in its entirety. They must also immediately halt arbitrary arrests of transgender people and drop all charges and convictions brought against them under this transphobic law.

“All those unjustly imprisoned under Article 198 must now be released, including Maha al-Mutairi who was arrested solely for being a transwoman. The authorities must also investigate all allegations of torture by security forces and install an independent mechanism for monitoring police behaviour.”

Background 

In May 2007, Kuwait’s National Assembly voted to amend Article 198 of the Penal Code. The adjustment criminalized “indecent” gestures in public and imitation of the opposite sex — a “crime” punishable by a prison sentence of up to one year and a fine. The amendment was applied arbitrarily.  

On 29 December 2021, the Constitutional Court accepted a legal challenge to Article 198.

On 3 October 2021, a court sentenced Maha al-Mutairi, a trans woman, to two years in prison and a fine under Article 70 of the Telecommunications Law and Article 198 of the Penal Code. She is currently being held in Kuwait’s Central Prison for men.  

On 5 June 2020, Maha al-Mutairi posted videos on Snapchat accusing police officers of raping and beating her during a seven-month period of detention in 2019 for “imitating the opposite sex”.

The post Kuwait: Overturning law that criminalized ‘imitation of the opposite sex’ a breakthrough for transgender rights appeared first on Amnesty International.

Amnesty International has had a longstanding presence in Thailand and is committed to continuing to promote and protect human rights for people in the country despite calls for it to be expelled, the organization said today.

“As a global movement with operations in more than 70 countries and members in 150 countries and territories, no matter where we operate, our job remains the same: to prevent, monitor and hold states, corporations and others accountable for abuses of human rights under international law,” said Kyle Ward, Amnesty International’s Deputy Secretary General.

“We offer constructive recommendations to authorities on steps they can take to uphold their international human rights obligations. We will continue to do this independently and impartially on the basis of facts. In response to the anti-Amnesty campaign and related investigation, we continue to answer any questions the Thai government may have about our work in the country.

“While we recognize that the Royal Thai Government has a duty to protect public order and national security, we continue to highlight that authorities must do so in a manner that is in accordance with international human rights law, and that is proportionate, necessary and fulfils the government’s obligations to ensure and facilitate respect for human rights, including the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

“Amnesty International’s constructive recommendations for authorities to fulfil their human rights obligations derive from internationally agreed human rights standards that Thailand has committed to uphold.

“The anti-Amnesty campaign comes at a time when authorities are separately trying to pass a controversial law regulating non-profit organizations in the country. This NPO law could have severe consequences for all civil society in Thailand, and Amnesty has repeatedly called on the government to withdraw the bill and seek further consultation. The targeting of Amnesty is taking place against a backdrop of a growing intolerance for human rights discourse among Thai authorities.”

Background:

In November, a vice minister in the Prime Minister’s office made public calls for Amnesty International to be expelled from Thailand. The official has started an online petition, helped organize calls on social media and staged small protests.

The Prime Minister responded by announcing an investigation into Amnesty International Thailand on 26 November.

The global Amnesty International movement is made up of the International Secretariat and a network of international members and national membership entities, including Amnesty International Thailand. Whilst Amnesty International Thailand and the International Secretariat are separate legal entities, they work closely together under the same Statute.

The post Thailand: Amnesty committed to continuing its work despite calls for expulsion appeared first on Amnesty International.