Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice, UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, and the Civic Space Initiative invite you to participate in a roundtable discussion with Clément Voule, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, on the role of technology companies in defending freedom of assembly and association online.
In recent years, the right to free assembly and association online has been challenged from numerous sides, often under the pretext of national security, public order, morality, and prevention of abuse. These restrictions include blocking of groups and websites focused on minority groups, large-scale Internet shutdowns, mass online harassment and doxing campaigns, and the use of facial recognition software to identify protesters. Violations of offline rights are spilling over into online spaces, where their impact ripples through entire societies. This creates an urgent need for the protection of these rights in new domains. The United Nations is seeking input from the private sector, academic experts, and the broader public on how to protect these shrinking spaces.
Participants are invited to share cases in which individual and collective rights to peacefully assemble online were violated. The conversation will inform the Special Rapporteur’s report to the United Nations Human Rights Council on threats to free assembly in the digital realm and how they can be addressed.
Lunch will be provided prior to the event.
We Look forward to your attendance at this special event.
CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.
In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.
In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.
His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
Francis Fukuyama sits down with Cameron Munter to discuss his latest book. Listen here.
Francis Fukuyama sits down with The World's Carol Hills to go over the identity politics of 2018. Listen here.
