Ella McPherson

We must reimagine the digitally mediated freedom of assembly, a misunderstood and misattended manifestation of this human right. Mediation, or the transmission of communication across time and space, is core to the practice of assembly, and so online assembly is a more mediated version of face-to-face assembly-rather than a lesser form. Even so, digitally mediated assembly is discredited as slacktivism-slacker activism, portmanteaued-in Western public spaces. This epithet springs from a tradition of subordinating the freedom of assembly to other communication rights like the freedom of expression because it is seen as a communal (versus individual), emotional (versus rational), and positive (versus negative) liberty. Slacktivism is also a visibility backlash: a reactionary, pervasive, distracting, media-fuelled phenomenon that preserves the status quo of public visibility. Discursively repositioning assembly online as the digitally mediated freedom of assembly extends the protection of this right to more people and more practices. It highlights the importance of incorporating assembly affordances into human rights-centred technology design, such as the affordances of pre-assembly, sight and sound, and gathering. Emergent social media platform trends-like depoliticization, the fragmentations of networks, and user alienation-only make attention to assembly affordances all the more urgent. Furthermore, promoting the idea of collective rights such as assembly helps us reimagine other communication rights currently understood as individual, such as the freedom of expression, raising the possibility of a détente in the current culture wars around this right.

At first thought, iteration seems banal. It is about repeating the existing; nothing is changing.  But this special issue shows that, in an era obsessed with the new, it is often the repetition of the old that creates social change.  Iteration fosters persuasion.  It affords opportunities for critical and creative engagement with meaning, values and knowledge.  It invites collaboration, though its apparent simplicity often belies a tremendous amount of individual and collective labour involved in the practices of iteration.  Through its repetition of the existing, however, iteration also can be a mechanism for reproducing the status quo.  Its pervasiveness and banality naturalise power, and its mimetic qualities shrink spaces for critical distance and care.

The editors of this special issue have brought together a delightful and fascinating diversity of articles focused on iteration in cultural production in the digital age.  We hop across geographies to examine lockdown diaries, artists’ books, socialist memes, fake news, the design of social media platforms and artificial intelligence, activism, film, social media forum moderation, news website reader comments and more.  Iterating through the collection, across its many disciplines, is a commitment to theorising through empirical evidence, to explaining with critique, and to providing pathways to praxis.  These characteristics of this special issue, and the many concepts and arguments it puts forward, make this collection of work exceptionally rich material for seeing iteration and how it shapes the world we live in today, as well as the world we want it to be.

In this preface, I take a media sociology approach to show how iteration can be usefully understood as collaborative communication for change.  I see this understanding of iteration, whose ascendancy is related to the ascendancy of computer science, as baked into the form of communication technologies – and thus as shaping the kinds of iteration that are possible when we use these technologies.  This understanding also prompts us to focus on the connection between iteration and social change.  To explore how this works, I analytically slow down the practice of iteration to show that it is a communication practice of transmission.  That transmission practice is itself constituted of cognate communication practices – the reception, evaluation and production of knowledge – in which visibility and persuasion are key.  In the latter parts of the preface, I illustrate this through the example of witnessing as iteration, as the high-stakes nature of witnessing make it a canary in the coalmine, more generally, for mediated communication in the digital age.  I show how breaking the witnessing practice down into its various parts allows us to see how power enters and inflects who and what are iterated, when – and who and what are not.  Thinking critically with iteration and against unequal power relations, the praxis this preface suggests is one – much in line with the rest of this special issue – of explaining how iteration might move the grassroots towards their goals.

In this chapter, I argue that, while the rise of ICTs has certainly created new opportunities, it has also created new risk – or negative outcomes – for human rights practitioners. This risk is silencing, and unequally so.

The chapter begins by outlining how risk is entwined with communication in the digital age. Rather than considering risk in isolation, we can think of it as manifesting via “risk assemblages,” or dynamic combinations of actors, technologies, contexts, resources, and risk perceptions (Lupton, 2016). In the subsequent two sections, I detail selected types of risk for human rights communication resulting from new combinations of actors and technologies involved in digital fact-finding and advocacy. For fact-finding, these include the risk of surveillance, which has consequences for participants’ physical security, and the risk of deception, which has consequences for their reputational integrity. For advocacy, these include the risk of mistakes, which can in turn risk reputational integrity, and the risk of miscalculations, which can jeopardize precious resources.

In the following section, I explain how this materialized risk combines with risk perceptions to create a silencing double bind. Human rights practitioners may be silenced if they don’t know about risk – and they may silence themselves if they do. This silencing effect is not universal, however, but disproportionately affects human rights practitioners situated in more precarious contexts and with less access to resources, with ensuing consequence for the pluralism of human rights reporting. The chapter finishes by outlining four ways of loosening the risk double bind: educational, technological, reflexive, and discursive approaches to working with risk.

Pre-print version of: McPherson, E. 2017 ‘Social Media and Human Rights Advocacy’ in Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 279–88.

The rise of social media has seen its concomitant celebration as a ‘liberation technology,’ namely a technology that supports social, political, and economic freedoms (Diamond, 2010).  This chapter provides a framework for understanding how the use of social media intersects with the practice of human rights advocacy at NGOs.  This framework is not to deny the disruptive possibility of human rights advocacy conducted over social media, but rather to ground related techno-optimism in the broad and complex terrain that influences this potential (Youmans and York, 2012; Madianou, 2013).  This chapter begins by arguing that the view that social media liberates advocacy by creating new pathways to visibility rests on an incomplete conception of visibility, one which focuses on the production of communication and overlooks the corresponding transmission and reception of that communication necessary for visibility to take place (Hindman, 2010).

The visibility of human rights advocacy can be understood as depending on the logics of the social media field, the target audience fields, and the political field(s) across and within which human rights communication takes place.  This chapter overviews this field theory approach to communication before outlining in broad strokes what we know about each of these logics.  Equally important, however, is what we don’t know.  For different reasons, each of these logics is somewhat inscrutable – that of the social media field because of its novelty, mutability, and proprietary secrecy; those of target audience fields because social media advocacy effects are both hard to isolate and under-researched; and those of political fields because surveillance tactics are often covert.  All of this inscrutability creates risk, and risk, as we shall see, is anathema to visibility.  One of the benefits of the field approach is its concern with inequality (Bourdieu, 1993).  As an actor’s ability to mitigate risk corresponds to his or her resources, it may be that – instead of being a leveler – social media advocacy is exacerbating inequalities of visibility within the human rights field (Beck, 1992; Mejias, 2012; Thrall, Stecula and Sweet, 2014).  The chapter concludes by sketching a research agenda for the use of social media in human rights work.

This article draws on Gandy’s (1982) influential concept of “information subsidies” to examine strategies Mexican human rights NGOs employ to get their information into the news. By building their credibility as sources — through interpersonal relationships with journalists, through authority with human rights leaders, and through associations with NGO networks — NGOs provide a verification subsidy that shortens the time journalists need to evaluate the sources of their information. By playing to NGOs’ strengths, namely their symbolic and social capital, this type of information subsidy holds promise for pluralism and accountability in the public sphere. This promise varies, however, according to what kind of pluralism we mean: namely, pluralism vis-
a-vis the field of power, pluralism within the field of human rights NGOs, and pluralism of access to human rights accountability. It also varies according to the resources of the NGO in question, which affect the NGO’s ability to demonstrate credibility and thus to provide information subsidies. The article’s focus on the information subsidies provided by subordinate journalistic sources, particularly those that address information values about sources rather than about content, as well as on the centrality of credibility in communication across fields, further develops these concepts in media sociology.

This article is part of a special issue on 'Human Rights in the News' in the Journal of Human Rights.  See more here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14754835.2016.1176522

The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is creating a wealth of new opportunities as well as a variety of new risks for human rights practice.  Given the pace of innovation in the development and use of ICTs, our understanding of their impact on human rights lags.  This report provides a crucial and in depth look at ICT initiatives and trends across the key human rights practices of prevention, fact-finding, and advocacy, identifying both risks and opportunities. 
In prevention, ICTs can be harnessed to protect human rights defenders, to prevent violations in police-civilian interactions, and in data-driven early warning systems and communication-based conflict prevention.  That said, ICTs also create new security risks for human rights defenders and can violate the right to privacy.
In fact-finding, ICTs afford the spontaneous and solicited participation of civilian witnesses in the production of human rights evidence.  Of course, a greater volume and variety of information from unknown and untrained sources creates problems of misinformation and verification, which technology only goes so far to mitigate.
In advocacy, ICTs provide new channels for quickly and visibly mobilizing publics, for directly engaging with advocacy targets, and for spreading awareness of human rights.  That said, the effects of these new advocacy channels are unclear, and they may imperil categories of human rights and the reputations of human rights organizations.
The report also considers how digital divides and the political economy of ICTs influence the nature, extent, and distribution of these opportunities and risks.  In doing so, it outlines a research framework for understanding ICTs and human rights practice to underpin academics’ and practitioners’ assessment, development, and deployment of ICTs for and in the spirit of human rights.
An earlier version of this report, prepared for an expert meeting ahead of the June 2015 session of the UN Human Rights Council, informed the thematic report on ICTs and the right to life presented at that session by the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions.  As such, the projects profiled represent a snapshot of that timeframe; this report is therefore accompanied by a regularly updated, student-run Tumblr blog, ictandhr.tumblr.com, which welcomes submissions on new initiatives.

Last November, a YouTube video portraying a young boy rescuing an even younger girl from what seemed to be a hail of bullets went viral and hit the headlines.  The video, titled “SYRIA! SYRIAN HERO BOY rescue girl in shootout,” demonstrated both the promise and pitfall of social media for the public generation of accounts and accountability.  On the one hand, the spread of this video demonstrated how social media facilitates the participation of new communicators.  On the other, the BBC eventually debunked this video as a fake, funded by the Norwegian Film Institute and Arts Council Norway and shot by a Norwegian director in Malta on a set used by blockbuster films Troy and Gladiator, using professional child actors.  Social media’s affordance of misinformation is a problem not just for the information professionals trying to parse the wheat from the chaff, but also for the civilian witnesses trying to publicize their documentation.  This is because well-publicized incidents of misinformation reinforce gatekeepers’ verification barrier between private information and public evidence.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how professional human rights fact-finders can be understood, after Bourdieu, as a field characterized by an information logic governed by verification.  In contrast, civilian witnesses – particularly at the accidental rather than activist end of the spectrum – can be thought of as a non-field. The verification of social media information depends on digital information forensics, a rapidly evolving field combining new verification technologies with tried and tested gumshoe techniques.  These verification strategies are part of the cultural capital of the human rights fact-finding field, distributed via the networks or social capital within the field.  The flipside of these verification strategies are verification subsidies, which, after Gandy’s concept of information subsidies, are characteristics sources can supply with their information to make it easier for others to verify; these include a digital footprint to facilitate the source’s identification.  Part of the usefulness of Gandy’ concept is that it is an economic metaphor that highlights the connection between the ability to provide information subsidies and the possession of other types of resources.  The implication for civilian witnesses is that those with the least amount of symbolic capital in the form of digital footprints and the least amount of cultural capital in the form of understanding verification (in part because they are not part of a networked field) will have the most trouble in getting their social media information verified; it is often those with the least resources, however, who most need access to the public accountability mechanism of human rights.  The chapter concludes with considering how the phenomenon of third party verification subsidies, both human and machine, might lower the verification barrier.

This article contributes to the emergent literature on the use of social media at advocacy organizations. Much of this existing literature focuses on these organizations’ production of social media information; this article, however, explores the complementary and relatively unexamined consumption of social media information that can form part of advocacy work. By drawing parallels between journalism and advocacy, the article develops two theoretical models of how advocacy organizations evaluate social media information as part of this consumption. These models differ according to the information values at their cores and according to how these values are evaluated in practice; correspondingly, the models interact differently with social media’s affordances. The key information value for the evidence model is the veracity of the information’s metadata, and this is largely evaluated through a time-intensive verification process requiring corroboration and drawing on human expertise. In contrast, the key information value pertaining to the engagement model is participation, which is evaluated by measuring the volume of participants in the information’s production and transmission. The affordances of social media are often hindrances for the evidence model, because they can make metadata more difficult to verify. In contrast, the engagement model capitalizes on social media affordances, because these affordances facilitate participation as well as the evaluation of participation volume using digital analytics. In addition to shedding light on approaches to social media information evaluation at advocacy organizations, this article urges researchers and practitioners to be alive to related barriers to pluralism as they study and use these approaches.

While much of this book is focused on the effects of human rights coverage on mobilization, we must remember that this coverage is not produced in a vacuum. During the day-to-day practice of journalism, members of the media are affected by a variety of influences that determine not only what information they choose to report and how they report it, but also what information they choose to ignore. These choices – or, as the case may be, commands – shape the human rights information transmitted by the media, and, if we presume that this information has an effect on its audiences, shape mobilization as well. It is therefore very important to understand the influences on human rights reporting.

Through a case study of human rights reporting at Mexican newspapers, I aim to provide an overview of what journalists are trying to do when they cover human rights stories and how these aims interact with overt influences on journalism, such as economic considerations and political pressures, to produce human rights news. To do this, I have developed a framework for thinking about how the headlines are plucked from the informational ether of every news day. Specifically, information is assessed against basic criteria of newsworthiness. Of that which is considered newsworthy, the more a particular piece of information is in line with a newspaper’s journalistic, economic, and political aims relative to other bits of information, the more likely it is to be published. I explain these assessment categories in turn in this chapter, describing what kinds of human rights news survive this winnowing at Mexican newspapers.

This article describes social-organizational models that Mexican newspapers have evolved in response to competition from electronic media. The spot news model competes through simulation and cannibalization, and it is organized for efficiency. Its routine of speed and steep hierarchy keep newsroom credibility centralized among newspaper leaders, which makes it difficult for new sources to convince reporters to listen to them, and for reporters, in turn, to convince editors to publish new sources. The reportage model, in contrast, competes with electronic media through differentiation, emphasizing investigation and analysis over speed. Its newsroom is correspondingly organized according to a slower schedule and a flatter hierarchy. The reportage model therefore decentralizes newsroom credibility by allowing reporters the expertise and autonomy they need to put new sources into print. Though these two models represent simultaneous reactions to market competition, they have opposing effects on democratic journalism as measured by pluralism and accountability.

A small sign at the entrance of this exhibition’s London showing states, ‘Please note the Human Rights Human Wrongs exhibition… contains graphic imagery that viewers may find disturbing.’  Cue the visitor’s elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, feelings of hesitation, trepidation, curiosity – and even, perhaps, titillation.  The sign does not disappoint.  At every turn, the exhibition displays a new cruelty: a hanged pair in Syria, bloating corpses with their throats slit in El Salvador, police dogs ripping the clothes off a man in Birmingham, Alabama.  But before visitors even cross the exhibition’s threshold, this printed piece of paper – a trigger warning – may undermine its fundamental purpose.  By priming us to think about the exhibition’s lurid content, the trigger warning distracts us from critical reflection on the production of these images as relates to humanitarian aims....

Since 2011, CGHR has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, providing research support to his mandate. In 2012, a team of researchers produced a ‘Research Pack’ on the threats to the right to life of journalists for an Expert Meeting held in Cambridge, ultimately contributing to the Special Rapporteur’s report that year to the Human Rights Council. In 2013, work began on a broader collaboration studying violations of the right to life across the African continent, culminating in a report, ‘Unlawful Killings in Africa,’ to guide the Special Rapporteur’s future activity. In 2014, a CGHR research team began a study of how the use of information and communication technologies affects the right to life, resulting in this report and the ICTs and Human Rights blog. This report was originally a discussion document prepared by CGHR Research Associate Dr Ella McPherson in collaboration with the mandate of the Special Rapporteur and ahead...

'Deal with me, here I stand!' were words that Christof Heyns used to convey the drama inherent in many forms of assembly and protest. Central to so much of Christof's work – including his doctoral research on civil disobedience in South Africa and his captivation with the example of Mahatma Gandhi in struggles against injustice and colonialism – was the sense of urgency, even of crisis, that such principled action can usher forth against the seeming unassailability of state power in all its forms.

General Comment 37 should go further to recognize appropriate protections for gatherings in online spaces. This submission considers and makes recommendations first, in relation to the implications of digital mediation for the scope of the right of peaceful assembly and, second, in relation to restrictions on the right and related state obligations. Submission by Michael Hamilton, Suzanne Dixon and Jennifer Young (University of East Anglia) and Ella McPherson, Sharath Srinivasan, Eleanor Salter, Katja Achermann, Camille Barras, Allysa Czerwinsky, Bronwen Mehta and Muznah Siddiqui (Centre of Governance and Human Rights, University of Cambridge).

The scene is a dusty stretch -possibly of road -framed by rubble, old tires, barrels, abandoned vehicles and crumbling walls. The footage is shaky, giving the impression that the camera is handheld. A man runs out of a doorway opposite and shots ring out. Small puffs of smoke erupt behind and ahead of him, suggesting that bullets are hitting the wall along which he runs. A moment of calm elapses, and then the camera pans left to a young boy, probably around eight years old, getting up from the ground. The boy begins to run toward an abandoned car; the shots recommence and a puff of smoke emerges from his chest. He falls, slow-motion, first to his knees, and then to his side. He lies there, face away from the camera, for a few seconds, then begins to run again, head down, toward the car. He drops behind it, then emerges dragging a younger girl in a bright pink top by the arm. They both run back the way he came, ducking at first, then running faster as the shooting continues. Througho...

The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is creating a wealth of new opportunities as well as a variety of new risks for human rights practice. Given the pace of innovation in the development and use of ICTs, our understanding of their impact on human rights lags. This report provides a crucial and in depth look at ICT initiatives and trends across the key human rights practices of prevention, fact-finding, and advocacy, identifying both risks and opportunities. In prevention, ICTs can be harnessed to protect human rights defenders, to prevent violations in police-civilian interactions, and in data-driven early warning systems and communication-based conflict prevention. That said, ICTs also create new security risks for human rights defenders and can violate the right to privacy. In fact-finding, ICTs afford the spontaneous and solicited participation of civilian witnesses in the production of human rights evidence. Of course, a greater volume and variety of inf...

This article describes social-organizational models that Mexican newspapers have evolved in response to competition from electronic media. The spot news model competes through simulation and cannibalization, and it is organized for efficiency. Its routine of speed and steep hierarchy keep newsroom credibility centralized among newspaper leaders, which makes it difficult for new sources to convince reporters to listen to them, and for reporters, in turn, to convince editors to publish new sources. The reportage model, in contrast, competes with electronic media through differentiation, emphasizing investigation and analysis over speed. Its newsroom is correspondingly organized according to a slower schedule and a flatter hierarchy. The reportage model therefore decentralizes newsroom credibility by allowing reporters the expertise and autonomy they need to put new sources into print. Though these two models represent simultaneous reactions to market competition, they have opposing ef...

In this chapter, we first describe the settled practices of human rights fact-finding that open source investigations have disrupted. Although the authority to shape these practices is centralized largely with Western human rights institutions populated by professional experts, the more decentralized underpinnings of open source investigation – namely, the use of information produced by civilian witnesses and through diverse networks – have an equally long history. We go on to detail how the rise of new technologies in human rights fact-finding has allowed for the participation of new actors in the form of civilian witnesses and analysts and necessitated the participation of others in the form of technologists and machine processes. These new actors bring with them not only new data and new methods, but also new norms about what human rights knowledge should be. The clash of these new elements with established practices produces a knowledge controversy in which much is possible and much is at stake. In the subsequent chapter section, we take a closer look at what is at stake through examining the power relations within human rights fact-finding revealed and disturbed by this knowledge controversy. Namely, we look at the power to shape human rights methodology, because methodology rules in and rules out particular types of human rights information with respect to evidence. It thus rules in and rules out particular types of corresponding subjects and witnesses of violations with respect to access to human rights mechanisms that can help them, in turn, speak truth to power. Ultimately, we are concerned with the impact of these power relations on pluralism, or the variety and volume of voices that can speak and be heard, both in terms of shaping the practices of human rights fact-finding, and in terms of access to human rights mechanisms that help subjects and witnesses speak truth to power.

Pre-print version of: McPherson, E. 2017 ‘Social Media and Human Rights Advocacy’ in Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 279–88. The rise of social media has seen its concomitant celebration as a ‘liberation technology,’ namely a technology that supports social, political, and economic freedoms (Diamond, 2010). This chapter provides a framework for understanding how the use of social media intersects with the practice of human rights advocacy at NGOs. This framework is not to deny the disruptive possibility of human rights advocacy conducted over social media, but rather to ground related techno-optimism in the broad and complex terrain that influences this potential (Youmans and York, 2012; Madianou, 2013). This chapter begins by arguing that the view that social media liberates advocacy by creating new pathways to visibility rests on an incomplete conception of visibility, one which focuses on the production of communication and overlooks the corresponding transmission and reception of that communication necessary for visibility to take place (Hindman, 2010). The visibility of human rights advocacy can be understood as depending on the logics of the social media field, the target audience fields, and the political field(s) across and within which human rights communication takes place. This chapter overviews this field theory approach to communication before outlining in broad strokes what we know about each of these logics. Equally important, however, is what we don’t know. For different reasons, each of these logics is somewhat inscrutable – that of the social media field because of its novelty, mutability, and proprietary secrecy; those of target audience fields because social media advocacy effects are both hard to isolate and under-researched; and those of political fields because surveillance tactics are often covert. All of this inscrutability creates risk, and risk, as we shall see, is anathema to visibility. One of the benefits of the field approach is its concern with inequality (Bourdieu, 1993). As an actor’s ability to mitigate risk corresponds to his or her resources, it may be that – instead of being a leveler – social media advocacy is exacerbating inequalities of visibility within the human rights field (Beck, 1992; Mejias, 2012; Thrall, Stecula and Sweet, 2014). The chapter concludes by sketching a research agenda for the use of social media in human rights work.

This article contributes to the emergent literature on the use of social media at advocacy organizations. Much of this existing literature focuses on these organizations’ production of social media information; this article, however, explores the complementary and relatively unexamined consumption of social media information that can form part of advocacy work. By drawing parallels between journalism and advocacy, the article develops two theoretical models of how advocacy organizations evaluate social media information as part of this consumption. These models differ according to the information values at their cores and according to how these values are evaluated in practice; correspondingly, the models interact differently with social media’s affordances. The key information value for the evidence model is the veracity of the information’s metadata, and this is largely evaluated through a time-intensive verification process requiring corroboration and drawing on human expertise. ...

This article contributes to the emergent literature on the use of social media at advocacy organizations. Much of this existing literature focuses on these organizations’ production of social media information; this article, however, explores the complementary and relatively unexamined consumption of social media information that can form part of advocacy work. By drawing parallels between journalism and advocacy, the article develops two theoretical models of how advocacy organizations evaluate social media information as part of this consumption. These models differ according to the information values at their cores and according to how these values are evaluated in practice; correspondingly, the models interact differently with social media’s affordances. The key information value for the evidence model is the veracity of the information’s metadata, and this is largely evaluated through a time-intensive verification process requiring corroboration and drawing on human expertise. ...

While much of this book is focused on the effects of human rights coverage on mobilization, we must remember that this coverage is not produced in a vacuum. During the day-to-day practice of journalism, members of the media are affected by a variety of influences that determine not only what information they choose to report and how they report it, but also what information they choose to ignore. These choices – or, as the case may be, commands – shape the human rights information transmitted by the media, and, if we presume that this information has an effect on its audiences, shape mobilization as well. It is therefore very important to understand the influences on human rights reporting. Through a case study of human rights reporting at Mexican newspapers, I aim to provide an overview of what journalists are trying to do when they cover human rights stories and how these aims interact with overt influences on journalism, such as economic considerations and political pressures, to produce human rights news. To do this, I have developed a framework for thinking about how the headlines are plucked from the informational ether of every news day. Specifically, information is assessed against basic criteria of newsworthiness. Of that which is considered newsworthy, the more a particular piece of information is in line with a newspaper’s journalistic, economic, and political aims relative to other bits of information, the more likely it is to be published. I explain these assessment categories in turn in this chapter, describing what kinds of human rights news survive this winnowing at Mexican newspapers.

Since 2011, CGHR has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, providing research support to his mandate. In 2012, a team of researchers produced a ‘Research Pack’ on the threats to the right to life of journalists for an Expert Meeting held in Cambridge, ultimately contributing to the Special Rapporteur’s report that year to the Human Rights Council. In 2013, work began on a broader collaboration studying violations of the right to life across the African continent, culminating in a report, ‘Unlawful Killings in Africa,’ to guide the Special Rapporteur’s future activity. In 2014, a CGHR research team began a study of how the use of information and communication technologies affects the right to life, resulting in this report and the ICTs and Human Rights blog. This report was originally a discussion document prepared by CGHR Research Associate Dr Ella McPherson in collaboration with the mandate of the Special Rapporteur and ahead...