On the closing day of the Summit, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media and Catherine Trautmann, Member of the European Parliament co-hosted a Workshop on "Human Rights and the Information Society". Trautmann (Social Democrats) also was the special rapporteur on the WSIS for the European Parliament. Her report was adopted in plenary on 23 June 2005.

Speakers included: Ambeyi Ligabo, UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Catherine Trautmann from the EU Parliament, Sidiki Kaba, president of the International League of Human Rights, Sharon Hom from Human Rights in China, and Rikke Frank Jørgensen, Danish Human Rights Institute and author of this contribution.

The purpose of the workshop was to cover a range of issues pertaining to

The EDRI and XS4ALL petition against data retention has attracted over 55.500 signatures, of which over 20.000 from the Netherlands (where the campaign was launched), over 6.500 from Germany and almost 6.000 from Finland. Runners-up in the daily country count are Bulgaria (over 3.000), Sweden and Spain (over 2.000 each), Austria (over 1.750). France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, the United States and Slovenia have each contributed over a 1.000 signatures.

Currently, 81 organisations and companies have signed in support of the petition. The petition is available in 21 languages, with Portugese as the last addition.

The campaign continues to invite last-minute signatures and support. The petition will be offered to the European Parliament before the end of November.

Petition
http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com

The sixth edition of Swiss Big Brother Awards ceremony was held in Zurich's Rote Fabrik on 29 October 2005. The Swiss jury received 100 nominations in four categories: government, business, workplace and the special life-time achievement award. The financial services branch of Swiss Post, Postfinance, was awarded the business award for the illegal transfer of bank transaction data to the United States. The transfer became apparent after a Swiss man tried to transfer an amount in US dollars to a Cuban travel agency based in Switzerland. Both bank accounts were registered in Zurich. Although the man assumed the transfer was purely domestic it turned out that Postfinance uses its US partner Western Union for all transactions in US dollars. The man was notified that the US Department of the Treasury had confiscated his money because of the US embargo against Cuba. Postfinance advised him to send a protest to the US authorities in order to get his money back. So much for the Swiss bank secrecy.

In a carefully worded report, the coalition of EU privacy commissioners (the Article 29 Working Party) criticises both the Council and the Commission policies on data retention. The Article 29 Working Party calls for restraint and safeguards that have to date not appeared in any national or EU policy. "The Working Party questions whether the justification for an obligatory and general data retention coming from the competent authorities in Member States is grounded on crystal-clear evidence. The Working Party also doubts whether the proposed data retention periods in the draft Directive are convincing." And when it comes to safeguards, the Working Party states: "imposing the said data retention obligations on communication service providers without having first realised adequate, specific safeguards is not to be accepted within the existing European legal framework."

Behind closed doors, the European Parliament is engaged in a monumentous battle with the Council of ministers of Justice over the plans for mandatory data retention. After a first meeting of the leading parliamentary committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) on Monday 24 October, it looks like a majority of social-democrats, greens and some liberals is ready to delete internet data from the proposal all together, focus on a very limited set of telephony data and store them for only 3 months, while deleting the abhorred 'comitology procedure'.

During the debate with LIBE the European Commission provided some technical explanations about their proposal for a directive. A 'connection label' is a number only related to voice over IP connections. And the term user ID only relates to internet access. That would clearly exclude the logging of data about e-mail correspondence. The Commission also explains to what extent service operators should retain data on other services. A question from the EP was "If a Vodafone user calls a Base user, how should Vodafone obtain knowledge on the identity of the Base user?" Answering that question, the Commission says the providers only need to deal with data 'generated or processed in the process of supplying their communications services', so in this example, Vodafone would only have to provide the number of the Base user.

The EDRI and XS4ALL petition against data retention has attracted over 54.000 signatures, of which over 20.000 from the Netherlands (where the campaign was launched), over 6.000 from Germany and 5.750 from Finland. Runners-up in the daily country count are Bulgaria (over 3.000), Sweden and Spain (over 2.000 each), Austria (over 1.500). Italy, the UK, Belgium, France, Slovenia and the US respectively, have each contributed over a 1.000 signatures.

Currently, 79 organisations and companies have signed in support of the petition. The petition is available in 20 languages.

The campaign continues to invite signatures and support throughout October 2005, when the Commission proposal is debated by the European Parliament. Meanwhile, the Council is still threatening to adopt a framework decision

Today the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) has launched a new 18 month panel on terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights. "The legal community worldwide must now take a leadership role in articulating how the rule of law can be respected in addressing terrorism in its many complex global and local forms." The ICJ has formulated 10 legal and policy issues the panel should address. One of them addresses the issue of blanket electronic surveillance: "Do we need to have intrusive surveillance of public places and transports, data on travel, phone calls and Internet use in order to protect people from terrorism?" Other issues are freedom of speech (How can we criminalise incitement to violence without eroding freedom of speech, the press and religion?), discrimination (how to increase security without discriminating,

Charles Clarke from the UK Home Office uttered some incredibly harsh threats to the European Parliament committee on civil liberties (LIBE) on 13 October, the day after the Council meeting, but his barking could not conceal the fact the ministers of Justice and Home Affairs did not have any teeth to bite with. Several national parliaments (Germany, Austria, the Netherlands) have not given their ministers the go-ahead on the framework decision on data retention. But according to Council conclusions, "The Council agreed to revert to this issue at its next meeting with a view to a final decision before the end of the year."

Clarke obviously thought it was a good strategy to try to intimidate the MEPs. If they didn't agree before December in first (and last!) reading on introducing data retention, he said, the ministers would pull out the