Cyber Justice

Cyber justice is a viable approach for defining how good governance and human rights norms can be guiding principles to govern the Internet. Cyberspace is a borderless public space in which the Internet is a network and a tool that allows different digital devices to connect and communicate. Cyberspace has more and more converted into “one space” in which we move at the same time an online and an offline space. But the main difference between the offline and online space and the world we live and work in is that the online space lacks justifiability and liability of actors and institutions that provide online services that we use.

This chapter will highlight how the cyber world and thus cyberspace has become a space for principles of human rights and good governance is discussed. These principles have enjoyed popularity through the Internet, but at the same time have undergone a dramatic increase of violations and abuses.

This chapter illustrates the range of international human rights norms, standards, and mechanism that exist and can be applied to people, companies, and institutions using and moving in cyberspace.

In this chapter, the human right to privacy and the human right to information will be closely illustrated in the context of cyber justice. Good governance principles, such as accountability and transparency, are benchmarks against which these human rights are to be assessed. Public privacy is an artificial notion that aims to illustrate the challenges of balancing claims for privacy and transparency.

This chapter is about the efforts to achieve fairness and justice in the Internet through means of human rights and good governance principles. It takes global agreements, instruments, and mechanism by means of multi-stakeholder involvement to achieve cyber justice.

Cyber law is needed to govern the cyberspace. While currently developed, it will be based on existing international human rights and criminal law standards. Moreover, a new cyber law regime will not seek new norms, but it aims to develop standards and mechanism that allow to hold providers and users accountable if they violate human rights norms in cyberspace. Cyber law is the foundation for the cyber and Internet governance regime.

Shrinking cyberspace can be the consequence of different policies and activities as well as individual behavior. Governmental authorities censor the access to Internet, commercialization and privatization allow companies to charge high fees for the use of Internet, and users or HRD avoid to access certain websites due to the fear of being traced back with their IP addresses or because they no longer trust providers and available services. Despite the different reasons for the shrinking space, there are different consequences for the full enjoyment of human rights and personal development.

A global code of conduct on how to move, act, and behave in cyberspace has been the claim and utopia of many Internet pioneers over the past decades. Human rights norms, the multi-stakeholder approach, and good governance principles have been at the core of such a conduct.

Common norms, standards, rules, and regulations are key to govern the Internet and subsequently the cyberspace. But to organize and agree on them within a diverse community of four billion Internet users is the current challenge of governments, international organizations, and the multi-stakeholder community.

Cyber Governance is a regulatory and procedural setup to govern cyberspace. It is based on good governance principles and human rights norms. It is participatory and transparent and seeks to establish accountability measures that hold stakeholders accountable for their actions regardless of which country they are located or resident of.

An informal social cyber contract is the precondition to a cyber and Internet-based constitution. It will set the normative and governing frameworks of cyberspace and, thus, needs to be agreed upon by the Internet community as such.

Ultimately, the claim for cyber justice is based on a globally agreed social contract and a good governance-based cyber governance regime of which (today) four billion users generally agree upon and in which they have the possibility to interact freely and protected. This is an endeavor of a new magnitude because of the size of cyber space, the number of “cyber citizens,” and the speed and innovations IT provides. But it is not impossible as illustrated above, if this governance regimes remains to be based on the basic idea of universal human rights norms and principles which are no longer disputed among the majority of world’s population. Which in return is the same one that accesses and uses the Internet for private, economic, social, or professional causes. Good governance principles based on concepts of democracy help to design a cyber governance regime that manages these common interest of users and providers in the Internet and provide the grounds for cyber justice.