Author: Paloma Dean
DOI: 10.57912/27325614
Between January and March of 2024, the Pulse Internet Society has recorded twenty-two separate internet shutdowns. That is over one and a half times the number of shutdowns recorded in the first quarter of 2023. Internet shutdowns occur when—usually a government actor—intentionally disrupts internet traffic. States can shut down the internet in regions of their country, over the entire country, and even outside of their borders. Most internet blackouts occur during times of upheaval. These blackouts are usually a method of silencing internet users, restricting opposition, and stifling humanitarian aid.
In 2011, the United Nations (UN) recognized the internet as “a key means” for people to exercise their freedom of opinion and expression, and—implicitly—that by cutting people off from the internet, states are violating these rights. Additionally, internet shutdowns disrupt important functions in the targeted region. Humanitarian aid will become less effective, as aid workers cannot get information as quickly. Hospitals and other medical centers run on the internet and digital infrastructure and they would cease to function properly without internet access. On top of all of this, internet blackouts provide cover for government actors and other individuals to commit crimes against humanity without record. According to data collected from this source, since 2018, there have been over one thousand two hundred and thirty-eights internet blackouts, and nearly all of them have violated human rights and put the targeted populations at unnecessary risk. Despite this, the international community has done little to regulate and punish internet shutdowns.
The first widely recognized internet shutdown occurred in 2007 when Guinean president Lansana Conté declared martial law and shut down his country’s internet for thirteen days. At the time of the blackout, internet use in Guinea was so minimal that all Conté had to do to disrupt Guineans internet access was physically shut down the internet cafes and news stations in his country. With modern technology, physical action is no longer needed to cause internet shutdowns. Most of them are done remotely. The two most common ways to cause an internet blackout are to tamper with the power grid and internet infrastructure such as cell phone towers, or to restrict specific internet platforms by blocking their specific IP addresses. It’s near effortless for governments to cause internet shutdowns for any area where they can access internet infrastructure, even including territories not within a government's borders.
In 2020, the Ethiopian military began operations in the region of Tigray, the northernmost state in Ethiopia. All sides involved in the war have been accused of atrocities from famine to ethnic cleansing to rape and many other violations of international law, but one violation that is not getting as much press is the two year long internet blackout in Tigray that silenced over six million people and hindered aid efforts in the region. When the war ended, one of the conditions in the agreement signed by the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front was the immediate return of the internet to the region. However, the people in Tigray have not experienced a full return of their internet. Their telephone and communications access has been restored—allowing humanitarian organizations to coordinate aid more easily—but internet access has remained throttled, preventing the people of Tigray from being able to express to the world the reality of what happened to them during the war.
Despite the ongoing internet blackout and the myriad of other recorded human rights abuses, the UN Rights Body and the African Union have disbanded investigations into all of the abuses committed during the war including all investigations into how the internet shutdown affected Tigrayans human rights. By not prosecuting the human rights abuses caused by the internet shutdowns in Ethiopia the UN has given the Ethiopian government zero incentive to follow the peace agreement or to stop enacting new internet blackouts. This implicit permission is not contained to Ethiopia. The international community's silence on the issue has made it clear that such actions are permissible and authoritarians who commit the same are un-prosecutable.
Ethiopia is not the only country concealing human rights abuses under internet shutdowns. Many other nations are taking this “free pass” given to them by the international community and running with it. In 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine. A big part of the first wave of this attack was a cyber attack called AcidRain that remotely disabled many frontline and military routers in Ukraine. Since 2022, Russia has enacted over twenty-five internet blackouts, twenty-two in Ukraine and at least three domestically. Like in Tigray, many of Russia's internet shutdowns in Ukraine coincided with documented human rights abuses. These internet shutdowns hamper humanitarian aid in all of the afflicted regions of Ukraine and the lack of quick and up-to-date information puts more lives at risk.
Unlike the situation in Ethiopia, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have both pressed charges against Russia, however none of the charges pressed against Russia deal with the internet blackouts the Federation is enacting. Outside of one OHCHR report on human rights in Ukraine, the international community has stayed silent on the internet shutdowns enacted during the war.
This silence on internet blackouts has allowed countries like Russia and Ethiopia to continue blocking the internet as they please. In Ukraine, Russia has recently been able to disrupt Ukraine’s Starlink—a SpaceX initiative that provides high speed broadband internet via the world's largest satellite constellation—that Ukrainians have been dependent on since the first wave of Russian internet shutdowns. In Ethiopia, it has been two years since the signing of a ceasefire agreement that bound the Ethiopian government to restoreinternet access to Tigray, yet the Tigrayan region still does not have all of its internet and infrastructure restored. In addition to the snail-like pace of internet restoration in Tigray, the Ethiopian government has enacted similar shutdowns in the Amhara region since February of 2023. The most recent shutdown—which started in August of 2023—only ended in late July of 2024, and the threat of more blackouts is still very present.
While the UN and most other intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have stayed largely silent on this matter, since as early as 2000 individual states have been protecting their citizens and residents from internet blackouts. In 2000, Estonia’s Electronic Communications Act made “connections to a communication network” one of the nations universal services—a service available to “all end-users requesting it” at an affordable price. In 2010 Finland and Costa Rica both codified internet access—Costa Rica declared it a fundamental right of its citizens while Finland declared “functional internet” as a part of Finnish universal service. More recently in 2020, the Jakarta State Administrative Court ruled it was illegal for the government to shut down the internet in Papua and West Papua.
One of the only major IGOs to criticize internet shutdowns and take substantial actions toward protecting human rights and access to the internet on a regional scale is the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). On multiple occasions since 2020, ECOWAS has declared internet blackouts illegal. In 2020, the ECOWAS high court made a binding ruling in which the Togolese government had to reinstate and protect access to the internet following a nine day long internet shutdown. In 2023, the court ruled that the 2020 Guinean internet blackout violated human rights and was illegal. The court ordered the Guinean government to create laws that would prevent these shutdowns from happening again. Most recently, the ECOWAS high court found that the 2021 Nigerian Twitter ban violated human rights and once again mandated that the Nigerian government amend its laws to make sure another blackout never happens again. Since their respective rulings, none of these three governments have enacted another internet shutdown, and since the most recent ruling in 2022, only two out of the fifteen ECOWAS member states have enacted blackouts. Nevertheless, without an international consensus on both the stigma and appropriate punishment, internet shutdowns are likely to continue.
Going forward, the UN and other IGOs will need to take actions like ECOWAS and these countries have in order to prevent further internet blackouts in times when internet and communications access is essential. Every internet shutdown—no matter how long it lasts—violates the right to freedom of expression and shuts down quick communication, putting everyone in the area targeted by the blackout at higher risk of injury or even death. By codifying the right to internet access for all people into international law and creating a legal precedent by prosecuting a government that has enacted an internet shutdown and violated human rights, the international community can make its stance on the issue of internet blackouts heard. The burden of a response is not just on the UN, regional IGOs like the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Arab League, and many others need to respond to the threat of internet blackouts as well. The UN is an important organization for international cooperation, but the tensions and global politics in the UN can prevent effective passing of laws and block the enforcement of rulings. It will then fall to regional organizations to protect human rights and prevent internet shutdowns. Staying silent only allows nations an easy and legally gray way to infringe on human rights. Individual states have been codifying internet access into their laws since 2000, and it is time for the international community to catch up and protect “inalienable rights of all members of the human family” from the dangers of internet shutdowns.
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