Human Rights Watch 49d ago

Commercial spyware and other types of surveillance technology poses a significant threat to human rights worldwide. Police and intelligence services in many countries use such technology to target activists, journalists, humanitarians, academics, and other critical voices, undermining democratic institutions, shrinking civic space, violating victims’ privacy and other rights and, in many cases, threatening their physical security. The European Union currently is doing too little to prevent sales and transfers from its member states to governments with a track record of using such technologies for crackdowns on dissent and other serious rights violations. Human Rights Watch sought information about the licensing and exports of such technology through freedom of information requests in each of the 27 EU member states and received data from nearly half of the EU countries that have sent data to the commission. Human Rights Watch analysis of that data, along with its analysis of European Commission public reports and data also obtained via transparency requests, show serious defects in the EU’s current approach. To support our work, please visit: https://hrw.org/donate Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org Subscribe for more: https://bit.ly/2OJePrw