How Brazil Crowdsourced a Pioneering Law

The passage of the Marco Civil da Internet, an “Internet bill of rights” commonly referred to in English as the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, demonstrates how the Internet can be used to rejuvenate democratic governance in the digital age. The law is important not only for its content, but for the innovative and participatory way it was written, bypassing traditional modes of legislation-making to go directly to the country’s citizens. At a moment when governments of all kinds are viewed as increasingly distant from ordinary people, Brazil’s example makes an argument that democracy offers a way forward.

      The pioneering law was signed in 2014 and has three components. First, it safeguards privacy by restricting the ability of private corporations and the government to store Internet users’ browsing histories. Second, it mandates a judicial review of requests to remove potentially offensive or illegal material, including content that infringes copyrights. And third, it prohibits Internet service providers from manipulating data transfer speeds for commercial purposes. The bill was acclaimed by activists as an example the rest of the world should follow.

      What makes this law even more interesting is that it became one of the largest-ever experiments in crowdsourcing legislation. The law’s original text was written through a website that allowed individual citizens and organizations — including NGOs, businesses, and political parties — to interact with one another and publicly debate the law’s content. This process was markedly different from the traditional method of writing bills “behind closed doors” in the halls of Congress, a process that favored well-connected families and large corporations.

      Policymakers in other countries have tried to capture citizen input using social media before, but never on this scale, in a country of roughly 200 million people. Whether it would succeed was far from certain. During the website’s public launch, in 2009, one of the government lawyers summed up the organizers’ high hopes: “This experience could transform the way we discuss not just legislation about the Internet, but also the way we discuss other bills in Brazil, and, in so doing, reconfigure our democracy.”

Adapted from http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/19/how-brazil-crowdsourced-a-landmark-law/

                                   This migrant crisis is different from all others

      2015 was unquestionably the year of the migrant. The news was dominated for months by pictures of vast crowds shuffling through the borders of yet another European country, being treated with brutality in some places and given a reluctant welcome in others.

      When researching a report for radio and television about the migrant phenomenon, it is possible to realize that there was nothing new about it. For many years, waves of displaced and frightened people have broken over Europe again and again and the images have been strikingly similar each time.

      In 1945, __________ (1) the ethnic Germans, forced out of their homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia and obliged to seek shelter in a shattered and divided Germany. More recently, we can see floods of Albanian refugees escaping from the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian forces in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999.

      Yet there is one major difference between these waves of migrants in the past and the one we saw in 2015. Professor Alex Betts, director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University says that it was the first time Europe faced people coming in from the outside in large numbers as refugees. He explains: “The fact that many are Muslims is perceived as challenging Europe’s identity.” European societies are changing very fast, indeed, as a result of immigration. In London, for instance, more than 300 languages are now spoken, according to a recent academic study. The influx of migrants reinforces people’s sense that their identity is under threat.

      But how can the world deal conclusively with the problem? The former UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Sir John Holmes, blames global governance. “Other powers are rising,” he says - Syria is an example of this. “And the United States doesn’t have the influence it once did, so the problem’s not being fixed, no-one’s waving the big stick and we’re having to pick up the pieces.” We have endured an entire century of exile and homelessness and the cause is always the same - conflict and bad government. Unless these are dealt with, the flow of migrants will never be stopped.

                                                         Adapted from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-35091772