The African Internet Rights Alliance (AIRA) has made a formal submission to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) on the draft African Guidelines on Promoting and Harnessing Data Access as a Tool for Advancing Human Rights and Sustainable Development in the Digital Age.
Developed in fulfilment of Resolution 620, the draft Guidelines are — to our knowledge — the first continental instrument to treat access to data, including data held by private platforms and dominant digital services, as part of the human right of access to information. They do so from the standpoint of a region whose people have too often been the objects of data extraction rather than the beneficiaries of data use. AIRA strongly welcomes them.
Our submission endorses the draft’s direction and offers detailed proposals to strengthen it. Drawing on our members’ litigation, research and community work across the continent, we focus on several priorities:
- Guarding against inversion. An instrument built to open the state’s data to the people must never be read to open the people’s data to the state.
- Connectivity and continuity. A right of access to data has little meaning for a population that has been disconnected by an internet shutdown.
- Gender, children and disability. These dimensions should move from welcome clauses into operative frameworks — with particular attention to Africa’s position as the world’s youngest continent.
- Platform data, AI and researcher access. Where voluntary access has collapsed and statutory access elsewhere has excluded African researchers, AIRA sees an opportunity for Africa to lead.
- Implementation for African realities. Financing, capacity, languages, and the offline and informal lives of most Africans — rather than frameworks transplanted from very different contexts.
Together, the submission sets out twenty-four recommendations to help the Guidelines stand alongside the Declaration of Principles as one of the defining African human rights instruments of the digital age.
We thank the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa, Honourable Commissioner Ourveena Geereesha Topsy-Sonoo, and stand ready to contribute to the validation and implementation phases ahead.
Download the Full Submission (PDF): AIRA Submission on ACHPR Res620 Data Access Guidelines (1)
