G20 + C20 + DIGITAL RIGTHS

The Group of Twenty (G20) process has not, historically, been a focus for human rights defenders working on digital issues. In part, this was because the G20 has never paid these issues much attention. Nevertheless, this circumstance has recently changed. Since 2015, references and commitments related to a broad scope of digital rights can be found in each G20 Leaders’ Final Declarations (Communiqués1).

The G20 host country (or President) in 2017, Germany, put digitalisation and the digital economy at the heart of the G20 agenda for the first time. Because the G20 was originally convened to address finance and economic policy issues, one of its biggest concerns is the digital economy. In practical terms, the G20’s inclusion of digitalisation means that there was for the first time a ministerial meeting on it and a dedicated working group, or task force, on the digital economy.

Argentina, the host country in 2018, established as one of its three priorities “the future of work”, based on the emergence of new technologies and the development of new forms of work that are rapidly changing production processes worldwide. It also kept the Digital Economy Task Force (DETF) and scheduled in the 2018 G20 annual agenda two meetings for the Task Force (February and July) and one Ministerial Meeting on Digital Economy (August).