MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th October, 2022) Over 100,000 people have signed a petition urging member states of the United Nations to stop sales and exports of surveillance technologies and, thus, end unlawful surveillance of political activists, journalists and lawyers from all over the world, the Amnesty International human rights group, which authored the petition, said on Friday.
"107,273 people from 180 countries and territories signed the organization's petition demanding UN member states support a global moratorium on surveillance technology until there is a proper regulatory framework that protects human rights," the group said in a statement.
Agnes Callamard, the group's secretary general, noted that there was a global spyware crisis where activists were targeted by surveillance tools as a means "to silence and intimidate them," and she urged countries to step up in their efforts to support a global moratorium on sales of surveillance technologies.
In late September, the UN Human Rights Council held a general debate to discuss the spyware crisis, among other issues.
In recent months and years, there has been a number of cases concerning the use of surveillance tools to spy on people, including the scandal that broke out around the Pegasus spyware developed by Israeli company NSO Group in 2021. The Pegasus spyware was purportedly used to spy on the phones of about 50,000 targets, including politicians, businessmen, activists, journalists and opposition figures around the world.
In the wake of the scandal in August 2021, UN human rights experts called on countries to impose a global moratorium on exports of surveillance technology. The problem of spyware was also one of the key issues addressed in the UN Secretary General's report published in September 2022.
