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David Kaye
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David Kaye

Clinical Professor of Law

Expertise:

Public international law, international humanitarian law, human rights, international criminal justice, the law governing use of force, and freedom of expression

Background:

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2014-2020). His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.

Appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2014, David served through July 2020 as the global body’s principal monitor for freedom of expression issues worldwide. He reported to the UN on COVID-19 and freedom of expression and, in 2019, to the UN General Assembly on online hate speech. His earlier reporting addressed, among other topics, the ways in which Artificial Intelligence technologies implicate human rights issues, the global private surveillance industry and its impact on freedom of expression, growing repression of freedom of expression globally, encryption and anonymity as promoters of freedom of expression, the protection of whistleblowers and journalistic sources, the roles and responsibilities of private Internet companies, and the regulation of online content by social media and search companies. He conducted official missions to Japan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Mexico, Liberia, Ecuador and Ethiopia, and regularly addressed major policy and academic conferences dealing with free expression, technology and media freedom worldwide. Together with the regional monitors of freedom of expression in Europe (OSCE), the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, he joined six Joint Declarations on major contemporary challenges for free expression and independent media worldwide.

After doing his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the U.S. State Department as a lawyer in 1995. In 2002, while the principal lawyer for international humanitarian law at the State Department, he was an advocate inside government for application of the Geneva Conventions to detainees captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which the United States had invaded in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, or otherwise brought to the U.S. Naval detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In addition to his work on human rights and freedom of expression, his academic research and writing have focused on accountability for serious human rights abuses, international humanitarian law, and the international law governing use of force. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, he has also published essays in such publications as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, Slate, Foreign Policy, JustSecurity and The Los Angeles Times.

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Recent Publications

Book

David Kaye, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports 2019).

Reports Submitted as UN Special Rapporteur

David Kaye, Online Hate Speech, UN Doc. A/74/486. (9 October 2019).
David Kaye, The Private Surveillance Industry, UN Doc. A/HRC/41/35 (28 May 2019).
David Kaye, Artificial Intelligence and Freedom of Opinion and Expression, UN Doc. A/73/348 (29 August 2018.
David Kaye, Company Content Moderation and State Regulation, UN Doc. A/HRC/38/35 (6 April 2018).
David Kaye, The Right to Information in International Organizations, UN Doc. A/72/350 (18 August 2017).
David Kaye, Freedom of Expression and the Digital Access Industry, UN Doc. A/HRC/35/22 (30 March 2017).
David Kaye, Contemporary Challenges to Freedom of Expression, UN Doc. A/71/373 (6 September 2016).
David Kaye, The Private Sector in the Digital Age, UN Doc. A/HRC/32/38 (11 May 2016).
David Kaye, The Protection of Sources and Whistleblowers, UN Doc. A/70/361 (8 September 2015).
David Kaye, Encryption and Anonymity, UN Doc. A/HRC/29/32 (22 May 2015).

Articles, Essays, Reviews

David Kaye, Legitimacy, Collective Authority and Internet Governance: A Reflection on David Caron’s Study of the UN Security Council, Berkeley Journal of International Law (forthcoming 2019).
David Kaye, Foreword: Private Actors and Human Rights Online, in Human Rights in the Age of Platforms (MIT: 2019, Rikke Frank Jørgensen, ed.).
David Kaye, The Limits of Supply-Side Internet Freedom, Knight First Amendment Institute, Emerging Threats Series (June 2018).
David Kaye, Right is Might, in Committee to Protect Journalists, Attacks on the Press (2017).
David Kaye, The Council and the Court: Law and Politics in the Rise of the International Criminal Court, 94 Texas Law Review 713 (2016) (book review, with Kal Raustiala).
David Kaye, Archiving Justice: Conceptualizing the Archives of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Journal of Archival Science (2014).

David Kaye

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