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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). He is the 2023-2024 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Public International Law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights at Lund University, Sweden. 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. In addition to his academic work, he is the Independent Board Chair of the Global Network Initiative and a Trustee of the global freedom of expression organization, ARTICLE 19.

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).

Articles, Essays, Reviews

The United Nations Charter, International Human Rights, and the Hollowness of Sovereignty Claims, Oxford Handbook of Human Rights Advocacy (2023/forthcoming), available at SSRN.
A review of Samuel Moyn’s Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, 117 American Journal of International Law 177 (2023).
Online Propaganda, Censorship and Human Rights in Russia’s War Against Reality, 116 American Journal of International Law Unbound 140 (2022).
Convergence and Conflict: Reflections on Global and Regional Human Rights Standards on Hate Speech (with Evelyn Aswad), 20 Northwestern Journal of Human Rights 165 (2022).
The Troubled World of Hate Speech Regulation (review essay), 21 Journal of Human Rights 110 (2022).
Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Elgar Encyclopedia of Human Rights (eds., Nowak et al) (2022).
The Spyware State and the Prospects for Accountability, 27 Global Governance 483 (2021).

Reports Submitted as UN Special Rapporteur

David Kaye, Academic Freedom and International Human Rights Law, UN Doc. A/75/261 (28 July 2020)_
David Kaye, Disease Pandemics and the Freedom of Expression, UN Doc. A/HRC/44/49 (23 April 2020)
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).

David Kaye

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