UN expert: Digital surveillance related chilling effects must be addressed before long-term societal damage becomes irreversible

GENEVA – The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Gina Romero, has issued a stark warning regarding the harmful impact of widespread intrusive, high-risk surveillance systems.

Driven by global securitisation, counterterrorism frameworks, and the militarisation of domestic policing, contemporary digital surveillance is destabilising associative life and undermining the long-term solidarity structures necessary to sustain social movements.

“Traditional approaches have treated surveillance strictly through an individual privacy lens,” Romero said. “We must fundamentally pivot toward the collective dimension of human rights. Contemporary surveillance is creating a permanent state of digital enclosure, where activists operate under the baseline assumption that they are constantly watched.”

The Special Rapporteur’s latest thematic report presents evidence of compound human rights harm that simultaneously interferes with other rights such as privacy, freedom of expression, non-discrimination and participation. Because of the enabling function of the rights to assembly and association, chilling effects ultimately undermine the very ability to advocate for and defend broader human rights frameworks.

The findings reveal an environment where States consistently use crime-prevention and national security narratives to reverse the presumption of innocence, structurally forcing individuals and associations to prove they do not pose a threat. Collective action is deliberately labelled as “national security threats,” “foreign interference,” or “terrorism” to legally justify surveillance architectures.

The operational impacts on civic space are severe. Perceived surveillance erodes interpersonal trust, severely deters mobilisation and recruitment, and forces organisations to re-direct resources towards complex digital security architectures and legal defence fees, at the cost of missional reach, impacting civil society work and impact.

The deployment of facial recognition technology and legislative bans on face coverings strip individuals of public anonymity, discouraging them from participating in demonstrations. Movements pushed into digital assemblies face targeted remote digital attacks, State-sponsored internet shutdowns, and public smear campaigns.

The report also describes the severe medical harm caused by digital repression, including depression, emotional exhaustion, burnout, severe hypervigilance and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Private technology firms and telecommunications providers have become complicit, prioritising profit over user protection through formal or informal information-sharing agreements and deploying technologies that deliberately exploit legislative gaps.

To halt irreversible structural harm, the Special Rapporteur calls on States and corporate actors to look beyond narrow privacy reviews. States must establish independent end-to-end oversight mechanisms to evaluate the proportionality of their overall surveillance footprint.