Brazil, Germany submit anti-spy resolution to UN

An anti-spying draft resolution written by Germany and Brazil has been submitted to the United Nations amid the US surveillance scandal.

The draft resolution put forward on Friday would reaffirm “the right to privacy and not to be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, family, home or correspondence.”

The right is already protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The draft resolution would also reaffirm the “same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular the right to privacy, including in the context of the surveillance of communications.”

The draft was to be processed by the UN secretariat before being handed over to the UN General Assembly’s human rights panel for discussions.

This comes as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff have both condemned the widespread spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

Merkel has demanded the United States to enter a “no-spying” agreement with Germany and France by the end of 2013 amid recent revelations that the NSA spied on the two countries.

The German chancellor has also stressed that alleged espionage against Berlin and Paris, which are considered among closest allies of the US, should be stopped.

On October 26, a report published by German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that Merkel’s cellphone had been listed by the NSA Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002, and that her cellphone number was still listed in June 2013.

Last month, Rousseff spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, calling for international regulations on data privacy and limiting espionage programs targeting the Internet.

Rousseff’s appeal came after reports were published in September by Brazil’s Globo television network, which revealed that the NSA spied on the president’s emails, phone calls, and text messages.

Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.