Published on 19-02-2024, Last modified on 19-02-2024
Public Lecture Joe Cannataci: Award Amnesty International Chair 2024
Every year, Ghent University awards the Amnesty International Chair to an outstanding person who has made a significant contribution to human rights worldwide.
Joe Cannataci is the 2024 laureate of the Amnesty International Chair. He is being honored by Ghent University for his outstanding work on the fundamental right to privacy. Cannataci will give a public lecture at the occasion of the award of the Amnesty International Chair on 26 March in Ghent.
Privacy and personality: past, present and…possibly…a future
How did you become who you are today? What are the links between your personality and privacy? Did you fashion your identity, including your sexual preferences, in public or in private? When you decided to be religious, atheist or agnostic did you discuss your ideas in private or in public? Do you broadcast your finances to the world…or do you keep them private? Why are you a private person…and why are some of your neighbours apparently not worried about making public, things that you would keep private? Is privacy really a universal right or is it an invention of Western democracies? Why are some things private in, say, Saudi Arabia but not in France…or vice-versa? What can we learn from “the three As” i.e. the Anthropology, the Archaeology and the Architecture of Privacy?
These are some of the dimensions of the fundamental right to privacy that will be explored during the Amnesty International Human Rights Chair lecture to be delivered in Ghent by Professor Joe Cannataci on Tuesday 26th March 2024. Apart from reflecting his experiences as the UN’s first -ever Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy, Cannataci will also draw on as-yet unpublished fieldwork in the jungles of Borneo, peninsular Malaysia, as well as the oldest hunter-gatherer’s in Kenya and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
Programme:
Doors: 19h30
Start: 20h00
End: 21h30
Who is Joe Cannataci?
Joe Cannataci was the first ever UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy serving the maximum of two consecutive terms between 2015 and 2021. He is head of the Department of Information Policy & Governance at the University of Malta. He also co-founded and is Co-director of STeP, Security, Technology & e-Privacy Research Group at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he holds the Chair of European Information Policy & Technology Law . He is a Senior Fellow and Associate Researcher at the CNAM Security-Defense-Intelligence Department in Paris, France and contributes to the Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies at the University of Oxford.