This statement was delivered by APC Global Programme Director Raman Jit Singh Chima to the plenary of the Global Mechanism on 22 July 2026.
Madame Chair, colleagues:
I speak to you today on behalf of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). Since this is the first time that APC is taking the floor, let me first congratulate you, Madame Chair, on your appointment, and express our appreciation for the efforts that you, the secretariat and the co facilitators have been making to help us engage in and aid the Global Mechanism.
APC is an international non-profit membership organisation born in 1990 whose network now comprises 73 organisational members and 44 associates active in over 60 countries. From our beginnings, our network has believed it is crucial for the international system to engage with civil society, public interest technologists and grassroots communities on the political and policy aspects of technology development and its governance. APC has engaged with the UN’s discussions on global cybersecurity across the successive OEWGs, and we are glad to see this permanent mechanism come into operation.
State-led and multilateral system capacity-building programmes must address the disproportionate impacts of cyber threats faced by vulnerable communities, including women, LGBTQI+ people and human rights defenders. The unique threats that different communities in the Global South face are often unrecognised – or even unrecorded – and therefore not catered for in these discussions and processes.
In effect, they are invisible.
Your excellencies: the reality is that cyber threats, models and actors are different in different communities. Civil society can support your efforts by providing evidence to better understand and mitigate their differentiated effects. Based on interviews and testimonies from women in public-facing roles, members of the APC network have documented how digital surveillance is used to intimidate, silence and restrict women’s participation in civic and political life.
In that regard, we therefore hope that this Global Mechanism builds on the recognition documented by the second OEWG of the harms posed by the global growth of the cyber mercenary, hack-for-hire spyware sector, and the critical harms it unleashes on human rights defenders, journalists and activists advocating on women’s rights and LGBTQI+ concerns. We call for further work on the gendered impact and the impact on vulnerable communities with respect to the operation of cyber mercenary actors.
Excellencies, as you may have inferred, it has often been civil society and academic research that has provided empirical evidence of the human impacts of operations such as ransomware attacks that provoke personal data breaches that affect privacy, health rights, dignity and self-development. Our networks are those which directly observe, mitigate and report on disinformation campaigns towards women politicians and journalists, internet shutdowns, surveillance and hacking that targets human rights defenders. We therefore hope that the Global Mechanism will overcome the injury it inflicted on itself by the initial blocking of so many stakeholders who we so critically need to see sitting beside us here.
Madame Chair, APC and our partners have been organising training activities to equip stakeholders with the capacities needed to engage in global cybersecurity policy discussions. We urge you to ensure that this process is both enabling and a safe space for civil society, vulnerable communities and security researchers to participate and aid these crucial cybersecurity global processes.
We believe that the work of the Global Mechanism and its DTGs should also aim to help states to build appropriate cybersecurity laws and policies which aid, and which do not overreach or oppress. Our members and partners have urged governments to implement gender-sensitive cybersecurity laws that explicitly address digital violence and to establish holistic, rapid response mechanisms to prevent escalation. We hope that this is a topic prioritised for discussion and development by the DTGs.
Excellencies, we also urge you to pay careful attention to how the current race for the deployment of AI technologies impacts the Global Majority and vulnerable communities with respect to information security. We believe that the Global Mechanism and its DTGs should examine how the current race for AI deployment, especially in the public sector, is impacting security vulnerabilities and in turn affecting vulnerable communities and individuals.
Additionally, in the sphere of AI and cybersecurity, we believe that the Mechanism should ensure that the lessons of the last two decades on human rights and feminist-anchored approaches to technology are a foundation that is used to build efforts on.
In closing, Madame Chair, rest assured that all stakeholders – whether accredited or not – stand ready to make themselves of assistance to you and all delegates in our shared journey. We urge you to listen to us: we share critical information and vulnerabilities in our technical, legal and diplomatic spaces which this Mechanism was established to help patch.