No-one should ever have to make a decision at 4:45am. But I picked up my phone and cancelled my taxi to the airport, just as it was pulling up outside.
The prior evening, the Lusaka Times had published that the Zambian Minister of Technology had decided to “postpone” the RightsCon conference, due to start the following week and the reason for my early start that morning.
“Certain invited speakers and participants remain subject to pending administrative and security clearances” was the ministerial reason for the postponement.
At 6:30am, the RightsCon organisers confirmed that the conference was off, and that delegates should not travel. Those already in transit would have to turn around and come home.
I was going to RightsCon to participate in a panel discussion about various nations’ implementation of age-verification. I’d be talking about the Australian social media ban, the lack of evidence for its success, and the growing pile of evidence that it’s turned-out to be the abject policy failure that we predicted back in 2024. The panel would also talk about the UK’s Online Safety Act, which teenagers have been gleefully circumventing to access the parts of the internet that adults would rather pretend their teens don’t know about. We’d look at the US context of regulation-free internet services, and the impact on child safety. And we’d talk about the situation across Africa, where many governments are eyeing-up or already implementing schemes to restrict internet access under the guise of “family values” or “national security.”
Sadly, that conversation and hundreds of others like it will no longer be happening. Instead, the digital rights of everyone, everywhere, will be worsened because advocates, academics, technologists, and civil servants will not be able to grow our collective understanding of how best to protect human rights in the digital age.
In an almost-completely-predictable twist, the RightsCon organisers have asserted that the Zambian government cancelled the conference after being pressured by the Chinese government over the attendance of delegates from Taiwan. Rightly, Access Now resisted Chinese demands to “moderate specific topics and exclude … Taiwanese participants from in-person and online participation.”
The day after the Zambian government cancelled RightsCon, the Chinese/pan-African free-trade deal came into effect.
Now the dust has settled, there remains an important question for digital rights activists and RightsCon: what happens next? RightsCon was hosted in Zambia so that African delegates could attend without the visa and immigration issues unfairly inflicted on them by previous host nations. But the Zambian government’s fealty to China demonstrates that the conference cannot reliably be held in nations where the Chinese government enjoys significant leverage. Leaving us with a conundrum: which countries in the world have a sufficiently rights-respecting government that will allow difficult conversations about state interference with human rights, yet also have a sufficiently liberal visa policy that delegates from global majority nations can secure entry. Sadly, it’s not a long list and that demonstrates why the work of RightsCon is so very important.
RightsCon is a great institution and the world is worse off without it. Digital Rights Watch stands in solidarity with the organisers, Access Now. We’d like to thank all of the amazing people who worked so hard on RightsCon 2026 - this year’s state interference shows how your work is more important than ever. We’ll see you in 2027.