Mr. Erjon Curraj is Digital Transformation Expert/Founder & Managing Partner at Tech 360 Smart Solutions/Jean Monnet Module Coordinator/Business Development. Addressing the Regional Conference “Attacks on Democracy and Human Rights” in Skopje, he stressed that reducing the threat of hybrid attacks requires a focus on digital rights and digital literacy.
“I believe in order to be not so vulnerable, our region against such attacks , government, democracy, we need hardly to point and focus on digital rights and digital literacies, which definitely has not mentioned before that it includes as well media. This is the way how we want to tackle that, but definitely in order to do that we should be inclusive.”, stressed Curraj in the beginning of his address on the Regional Conference “Attacks on democracy and human rights”, held on 28 july 2021, in Skopje.
“They can support this awareness raising capacity development for citizens to access different digital services, particularly for those social groups that cannot have necessary skills, knowledge or have the necessary infrastructure to do so. For instance: marginalized communities, vulnerable groups, rural youth, elderly as mentioned before. I have many cases here so they see media saying so a lie had never mentioned before and everybody believe, it because they have learned on traditional medias have proved information and using there and so they believe what is also in digital videos. This is something we have to work actually from very young ages, that’s a bit mentioned also before. For these reasons you need to work so young and throughout the life and good life learning for this all the different ages of our region. This point digital rights, protection is actually the core stone of digital democracy. CSO`S can as well monitor the quality of public digital services and hold the government accountable and push for more transparency, because we mentioned before from three parties from China and Russia, but actually we have the same issue that might come from the government themselves, before autocracy became one of our issues in our region. We have to demand from those can play a role, also to take the government more accountable and to be more transparent. This can be done as a coalition between CSO`S and media.”, pointed out Curraj regarding the role and influence of the media among the population.
Curraj says CSOs should monitor the quality of public digital services and hold the government accountable and push for greater transparency.
“CSO`s actually need to advocate for a policy dialogue with all stakeholders for the enhancement of strategic and legal framework. On visualization and data protection something which in our region it’s quite in baby steps, and that’s the problem we have. The case last year, some months ago about one million of data provided from the government system and this data have been used for let’s say election purposes and this is not actually a problem. The problem is that the citizens themselves they didn’t care, they didn’t thought that this is some bigger breach of their protection and so that’s what worries me, says Curraj.
“That’s why they need to have more knowledge, more culture on what is this data or their rights about the digital data etc and private data. It still needs to facilitate this process and they need to cooperate with academia, supporting schools in project development or digital competences through mobility and exchange of experiences, capacity building for teachers and professors so the CSO`s need to partner also with business center for digital skills and reskilling for labor force. Here we see how they all go together. We see academia, we see education sector, we see private sector, also government. All together they have to play quite a crucial role altogether. As mentioned before what is very important, we have to focus in here. CSO`s can play this vital role in our democracies in order to start tackling digital rights, literacy working with academia, within the private sector and for raising awareness on digital rights and democracy.”, concluded Curraj.
Camera: Dehran Muratov
Video editing: Arian Mehmeti
Photography: Ognen Boshnjakovski
