You need to read Article 21. And as you read it, keep in mind it’s a public library.

(edit) There was a day when black people were denied access to the library. I suppose you would have said “Bruh, denying books is not a human rights violation” without any kind of legal rationale that articulates the meaning of Article 21.

Bizarre that so many here think it’s human-rights compliant to block poor people (those without phones) from public internet; who are in fact the people who need it most as governments are abolishing analog mechanisms of public service. Would be interesting to survey that same crowd on how many of them find it okay to block black people from publicly owned books. People can’t be this obtuse. It’s likely a high density of right-wing conservatives here, who understand human rights law but simply condemn anything they regard as competing with their privilege.

The UDHR is not a treaty, so it does not create any direct legal bindings.

Sure, but where are you going with this? Legal binding only matters in situations of legal action and orthogonal to its application in a discussion in a forum. Human rights violations are rampant and they rarely go to The Hague (though that frequency is increasing). Human rights law is symbolic and carries weight in the court of public opinion. Human rights law and violations thereof get penalized to some extent simply by widespread condemnation by the public. So of course it’s useful to spotlight HR violations in a pubic forum. It doesn’t require a court’s involvement.

The judge who presided over the merits of the Israel genocide situation explained this quite well in a recent interview. If you expect an international court to single-handedly remedy cases before it, your expectations are off. The international court renders judgements that are mostly symbolic. But it’s not useless. It’s just a small part of the overall role of international law.

The article you quote may have been excluded, overwritten or rephrased in your jurisdiction.

I doubt it. It’s been a while since I read the exemptions of the various rights but I do not recall any mods to Article 21. The modifications do not generally wholly exclude an article outright. They typically make some slight modification, such as some signatories limiting free assembly (Art.20 IIRC) to /safe/ gatherings so unsafe gatherings can be broken up. I would not expect to see libraries excluded from the provision that people are entitled to equal access to public services considering there is also Article 27:

“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

The European HR convocations take that even further iirc.

I see that the relevant websites (FCC and lifelinesupport.org) both block Tor so you can’t be poor in need of the Lifeline and simultaneously care about privacy. Many parts of the US have extremely expensive telecom costs. I think I heard an avg figure of like $300/month (for all info svcs [internet,phone,TV]), which I struggle to believe but I know it’s quite costly nonetheless. One source says $300/month is the high end figure, not an avg. Anyway, a national avg of $144/month just for a mobile phone plan is absurdly extortionate.

About Lifeline:

Lifeline provides subscribers a discount on qualifying monthly telephone service, broadband Internet service, or bundled voice-broadband packages purchased from participating wireline or wireless providers. The discount helps ensure that low-income consumers can afford 21st century connectivity services and the access they provide to jobs, healthcare, and educational resources.

So they get a discount. But you say free? Does the discount become free if income is below a threshold? Do they get a free/discounted hardware upgrade every 2-3 years as well, since everyone is okay with the chronic forced obsolescence in the duopoly of platforms to choose from? In any case, I’m sure the program gets more phones into more needy hands, which would shrink the population of marginalized people. That’s a double edged sword. Shrinking the size of a marginalized group without completely eliminating it means fewer people are harmed. But those in that group are further disempowered by their smaller numbers, easier to oppress, and less able to correct the core of the problem: not having a right to be analog and be unplugged (which is an important component of the right to boycott).

This topic could be a whole Lemmy community, not just a thread. In the US, you have only three carriers: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. I’ve seen enough wrongdoing by all 3 to boycott all 3. I would not finance any them no matter how much money I have. T-Mobile is the lesser of evils but it’s wrong to be forced to feed any of the three as an arbitrary needless precondition to using the library’s public wifi. It’s absolutely foolish that most people support that kind of bundling between public and private services.

US govs do not (AFAIK) yet impose tech on people. I think every gov service in the US has an analog option, including cash payment options. That’s not the case in many regions outside the US. There are already govs that now absolutely force you to complete some government transactions online, along with electronic payments which imposes bank patronisation, even if you boycott the banks for investing in fossil fuels and private prisons. And if you don’t like being forced to use their Google CAPTCHA (which supports Google, the surveillance advertiser who participates in fossil fuel extraction), that’s tough. Poor people are forced to use a PC (thus the library) to do public sector transactions with the gov, as are a segment of elderly people who struggle to use the technology. There is also a segment of tech people who rightfully object, precisely because they know enough about how info traverses information systems to see how privacy is undermined largely due to loss of control (control being in the wrong hands). It’s baffling how few people are in that tech segment.

So the pro-privacy tech activists are united with the low-tech elderly and the poor together fighting this oppression (called “digital transformation”) which effectively takes away our boycott power and right to choose who we do business with in the private sector. A divide and conquer approach is being used because we don’t have a well-organised coalition. Giving the poor cheaper tech and giving assistance to the elderly is a good thing but the side effect is enabling the oppression to go unchallenged. When really the right answer in the end is to not impose shitty options in the first place. It’s like the corp swindle of forced bundling (you can only get X if you also take Y). You should be able to get public wifi without a mobile phone subscription.

The UDHR prohibits discrimination on the basis of what property you have. The intent is to protect the poor, but the protection is actually rightfully bigger in scope because people who willfully opt not to have property are also in the protected class.

It’s all quite parallel to Snowden’s take. The masses don’t care about privacy due to not really understanding it.

“Ultimately, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ― Edward Snowden

The idea that activists need both free speech and privacy in order to fight for everyone’s rights is lost on people making the /selfish/ choice to disregard privacy. All those mobile phone users who don’t give a shit about mobile phones being imposed on everyone are missing this concept. The choice to have a mobile phone is dying. It’s gradually and quietly becoming an unwritten mandate.

Banking is also becoming bound to having a mobile phone. There are already banks who will not open account for those without a mobile phone. So we are losing the option to have a bank account but not a mobile phone.