UN GENEVA : ''GOVERNMENTS AND SNOOPERS''

HOW much does your government spy on you? UN may rank the snoopers.

A UN human rights expert has published a draft list questions to measure countries privacy safeguards, a first step towards ranking the governments that are potentially doing the most snooping on their own citizens.

Joseph Cannataci, the UN special rapporteur on the fight to privacy, submitted the draft questionnaire - touching on everything from from chatrooms to systematic surveillance - to the UN Human Rights Council, and invited comments by June 30.

Cannataci's role investigating digital privacy was created by the council in 2015 after Edward Snowden's revelations about US surveillance, and he has strongly criticised surveillance activities by the US and other countries.

As the first person in the job, Cannataci, set out an action plan for tackling the task and said he planned to take a methodical approach to monitoring surveillance and privacy laws to help him to decide which countries to investigate.

The council's 47 member states are not be obliged to agree with his findings, but special rapporteurs' reports are generally influential in a forum where governments are keen to appear to have an unblemished human rights record.

The 28 draft questions, each with a suggested score attached, begins with a potential five points of a country's constitution had a provision to protect privacy or has been interpreted to encompass such a protection. [Agencies]

The honor and serving of the latest developments Human Rights and on governments' spying on its citizens, continues to part 2.