Three Generations of Digital Human Rights

The proposed research program explores different strategies developed in the digital age within and outside international human rights law to respond to new needs, interests, risks and challenges brought about by transition of inter-personal interactions, social activities and regulatory schemes from offline to online environments.

It investigates the development in recent years of three generations of digital human rights: adaptation of existing rights and their manner of application to online environments (e.g., online privacy), the creation of new digital rights (e.g., right to access the Internet) and the introduction of new rights and duty holders (e.g., virtual persons and online platforms exercising quasi-sovereign power), as well as the development of alternative protection avenues based on private ordering, including rights by design and community standards, Internet governance and multi-stakeholder arrangements.

The ERC project will examine these paradigmatic normative, institutional and theoretical developments, and the policy choices behind them from five methodological perspectives: (1) historical study of the evolution of digital human rights and of choices made by norm-entrepreneurs and law-makers between different protection frameworks; (2) analytical study of protection gaps, overlaps and conflicts across traditional and digital human rights and alternative arrangements; (3) comparative study juxtaposing developments in the field of digital human rights against analogous development in international human rights law, with a view to identifying paradigms of normative and institutional change; (4) empirical analysis through interviews of the perceived effectiveness and legitimacy in the eyes of stakeholders of the said developments ; (5) Evaluation of the developments under theories of rights, global governance, business ethics and corporate responsibility and rational choice.