Human Rights and digital technologies
Etablissement : Faculté de Droit – Lille et Issy-les-Moulineaux
Langue : Anglais
Formation(s) dans laquelle/lesquelles le cours apparait :
Période : S1
Digital technologies are posing new challenges and opportunities for human rights. The revolution of the internet has brought forward important questions about attribution, responsibility and due diligence obligations in cybercrime and for autonomous weapons and their impact for human rights. Artificial Intelligence is also posing questions about bias in employment, the future of work and privacy and security with mass surveillance devices, amongst others. Simultaneously, social media has presented opportunities for resistance and to uphold democratic values in the world, while at the same time these technologies have been used as devices for mal/misinformation and hate speech, questioning the role of private corporations and states in regulating content while upholding freedom of expression. In a world that seems to be shifting to an online guided experience and relationships, new and old questions about globalization, human rights are at the forefront. This course will interrogate these challenges and opportunities from a critical perspective.
The course will be divided into four parts. The first session will address theoretical groundings and justifications of international human rights law broadly. Then it will address the structure of human rights obligations and their contested extraterritorial nature. By interrogating these foundations and the structure of international human rights law we will explore how human rights interact with a new globalized world in which digital technologies have no apparent boundaries and their relationship with the state, notions of responsibility and the obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights in this new context. The next three parts will all have theoretical and applied components. The first part of each session will address theoretical foundations of each topic, while the applied component will apply such notions through a case study. The second session will study the role of social movements and human rights in digital mobilizations. It will inquire about the role of digital technologies in the advancement or curtailment of human rights. The third session will explore mal/misinformation and the rights to freedom of expression and privacy in relationship with new digital technologies. It will inquire about the role of private companies and the state to respect, protect and fulfil human rights from a translational perspective and through the notion of horizontality. The fourth session will explore the new questions Artificial Intelligence is posing for notions of equality and discrimination in international human rights law.
- 1. Human Rights justifications and obligations
In the last 40 years, human rights have reshaped public international law. Their influence in international and national politics has been revolutionary by creating a discourse to transcend territorial boundaries and create mechanisms of enforcement that sometimes can defy the notion of sovereignty. Human rights practice in the international arena has shifted the idea of the state as the only subject of international law to include individuals as capable of holding states accountable for their human rights obligations. They have also created a new political economy of INGO’s and NGO’s that participate in the creation of at least soft law. In this module we will cover broadly the main human rights justifications and the architectureof human rights obligations. This evolution in the globalization of human rights will be the basis to interrogate the interaction of the human rights framework in light of the challenges brought by new digital technologies. Some of the questions we will address are: What are the main justifications for human rights? How do human rights relate to public international law? How do human rights challenge the concept of sovereignty in public international law? What are the obligations created by human rights? Who are the duty bearers of human rights? What are the sources of human rights? How does globalization interact with human rights and digital technologies? What are extra territorial obligations and how do they work?
Readings
Human rights and digital technologies
- M.I. Franklin, Human Rights Futures for the Internet, Chapter 1 in Research Handbook on Human Rights and Digital Technology Global Politics, Law and International Relations ( Eds. Edited by Ben Wagner, Matthias C. Kettemann, and Kilian Vieth) 2019.
Justifications and histories
- FreÌdeÌric MeÌgret, ‘International Human Rights Law Theory’ (2010). Available at SSRN.
- John Tasioulas, ‘On the Nature of Human Rights’, in The Philosophy of Human Rights: Contemporary Controversies, ed. G. Ernst and J-C Heilinger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 17– 59.
- Rowan Cruft, Matthew Liao, Massimo Renzo, ‘The Philosoph
