What is digital? The term digital refers to electronic and computing devices that produce, store, or transmit data in a binary format (ones and zeros). Digitalisation is the reduction of information and behaviour to this binary format so that it can be processed using digital technologies. Examples of digital technologies include hardware devices like mobile phones, laptops, and voice and video recorders; software applications like email, instant messaging, and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots; as well as infrastructure like the cables and data centres that connect social media platforms, digital government, and e-commerce services. Not all digital technologies are connected to the internet.
What are rights? Rights are the legal entitlements that we have in law. International human rights law grants everyone a set of 30 individual and collective rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which have been expanded and detailed in subsequent conventions and laws. Universal human rights include the right to free expression and to privacy of communication and correspondence; freedom of association and assembly, including the right to join a trade union; and the right to take part in the cultural life of the community and in collective political deliberation and decision-making.
What are digital rights? Digital rights are all of our existing human rights whenever we are using digital technologies. Digital rights apply whether we are using digital technologies online or offline. The rapid expansion in the use of digital technologies has expanded the possibility to exercise human rights, including the ability to express opinions and raise neglected issues online. However, use of the same technologies has also introduced new exclusions, disadvantages, and injustices. Half of the world’s population are unable to make effective use of digital technologies and many who do have digital access experience algorithmic discrimination, data bias, online gender-based violence, mass surveillance, or digital disinformation.
Why do we need digital rights at all?
The concept of digital rights and the practice of digital rights activism emerged for three connected reasons.
Rapid technological change – Human rights law was written before the internet, mobile phones, and social media were invented. It was not possible to anticipate the challenges to human rights presented by digitalisation, including how to govern global social media companies, how to respond to gender and racial bias in artificial intelligence algorithms, how to counter automated disinformation bots, deep fakes or the non-consensual extraction of personal and copyrighted data by surveillance capitalism and generative AI. The digitalisation of work has resulted in human rights violations including for gig- workers, data labellers, and online content moderators, and the digitalisation of social protection has benefited many but further excluded the most marginalised.
Migration online – In many countries offline political freedoms are in decline after 18 consecutive years of reducing political freedoms (Freedom House 2024) and shrinking civic space (CIVICUS 2024). One response has been for activists to open up new civic space online. For example, Whatsapp groups or closed Facebook groups can provide a relatively safe space for women, LGBTQ+ groups, or workers to organise. These online spaces can provide platforms from which to launch counter-narrative and rights-claims into more public spaces online or offline. The ability to organise online raises new issues of anonymity and encryption, surveillance and circumvention, and the governance of foreign Big Tech companies that human rights law had not anticipated.
Digital (dis)advantage – Using mobile or internet technologies in international development or social justice requires a detailed understanding of digital rights because the use of digital technologies is never neutral; it always involves exclusions and inclusions, conferring both advantage and disadvantage, and the advance of some interests at the expense of others. Digital rights provides a way for citizens, government, and other actors to work together to assess, mitigate, and overcome these challenges.
How we define digital rights?
There are at least three ways of understanding digital rights: as a set of legal entitlements that all people have by virtue of international human rights law, as an evaluative framework for analysing digital technologies and projects, and as a form of
collective action that responds to harms and injustices resulting from the use of digital technologies. This gives rise to the following three definitions:
- Digital rights are existing human rights when using digital technologies.
- Digital rights are a framework for evaluating technology initiatives and policies.
- Digital rights are a form of collective action against technology injustices.
The next sections discuss each of these conceptions of digital rights in turn.
Digital rights understood as legal entitlements ?
Understood as a set of entitlements, digital rights are the legal freedoms that every person has by virtue of international human rights law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants everyone a set of 30 fundamental human rights. These rights entitle all humans to, among other things: the right to privacy of correspondence (Article 12); the right to freedom of opinion and expression and to receive and impart information over any media regardless of frontiers to free expression (Article 19); the right to free association and assembly (Article 20); the right to take part in the life of the community including collective political (Article 21) and cultural life (Article 27) and to form or join a trade union (Article 23).
It is now clearly established in international law that ‘the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online’. It is a great strength that all human rights are universal, indivisible, and inalienable. This means that they apply to all people without exception, that all rights are equally important and interrelated, and that they cannot be taken away, traded, or transferred.
Governments can only suspend a human right if they are able to prove that doing so is ‘legal, necessary, and proportionate’ to secure a legitimate aim. For example, a country may be able to suspend the right to privacy of terrorists if it can show a judge evidence that a serious crime is being planned.
Digital rights understood as a framework
Digital rights are often used as a framework against which to evaluate the use of new technologies and initiatives in society. The extent to which citizens’ human rights are affected positively or negatively can be a useful way to evaluate the introduction of new technologies, projects, or policies. Digital rights organisations and researchers have used digital rights as a framework for workers’ evaluation of the digitalisation of social protection, to study the implications of online surveillance, and to assess the impact of digital disinformation and internet shutdowns.
Rights-based frameworks have a tactical advantage over some of the other frameworks available (justice, capabilities, human development) as governments worldwide have already committed to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) or built specific rights into their nation’s Bill of Rights, constitution or domestic law. The fact that almost all countries are signatories to the UDHR provides a strong platform for collective action internationally. Examples include Access Now’s #KeepItOn campaigns around internet shutdowns or APC’s campaigns on online gender-based violence and promotion of a feminist internet. Digital rights frameworks are being applied to an increasing range of issues as ever more aspects of our social, economic, and political lives migrate online.
Digital rights understood as collective action
Digital rights activists are human rights defenders. They respond to injustices by working to secure for everyone the ability to exercise, defend, and expand their rights. They work at three levels: (a) to mitigate immediate harms, (b) to reform policies and laws, and (c) to tackle the power relations that give rise to rights violations and injustice. This three-tiered strategy is sometimes referred to as the ‘conformist, reformist, transformist’ approach. Collective action is targeted at digital rights issues, including:
Access: The ‘digital divide’ in access to digital devices, connectivity, and digital literacies. Article 19 of the UDHR grants everyone ‘the right to receive and impart information and ideas through any media’ but as many as 50% of the population in some countries face five access barriers of availability, affordability, awareness, abilities, and accessibility.
Bias: Algorithmic systems using AI have been shown to be biased against groups based on gender, ethnicity, or social class. Machine learning reproduces patterns of structural discrimination and prejudice contained in the historical data on which it is trained. These biased AI systems are increasingly used to decide who gets welfare entitlements, job interviews, bail, or parole. Article 7 of the UDHR commits governments to non- discrimination but AI risks automating inequality.
Censorship: Digital authoritarian practices are being used by repressive governments and private sector partners to conduct digital surveillance, profile citizens, coordinate disinformation campaigns, and impose internet shutdowns. This shrinks the civic space for peaceful protest, democratic deliberation, and debate, and negatively impacts the right to privacy, free association, and free expression. Article 12 of the UDHR provides the right to privacy of correspondence.
Digital rights can be reduced as well as expanded. The gender backlash, online attacks on LGBTQ+ communities, and expanding corporate/state surveillance are current injustices that demand collective action by the kind of digital rights organisations introduced in the next section.
Digital rights organisations
New organisations are emerging all the time to address digital rights violations. There are organisations dedicated to defending and expanding digital rights in almost every country. They run a wide range of campaigns and organise events online and offline. Regional and global digital rights conferences bring activists together regionally and internationally into a global movement.
Activists tackled the impact on human rights of digital technology adoption long before the term digital rights was adopted. ‘Communication rights’ activists engaged in collective action, attended conferences and wrote papers and books on the subject in the twentieth century. Organisations like the Association of Progressive Communications (APC) have been active since 1990, coordinating civil society around technology and social justice issues before the first World Summit on the Information Society in 2003, and have consistently provided input to the United Nations and other digital policy setting processes over the last 25 years, to align digital policy with human rights and gender justice.
In addition to national digital rights organisations like the Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan, Unwanted Witness Uganda, and the Thai Netizen Network, there are regional digital rights organisations. Derechos Digitales coordinates work across Latin America, Engage Media across Asia, and CIPESA is pan-African. Several organisations coordinate their own annual digital rights conferences like the annual Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum organised by Paradigm Initiative. There are also global digital rights conferences like Global Gathering hosted by Article 19 and RightsCon organised by perhaps the largest digital rights organisation, Access Now. RightsCon is attended by thousands of delegates from hundreds of digital rights organisations. Access Now, APC and Article 19, among many others, take part in the civil society delegation to the annual national, regional, and global Internet Governance Forum, to highlight digital rights issues in global policy processes.
Where do digital rights come from?
Human rights come from collective action. When collective rights-claiming is successful it can result in legislation and in changes in norms and practices. Collective action by the suffragettes, trade unions, the civil rights movement, and national liberation movements resulted in new rights being inscribed in law. However, reactionary backlash and repressive lawmaking mean that the constant exercise, defence, and claiming of rights is essential.
The most widely recognised piece of international human rights law is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which grants 30 fundamental human rights to every person. These rights were later further elaborated in 1966 in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (UNGA 1966a, 1966b). The ICESCR begins in Article 1, with a statement of collective rights: ‘All peoples have the right of self-determination’. It also provides the right to take part in the collective cultural and political life of the community and to form trade unions.
All 193 member states of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the treaties, which are then adapted and adopted in regional conventions such as the 1981 African Union Charter on Human and Peoples Rights as well as being translated into national constitutions and into domestic law. Given the dominant role of private companies in digital technologies, it is also important to note the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which outline the corporate responsibilities of private companies to protect, respect, and remedy human rights.
Collective action over generations has secured these fundamental rights that can now be used to hold power to account and as a framework for assessing the merits and risks of new technologies, projects, and policies.
Limitations of digital rights
Digital rights provide a valuable framework for guiding collective action and for evaluating the use of digital technology in society. They have the enormous advantage of being embedded in globally agreed international law that has been incorporated into national constitutions, bills of rights, and domestic legislation, such that it applies universally to all citizens, organisations, and governments. However, it is not without limitations.
Although digital rights are universal in theory, the ability to exercise rights in practice is a function of power. The most powerful social groups in society are often better able to exercise their rights and access their entitlements than the least powerful groups. When we study people’s ability to exercise rights it quickly becomes clear that there is a hierarchy of ability to do this. Powerful countries, social classes, and genders are more influential in establishing rights. The ability to exercise existing rights is often unevenly distributed along intersectional dimensions of (dis)advantage. This also holds true in alternative frameworks such as the capabilities framework or data justice framework.
While human rights law provides everyone with the right to receive and impart information and communication over the internet, in practice high-income, educated, urban men from the dominant ethic-religious group have greater ability to exercise their rights than low-income, illiterate, rural women from a marginalised social group.
Digital rights and power analysis
Digital rights are a valuable set of legal entitlements; they provide a useful evaluative framework for analysing new technologies and projects; and they have been fruitful as a form of collective action against digital injustices.
Because digital rights are rooted in a set of universal rights that governments have signed up to, they provide civil society with a strong basis for leverage when holding the state and corporations to account.
The framework of universal human rights is also a convenient reference point when bringing together diverse stakeholders across sectors, professions, and positionalities, enabling multi- stakeholder policy dialogue.
However, like any framework, digital rights are not without limitations or weaknesses.
- Having rights in theory is not equate to being able to exercise rights in practice.
- There is often a hierarchy of ability to exercise digital rights in practice.
- The ability to exercise rights often reflects and reproduces existing power relations.
- Power relations often structure (dis)advantage intersectionally along dimensions including gender, race, and class.
For these reasons, adding a layer of power analysis to the digital rights framework could add significant value in understanding hierarchies of ability to exercise, defend, and expand digital rights in practice. To date there has been relatively little use made by digital rights researchers or activists of power analysis. There are a wide variety of potential approaches to power analysis in relation to digital rights. Resources that would be useful starting point include Srilatha Batliwala’s All About Power, which inspired this document, as well as VeneKlasen and Miller’s A New Weave of Power and Gaventa’s powercube.
Tony Roberts
You can read the full document – https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Understanding_Digital_Rights_Definitions_Conceptions_and_Myths/28597310/1/files/52996340.pdf
