Abstract
The seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) comes at a time of more contestation than usual over the future of human rights. A sense of urgency animates debates over whether the institutions and ideas of human rights can, or should, survive current geopolitical changes. This symposium, by contrast, shifts the lens to a more slow-moving but equally profound challenge to human rights law: how technology and its impacts on our social and physical environments are reshaping the debate on what it means to be human. Can the UDHR be recast for a time in which new technologies are continually altering how humans interact, and the legal status of robots, rivers, and apes alike are at times argued in the language of rights?
Highlights
The seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) comes at a time of more contestation than usual over the future of human rights
Can the UDHR be recast for a time in which new technologies are continually altering how humans interact, and the legal status of robots, rivers, and apes alike are at times argued in the language of rights?
In January, the EU Parliament asked the EU Commission to consider “creating a specific legal status for robots ... so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons.”[1]. A recent AJIL Unbound symposium on global animal law noted a trend towards de-reification of animals, and, in some jurisdictions, the “cautious acknowledgments ... of a ‘nonhuman’ or ‘human-like’ right of several animals” to physical liberty.[2]
Summary
The seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) comes at a time of more contestation than usual over the future of human rights. Of a ‘nonhuman’ or ‘human-like’ right of several animals” to physical liberty.[2] National courts or constitutions in New Zealand, India, Ecuador, and Colombia have extended the concept of a rights-bearing person to encompass geological features and ecosystems, such as rivers, forests, and mountains, and to nature itself, a trend approvingly noted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a recent judgment.[3] Several legal instruments and judgments speak of duties to future generations, and some cast humans that do not yet exist as rights-bearing persons with claims against humans that do exist.[4] These developments do not seek to upend the current human rights regimes so much as to include a broader set of behaviors under their umbrella. Drawing on the UDHR’s Article 29 and new insights from cognitive psychology, Land shows how states could promote online community structures that foster a sense of responsibility to others
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