Sustaining human rights for internet futures

This chapter reflects on the UN’s adoption of the term, digital human rights, in the context of the Global Digital Compact, part of the Pact for the Future adopted in September 2024 under the aegis of Secretary General Guterres. The move to reframe the UN’s custodianship of international human rights law is within a broad regulatory shift known as ‘digital transformation’. It is the latest step for multilateral institutions along the road of recognizing the public policy implications of humanity’s increasing intimacy with planetary digital networks, powered by successive generations of ‘thinking machines’. The chapter reflects on the conflation of digital with human rights in policy discourses from the point of view of human rights advocacy within over two decades of ‘multistakeholder’ consultations on internet governance. The question that goes begging, when lawmakers, internet businesses, and civil society organizations gather together to set global policy agendas that seek to address the intersection of internet technologies - also known as digital networks - and human rights, is who - or what - should be the subjects of digital rights? I argue that the successful embedding of ‘digital rights’ discourses at the expense of references to human rights presumes an equivalence neither fully articulated in human rights jurisprudence nor adequately addressed in burgeoning internet policy and regulation. To talk of ‘digital rights’ or ‘digital human rights’ cannot presume that either term is adequate for encapsulating the challenges facing the future viability of ‘fundamental rights and freedoms’ at the online-offline nexus.