Melbourne Law School - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemHuman rights for the data society( 2022)In 2011, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon launched the UN Global Pulse, an initiative on digital data technologies. According to Ban, the Global Pulse would ‘bring the work of the United Nations fully into the digital age’. By the end of the decade, in 2020, Ban’s successor Antonio Guterres published the ‘Road map for digital co-operation’, in which Guterres declared that the international community stands at ‘new frontiers of technology and human rights’. The aim of the Road map was to co-ordinate activity across the UN system to address both opportunities and risks that Guterres identified at this frontier. The risks were that digital technologies might be used for ‘surveillance, repression, censorship and online harassment’. The opportunities were for digital technologies to ‘provide new means to advocate, defend and exercise human rights’. This thesis is concerned with the UN’s engagement with digital data technologies in its human rights work in the 2010s. During that decade, the UN has both embraced new technologies and attempted to regulate them. Much of the existing scholarship on the relationship between digital data technologies and human rights in the international sphere has mirrored the UN’s ‘opportunities’ and ‘risks’ framing. The question implicit in this scholarship is how to use human rights goals and norms to make the inevitable datafication of the world better. This sense of inevitability is reflected in the commonly used periodisation of ‘a digital age’, which suggests that there is a singular human world that moves from one technological age to another. In contrast to these approaches, this thesis focuses on how the UN’s work on digital data technologies and human rights might make and shape a particular world. I use ‘world’ in the sense of a normative and imaginative universe in which there is a shared common sense about what it is possible to do, and what ought to be done, and the material environment underpinning that common understanding. My argument is that the UN’s attempts to embrace and respond to digital data technologies are producing a world in which the biggest technology corporations and their data technologies are widely accepted as indispensable to the international human rights project. I call that world the data society. The UN does so through a series of technical projects during the 2010s that produce what one might call ‘datafied’ forms of human rights. In these emerging forms of human rights, core concepts and practices are understood by reference to or performed through digital data technologies. The central implication of this argument is that when human rights practitioners – at the UN and beyond – use datafied forms of human rights, they play a significant role in making the data society possible. By the same token, they also play a significant role in foreclosing alternative possibilities – of worlds in which human rights and digital data technologies might be imagined differently.