Impact of digitalization on international human rights standards and States’ obligations to comply with them

Digitalization is a process of transformation of common things to a qualitatively new level relevant to current realities, in which technical progress has affected all spheres of human life. It has particularly also changed the approaches to the implementation of human rights and freedoms. In scientific and practical circles there is an essential discussion concerning so-called “digital” human rights. The need to determine the legal nature of “digital” human rights comes to the fore: are they new human rights or should we talk only about the same recognized rights realized online? The authors of this scientific article share the latter point of view, according to which “digital” human rights do not create new rights but are only a different environment for traditional human rights’ application. In the same vein, the question applies to universal and regional human rights mechanisms, which do not speak about the emergence of new rights but about the expansion of the realization of human rights and their transfer to the online space. At the same time, traditional human rights remain essentially unchanged while specific forms of their implementation in the digital environment appear. Digitalization does not create new, qualitatively different obligations for observing “digital” human rights for States and other subjects of international law. Thus one can positively assert the importance of the development of digital technologies which make it possible to globally expand the scope of human rights and freedoms and create an open space via the Internet which allows faster and more accurate access to information, including human rights, and makes it easier and borderless to communicate and express opinions freely. However, this phenomenon also has negative sides, reflected primarily in the increase of monopolies, both State and private, on the Internet and the related violation of the private life of Internet users.

About the authors: Ekaterina Alisievich – Candidate of Sciences (Ph.D.) in Law, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of International and Integrational Law, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia; Andrey Nikolaev – Doctor of Sciences in Law, Professor, Department of International and Integrational Law, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia; Kristina Keburiya – Candidate of Sciences (Ph.D.) in Law, Associate Professor of the Department of International and Integrational Law, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Alisievich E., Nikolaev A., Keburiya K. (2021) Vliyanie tsifrovizatsii na mezhdunarodnye standarty v oblasti prav cheloveka i obyazatel'stva gosudarstv po ikh soblyudeniyu [Impact of digitalization on international human rights standards and States’ obligations to comply with them]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 57–76. (In Russian).

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