IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 56

Feature
the ever-present listening and seeing electronic
or other devices? How can we escape being led
on the road to anonymity and emptiness so strikingly
predicted by some well-known contemporary
authors? Will science fiction in its degrading
aspects become reality? How will democracy and
the right to self-determination of peoples be preserved
in a world of advanced and domineering
technical development? " [Emphasis Added]
The Secretary General's speech not only foresaw
the now widely touted " existential threats " posed
by rapidly developing technologies like AI but also
present threats to democracy posed by digital platforms.
Beyond being remarkably forward-looking,
this speech ushered the first meaningful global discussions
on the interplay between new technologies
and human rights. In the wake of the Tehran Conference,
the UNGA adopted a series of resolutions
under the label " Human Rights and Scientific and
Technological Developments " [19]. Little ultimately
came out of the Tehran process, however. This is
attributable mainly to ideological differences of the
Cold War era which hindered the development of a
robust human rights-based response to the advent of
emergent technologies.
One notable outcome of the Tehran Conference
is the adoption of a truncated UNGA declaration
[20]. But the declaration did not go beyond generic
" soft " obligations on States. We call this an " obligation "
because it uses the traditional modal term
" shall " which is used in legislation to convey a compulsory
message, whereas we call the obligation
" soft " because as a soft law, a declaration cannot
impose binding legal obligations. At one level, the
declaration calls upon States to " prevent " the use of
new technologies by State organs to infringe upon
human rights [20, para 2 cum para 8]. As such, it
does not envisage a clear positive duty of States to
" protect " against infringement by non-State actors,
which appears rather tangentially in a clause where
States' duty of extending the benefits of technologies
to all strata of the population is provided [20, para
6]. Corollary to this is the call on States to deploy
new technologies as means of promoting human
rights [20, para 7].
A theme that found particular attention at the
Tehran Conference, and later in the declaration, is
the impact of new technologies on " privacy and the
protection of the human personality and its physical
56
and intellectual integrity " [20, para 6]. And it is this
theme which eventually found fairly elaborate articulation
in an international soft law. After years of a
protracted process, the UNGA adopted in December
1990 the first-and to date the primary-UN legal
instrument on data protection: the UN Data Protection
Guidelines [21]. Cold War politics had considerably
clouded the negotiation over the text of the
guidelines. Relatively better initial versions of the
guidelines embodied in the Secretary General's1974
report-which were later partially integrated with the
guidelines prepared by Louis Joinet, the main drafter
of the document-are absent in the final version of
the guidelines [22]. But it remains to be the most significant
and tangible outcome of the Tehran process
on new technologies and human rights. Doubtless,
the guidelines have since been superseded by a
range of highly progressive transnational data protection
standards. But to date, they constitute the
sole truly " universal " instrument on data privacy.
After the adoption of the guidelines,1 the issue
of digital human rights has resurfaced in the UN
human rights agenda, but only intermittently. In
2012, for instance, the HR Council took up the issue
with a new discourse under the theme " Promotion,
Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the
Internet " [23]. Launched against the background of
the so-called " Arab Spring " in the orchestration of
which social media played a significant role [24],
this discourse aimed at upholding the protection of
human rights, particularly freedom of expression
online as well as offline. This discourse, mainly
consisting of a series of resolutions, is still ongoing
with the latest resolution of the Council adopted in
July 2021 [25]. But this discourse has been running
in parallel with another longstanding discourse
on " freedom of opinion and expression " [26]. The
latter began in 2008, and the latest resolution was
adopted by the HR Council at its 41st session in
July 2022. But one sees a clear overlap of substance
between the two discourses.
Another post-Tehran process relating to tech and
human rights emerged in the wake of the Snowden
revelations in mid-2013. Likewise, this has also been
a rather domain-specific UN discourse focusing on
the " right to privacy in the digital age " which still
1Note that little data privacy jurisprudence has emerged since. The only exceptions
where digital privacy themes surfaced are the general comments of treaty bodies,
particularly the rather abbreviated general comment 16 on the right to privacy,
which was adopted by the human rights committee two years earlier in 1988, 'views'
adopted under the individual communication procedure and a series of concluding
observations developed under the periodic reporting mechanisms.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023
