This chapter proposes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reposition the place of the child in society. Advancements in digital technology and applied statistical analysis offer an opportunity to dislodge the largely entrenched view of the child as an inferior rights holder. As currently positioned, the child’s power is derived from the parent(s) or legal guardian(s). This currently accepted derivative power structure limits the child’s autonomy to wield power independently from the parent. This structure was successful in the past. However, technological advances and the modern child’s dependence on digital resources requires a re-examination of this parent-based derivative power structure. Parents may now have less capability to perform protective and preparatory duties owed to children in the digital context. An analysis of the parent as gatekeeper for participatory rights in the modern digital context is critiqued and the ability of AI to alleviate this problem is proposed.

Freedom of expression and association are at once themselves fundamental human rights and also necessary for the promotion and protection of other rights. In many contexts, anonymity is essential for the realization of these rights, affording citizens the ability to speak without fear of retribution. Yet while there is a growing acknowledgement of the importance that anonymity plays in enabling free expression and association in the online world, debates about the right to remain anonymous in the physical world are lagging behind.

This handbook intends to offer a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the human rights implications of emerging technologies in the fields of life sciences and information and communication technologies (ICT). To this end, the volume brings together leading experts whose expertise encompasses several disciplinary domains (law, ethics, technology, basic science, medicine, business etc.) with the purpose of gathering extensive multidisciplinary knowledge about the evolutive transformation of the human rights framework in response to technological innovation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that leveraging medical big data can help to better predict and control outbreaks from the outset. However, there are still challenges to overcome in the 21st century to efficiently use medical big data, promote innovation and public health activities and adequately protect individuals’ privacy. The metaphor that property is a “bundle of sticks” applies equally to medical big data. Understanding medical big data in this way raises a number of questions, including: Who has the right to make money off its buying and selling, or is it inalienable? When does medical big data become sufficiently stripped of identifiers that the rights of an individual concerning the data disappear? How have different regimes such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the US answered these questions differently? In this chapter, we will discuss three topics: (1) privacy and data sharing, (2) informed consent, and (3) ownership.

Robotic technologies have shown to have clear potential for providing innovation in treatments and treatment modalities for various diseases and disorders that cover unmet needs and are cost-efficient. However, the emergence of technology that promises to improve health outcomes raises the question regarding the extent to which it should be incorporated, how, made available to whom, and on what basis. Since countries usually have limited resources to favour access to state-of-the-art technologies and develop strategies to realize the right to health progressively, in this article, we investigate whether the right to health, particularly the core obligations specified under this right, helps implement medical robots.

Digital government has enabled the automation of numerous public services and improved the efficiency and openness of the public administration. Nevertheless, for senior citizens, undeserved communities, individuals with low literacy and limited digital skills, the shift to governmental portals, online payments, and smartphone applications remain considerable obstacles to their daily interactions with public authorities. Drawing on a review of interdisciplinary literature, this chapter contributes to the legal literature with an account of the underlying causes of digital exclusion and a discussion of its most relevant legal implications through the lenses of fundamental rights (e.g., due process, equal treatment) and the principles of good administration.

This chapter analyses rights in the context of reproductive technology. It begins by examining the evolving nature of reproductive rights, situating reproductive rights within broader debates over health and human rights. The chapter also explores the role of developments in assisted reproductive technology in shaping debates over rights. In analysing the evolution of rights in the context of assisted reproduction, the chapter explores: the role of ethics in regulatory debates over assisted reproduction; the issue of access to assisted reproduction; and the globalisation of health care, including health tourism, and its relevance for assisted reproduction. The analysis of each of these areas will include consideration of the role of law in defining reproductive rights.

Since the CJEU’s ruling of May 2014 in the Google Spain case (also known as the Costeja case), the “right to be forgotten” on the internet has been hotly debated in Europe and beyond. The Court in Strasbourg has been reluctant so far in upholding erasure or anonymisation of news archives (or parts of them), but it suggested that ‘less restrictive measures’ might be tolerable. The latter arguably enables one to tailor approaches to what the balancing requires in individual cases.

We have more information at our fingertips than ever, yet how much of it can we trust? If, as was argued in Chapter 3, we need to be able to trust the information upon which we base our assessments and beliefs about the trustworthiness of other actors, then the sorts of information disorders associated with the age of disinformation can have profoundly negative repercussions for societal trust and the social cooperation and coordination it supports. By examining the rise of mistrust and disinformation, the many faces of disinformation, and the causes of our current “age of disinformation,” this chapter aims to set the context for understanding the appeal and promise of blockchains and distributed ledgers in troubled times.

Novel, largely artificial-intelligence-driven technologies have become more widely accessible in recent years. This, combined with the rising dominance of social media as a primary source of news and the “weaponization” of information for political and other purposes, has led to increases in the forgery and manipulation of the evidential basis of factual claims. How easy is it for us to know when the evidentials that we rely upon to assess something as “fact” have been undermined? This chapter examines different types of evidential forgery and manipulation and describes the technological, social, and cognitive challenges we face in identifying these undermined evidentials. The chapter also explores what happens if we do become aware that the evidentiary underpinnings of our facts might be untrustworthy, and asks what threat this uncertainty poses to the epistemic foundations of societal trusting relations.

Computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional records and recordkeeping for the physical record, undermining practices centered on the “moral defense” of the record and supplanting them with practices centred on datafication. Prioritizing data malleability rather than the defense of information from manipulation and corruption has, this chapter argues, contributed to the current diminution of the trustworthiness of information and an unravelling of society’s evidentiary foundations. Fields such as archival science and the law have long considered questions of how records may testify to the events and actions of which they form a part – serving as proofs of claims, that is, as evidentials – but research in the field of computing has only relatively recently focused on these issues. Despite its roots in computing culture, blockchain technology offers the promise of an immutable ledger that may halt the processes of datafication contributing to the current widespread potential for manipulation of records. The design and spirit of blockchains – offering the ability to cryptographically “fix” the record, chaining it in place so that any tampering is extremely difficult and immediately evident – harks back to a pre-digital past when the materiality of paper records more readily fixed in place transactional “facts” and protected their integrity from manipulation.