Human Rights: The Fourth Generation of Human Rights Theory: A General Outline of Digital Rights in the Digital Age

Author Dr. Yang Xueke, studies digital law in Shandong University

This article was completed in May 2019 and was shortlisted for the second prize in the final review of the 14th China Youth Forum on Law in September 2019.

Introduction:

We generally call “negative rights” (i.e. rights to protect citizens’ freedoms from infringement) the first generation of human rights, and we call “positive rights” (i.e. rights that require the state to take positive actions to achieve their realization) the second generation of human rights. After the 19th century, human rights gradually expanded from the political field to various fields such as economy, culture, and society. After the 1950s, with the development of the national liberation movement, the traditional concept of human rights was transcended, human rights developed from individual human rights to collective human rights, and added the right to national self-determination, the right to peace, the right to the environment and other contents.

“Third generation human rights” is still largely an unofficial term, which therefore encompasses a very wide range of rights, including: collective rights, the right to self-determination, the right to economic and social development, the right to a healthy environment, the right to natural resources, the right to communication, the right to share in cultural heritage, intergenerational equity and the right to sustainable development.

Due to the rapid development of the globalization trend, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the intensification of ethnic and regional conflicts, the serious damage to the ecological environment, and the intensified competition for resources such as science and technology, energy, and information. Based on these factors, some people have proposed to include “peace, development, ecological environment, common inheritance of property, exchanges and humanitarian assistance, etc.” in the third generation of human rights. The Fourth generation of human rights will be discussed below.

The fourth generation of human rights, for Chinese people, was first seen and heard by Professor Xu Xianming’s assertion that the fourth generation of human rights is “harmony rights”, which has caused widespread discussion in the academic community with mixed reviews. ①②

As to whether the right to harmony can become a “generation”, there are academic disputes and ideological debates, which is understandable. In subsequent research, Professor Ma Changshan believed in his keynote speech at the first China Youth Forum on Human Rights that with the advent of the digital technology revolution, traditional human rights have their own problems and new human rights issues have also emerged in large numbers. At that time, although Professor Ma did not elaborate in detail, he attributed it to the fourth generation of human rights issues. [1] Later, with the inspiration of Professor Zhang Wenxian ‘s new era human rights jurisprudence that “without digital, there is no human rights” [2] , these academic insights resonated with my previous “human rights research in the era of artificial intelligence” [3] : digital human rights issues in the digital era can become a “generation”.

In fact, the issue of digital human rights in the digital age has become a “generational” issue. There are many works in the West that promote the fourth generation of human rights in the digital age, and some data rights belonging to the fourth generation of human rights have been recognized in the law. The earliest claim of the fourth generation of human rights came from Robert B. Gelman , who proposed a “Declaration of Human Rights in Cyberspace” in 1997 based on the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.

The Catalan Institute of Human Rights ( IDHC ) of Spain adopted the “Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights” ( DUDHE ) on the basis of the dialogue entitled “Human Rights: New Demands and New Commitments” held in Barcelona in 2004. The declaration is centered on democracy and includes a list of nearly fifty emerging human rights, including the right to drinking water and sanitation, the right to basic income, the right to continuous and inclusive education, etc., which promotes the understanding and debate of human rights. Since the global integration of the information society concept following the World Summit on the Information Society held in Geneva ( 2003) and Tunis (2005), the regulatory debate related to the Internet has also become increasingly important, with a series of public debates held that have a direct impact on the formulation of digital human rights policies and regulations. On June 1, 2011, the Joint Declaration on Freedom of Expression and the Internet was signed by the United Nations Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. In 2014, the Council of Europe adopted the Human Rights Guidelines for Internet Users. In 2015, the World Economic Forum considered that digital rights are essentially human rights in the Internet age. For example, the right to online privacy and the right to freedom of expression are identified as extensions of the rights established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On November 26, 2018, the University of Deusto in Spain proposed the Deusto Declaration on Human Rights in the Digital Environment, which identified the fourth generation of human rights in the digital environment, widely mentioned human rights in the digital age, and rights related to access and use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies. In 2021, the governments of Portugal and Spain successively announced digital human rights (rights) declarations with detailed lists of human rights.

The fourth generation of human rights is a new and little-known academic field for us, while the West has been paying attention to the fourth generation of human rights for more than 20 years, and the earliest attention was one year earlier than the founding of Google. When Google was founded 20 years ago, it proposed the “Fourth Generation Human Rights Declaration” which lists a detailed list of digital human rights. It is undeniable that there have been a lot of studies on individual emerging rights in the digital age in China, such as the right to be forgotten, the right to personal information, the right to algorithm interpretation, etc., but most of them are “single studies” of “scattered soldiers and braves”, lacking a comprehensive “general outline study” that can summarize the main points, and also lacking the historical inheritance consideration of the “generation” on the timeline. In view of this, it is of theoretical significance to specifically place the fourth generation of human rights in the three generations of human rights genealogy and conduct a comprehensive “general outline study” on the new (emerging) rights in the digital age, and provide some reference for promoting the formulation of the Chinese version of the “Digital Human Rights Declaration”.

Please Download for Full Text