As the world faces a set of grave challenges and risks, each of which compounds the others, the continued relevance of human rights will depend at least to some extent on their capacity to address these challenges. This is not to suggest that they capture the entirety of the human rights agenda around the world. However, these are challenges of such magnitude and importance that the human rights system needs to make its mark in addressing them.
Economic inequality
In the 2020s, economic inequality has become an even more pressing global priority. Overseas development assistance (ODA) reached an all-time high of $204 billion in 2022, while billionaire wealth across the world increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic demonstrated and accentuated inequalities between and within countries. The uneven experience of climate impacts around the world has given impetus to calls for reform of the international financial architecture to expand fiscal space for countries most at risk of climate harms.
Economic and other forms of inequality are integrally related to other global challenges, including the themes addressed in this paper. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made its strongest statement yet on the links between historical patterns of inequality and vulnerability to climate harms. While technology holds the potential for positive advances, there is also a danger that it could significantly deepen inequalities by handing immense power to those who own and control the technology.
Economic inequality is not a new agenda for human rights. Many Global South countries, in particular, have viewed addressing economic inequalities as a central part of the human rights project from the beginning. The history of economic, social and cultural rights has been complicated by persistent questions over how these rights are to be implemented, by whom, and drawing upon what resources – as well as by their politicization in the context of the Cold War – but they have long been de-emphasized by countries in the Global North and by many international NGOs. This is evident most notably in the US’s failure to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The effect of this has been to undermine wider acceptance of a holistic vision of human rights, and also to downplay the potential contribution of human rights in addressing economic inequality. As one interviewee emphasized, we need to see inequality as both a cause and a consequence of human rights violations. The equality of status asserted in Article 1 of the UDHR is of limited value if the human rights system fails to pay attention to economic inequality and its consequences.
Although tackling economic inequality is a public policy challenge with many dimensions, so far the tools that already exist within the human rights system have not been deployed boldly enough. According to one interviewee, not only have many protagonists of economic rights been insufficiently ambitious, but over time they have lost confidence in human rights tools. This means they have neglected concepts such as the duty of international co-operation, along with the principle that the state should take steps towards the progressive realization of economic and social rights to the ‘maximum of its available resources’, which calls for continually raising the bar of expectations as wealth increases. These are politically contentious ideas. Yet caution in pursuing them has come at a price to the credibility of the human rights system. As the same interviewee put it: ‘Realism and pragmatism have become a handicap because if we can’t engage with the big structural questions, then other frameworks will take over.’
The question remains as to how the human rights system could pivot towards addressing economic inequality as a higher priority. There are at least four ways this could happen.
First, there needs to be more effort from both sides to develop a serious engagement between the fields of human rights and economic policy. Many interviewees underscored that human rights actors should become much more engaged with institutions where economic policy is decided. In doing so, they could bring crucial perspectives, including intersectional analysis – that is, understanding how multiple systems of oppression or inequality based on identity intersect with each other in the experience of people who hold those identities. Correspondingly, international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) should acknowledge that they wield significant influence on matters of human rights, and that their decisions require a human rights analysis.
Wealthy countries in the Global North should pay considerably more attention to the long-standing demands from many less wealthy countries, including those in the G77, to address the inequality between states through the human rights system.
Second, within the multilateral system, wealthy countries in the Global North should pay considerably more attention to the long-standing demands from many less wealthy countries, including those in the Group of 77 (G77), to address the inequality between states through the human rights system. In an increasingly polarized environment, the space for a non-politicized discussion around this has diminished. Yet this is an agenda that matters deeply to many countries in the Global South, and it deserves universal engagement.
Third, clear business regulation grounded in human rights is essential to safeguard against multiple forms of exploitation that accentuate inequality. There is an opportunity to build on soft law within the human rights system – i.e. non-binding instruments such as principles, codes of conduct or declarations – that focus on areas from workers’ rights in supply chains to the disposal of industrial waste. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), introduced in 2011, have already proven influential. Efforts towards a binding treaty on business and human rights should build on this foundation, as should the proposed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.
Fourth, in a time of widespread economic challenges, inflationary pressures, debt traps, inter-generational inequality, and heightened awareness about the environmental costs of the economic system, there may now be a more general opening to rethink prevailing economic orthodoxy. Transformative ideas about economic policy – including across areas such as social security, taxation and debt – could find fertile ground in this context. There could thus be an important role for human rights in this broader endeavour; as one interviewee noted, human rights can describe what economic policy ought to deliver in terms of human outcomes. Approaches being explored within the human rights field vary from proposing new economic models that prioritize human rights outcomes to creating new indicators centred on human rights, or improving how states’ fulfilment of economic and social rights is measured.
Climate change and biodiversity loss
It is now widely accepted that the climate crisis is also a human rights crisis, perhaps the most consequential of all time. The closely related biodiversity crisis is only beginning to receive the same level of attention.
The immense impacts of climate change on human rights should be considered on two levels. The first is the harm that it has already caused to a wide range of rights, including the rights to life, self-determination, development, health, food, water and sanitation, adequate housing and cultural rights. These impacts disproportionately affect the people and communities that have done the least to cause the crisis. The second level is to consider how the far-reaching and unforeseen implications of climate change are likely to affect the entire arena in which the enjoyment of all human rights plays out. Direct and indirect threats – among them risks to the viability of whole countries, the destruction of cultural heritage, mass migration and political backlashes against massive climate disruption – will have further complex effects. The long-term human rights consequences of climate change are impossible to predict beyond a certain point.
Human rights are an important part of the toolkit in responding to climate change. This is briefly acknowledged in the Paris Agreement, which states that parties should ‘respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights’ in the context of action to address climate change. In fact, human rights norms, laws and mechanisms have much more to offer than this passing mention suggests.
First, the proliferation of climate litigation has drawn increasingly and extensively on human rights. The landmark Urgenda judgment in the Netherlands in 2019 expanded the possibilities for litigation against states on the basis of human rights. There has also been an expansion of civil litigation against corporations to force them into aligning business practices with the Paris Agreement. Numerous important rulings include the Milieudefensie case against Shell in 2021, which established a precedent for using the non-binding human rights provisions of the UNGPs in tort claims against corporations. Climate litigation based on human rights before international courts is growing – including several cases before the European Court of Human Rights, and requests for advisory opinions from the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Second, the concept of a ‘just transition’ based on human rights is an important safeguard against harms in the context of a rapid energy transition. This is likely to be highly relevant and necessary in the coming years. The concept focuses on ensuring that the transition is carried out in an inclusive way that mitigates the risks to people who face potential harms. These could include, for example, loss of work in industries linked to fossil fuels, or loss of access to lands that are mined for raw materials required for battery technology. Human rights standards can provide specificity and clarity to define what a just transition should look like in different contexts, from workers’ rights to the rights of indigenous peoples. A rights-based approach also ensures particular attention is brought to the differentiated effects of climate change on specific groups of people, including through the lens of intersectionality.
Third, the human rights framework can usefully complement the concept of ‘loss and damage’. This concept refers to the destructive impacts of climate change that cannot be or have not been avoided by mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) or adaptation (adjusting to and building resilience against current and future climate change impacts). It includes both economic (financially quantifiable) and non-economic aspects, such as the loss of cultural heritage or traditional ways of life. The agreement at the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in November 2022 to establish a Loss and Damage Fund creates a new funding arrangement to support countries with the least ability to recover from climate harms, although the politically vexed questions about how to turn this commitment into action are yet to be settled. The language of human rights can be helpful to describe the harms articulated as loss and damage, including elements of non-economic loss and damage that might otherwise be considered as somewhat elusive. The rich tradition of economic, social and cultural rights is particularly important in this regard, including the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to health, as well as the rights set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Human rights principles – including non-discrimination and substantive equality, effective remedy and meaningful participation for affected people in decision-making – also provide potential elements to guide how the fund should be implemented.
Fourth, in terms of addressing climate change and environmental degradation, there has been some normative innovation within human rights that portends well for the future. The recognition of a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021, and subsequently by the UN General Assembly in 2022, is an important statement of intent, even if there are still unanswered questions about how the right will be used and whether it will be enshrined in law. More broadly, nascent efforts to sketch out the idea of rights of non-humans in nature, described by one interviewee as ‘fascinating and anarchic’, point to further disruptive innovation. It is not yet clear how far the human rights paradigm will be able to stretch, but a purely anthropocentric approach may not hold indefinitely.
Climate change is also forcing a new reckoning with the inequities and injustices that brought us to this point. In 2022, notably, the IPCC acknowledged for the first time ‘historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism’. Tracing back present-day human rights impacts to the harms of colonialism is a line of thinking with potentially important consequences for the future, especially at a time when some African states have begun fresh efforts to use the human rights system to address the legacies of colonialism. Efforts to address climate change may bring together issues of development financing, human rights and confronting colonial legacies in a promising new way.
If the human rights system has already made important contributions in addressing the impacts of climate change, there is a longer road ahead on the biodiversity crisis. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted at the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) in December 2022, acknowledges the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and addresses the need to protect indigenous peoples and environmental defenders in the context of conservation. The delicate nexus of energy transition, environmental conservation and the rights of indigenous peoples should be kept under close scrutiny from a human rights perspective, and should be central to the human rights agenda of the future.
Technology and human autonomy
The pace of technological development and its encroachment into all areas of life is raising questions on many levels – from questions about agency and consent to deeper ones about how to live a meaningful life – and about the sustainability of democracy as we know it. Technological capabilities continue to develop much faster than regulation. Left unaddressed, this could pave the way for exacerbated risks across multiple sectors, including for human rights. The challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI) in particular are new and fast-changing. As one interviewee highlighted, parts of the human rights sector currently feel unprepared to take them on. But as these challenges become more urgent, the role for human rights as a global framework predicated on the equal dignity of humans will be instrumental in addressing them.
From a human rights perspective, the rapid advancement of technology raises a broad array of challenges, including around algorithmic bias and discrimination, surveillance and privacy, and the use of AI in public sector decision-making. Technology has already provided tools for authoritarian behaviour by governments (including democratically elected ones): surveillance technologies such as Pegasus offer capabilities that shift power away from ordinary people and facilitate repressive forms of government. Meanwhile, democracy and the civic conditions required for it to work have been damaged by the proliferation of disinformation through social media algorithms aimed at maximizing user engagement. The concerns are magnified by the control of the ‘digital public square’ by a small number of technology companies, which could be perceived as creating a three-way social contract between governments, people and Big Tech. The tech giants are now locked in competition with each other to maximize control over the future of AI. It is not difficult to envisage the need for prudence being outweighed by the brute logic of securing market share.
This situation creates risks for the plausibility of democracy, with many further implications for human rights. As boundaries between truth and fiction are further eroded, the possibility of genuine democratic discussion is slipping out of reach. AI is likely to accelerate this challenge. As the historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has written, in developing the capabilities to generate and manipulate language, AI may have ‘hacked the operating system of our civilisation’ and may risk breaking trust in democratic debate.
In this context, one of the most important emerging areas for human rights is to protect human autonomy and the freedom of the human mind against the kind of interference made possible by technology. This is closely related to the freedom to seek, receive and impart information. The human rights framework contains a distinction between the forum internum – the inner life of a person, which drives their decisions and actions – and the forum externum, or how this inner life is externalized. Until now, the focus has been mainly on the latter, which concerns the regulation of human behaviour. Only recently has there been any serious attention to the idea that the forum internum itself may require more elaborate protection.
Now, however, the idea that humans are capable of rational and autonomous decisions about the political, social and economic questions that our societies face is increasingly coming into question. The novelty of this challenge is subtle, since human attitudes are continually formed and challenged through interactions of different kinds. Yet the deliberate and manipulative character of ‘nudging’ based on mass surveillance and data-gathering, and the willingness (or necessity) for users to outsource decisions to technology, raises urgent questions about the extent to which we are increasingly surrendering control of our internal lives. As technology becomes increasingly adept at identifying patterns and predicting our thoughts and feelings, those who control such technology become capable of exploiting and manipulating us. Increasingly, as scholars such as Susie Alegre and Nita Farahany have highlighted, the next frontier for technology is inside the human mind.
Notwithstanding the advantages that new technology can bring, the encroachment of technology on human autonomy is an area to which the human rights sector should devote increasing attention, through careful analysis of potential risks, how these might be mitigated, and what ethical guardrails should be put in place. For example, Farahany has made the case that the UN Human Rights Committee should develop the concept of a right to ‘cognitive liberty’ – such as through a general comment, an authoritative interpretation of a human rights treaty. She has suggested, too, that a recognition of the need to protect the forum internum is also important from the perspective of fulfilling the right to mental health.
As another interviewee expressed it, the value of human rights consists in their ability to help us to have a relationship with technology that respects and preserves our humanity. Technology also offers powerful ways to enhance human flourishing, including in areas such as healthcare and education, among many others. Risks and opportunities sit very close together. Human rights offer a way of asserting human dignity and autonomy in the face of technologies that could revolutionize experiences of being human for better and for worse.
