A Right to Digital Platforms?

Description

DIGITAL PLATFORM GOVERNANCE: SECURITY, SCALABILITY AND SUSTAINABILITY CONFERENCE


Notwithstanding the innovative and new aspects of our lives which will come about due to digital platforms, digital platforms will also ‘enhance’ existing elements of the lives of human beings around the world. Consequently, digital platforms will continue to assume increasing importance in the lives of human beings. Given this increasing importance, there is a need to ensure that individuals can access digital platforms. This chapter argues that human rights are a framework through which to shape the obligations of states concerning individuals accessing digital platforms. Whilst digital platforms will speak to – and touch upon – many different existing human rights this paper will first establish that a right to digital platforms can be derived from – and subsumed within – the right to an adequate standard of living. In doing so, this chapter will examine how adequacy – alongside the right to continuous improvement of living conditions – can be understood as being temporally relative. This allows the right to an adequate standard of living to ‘capture’ developments in human living standards one of which is digital platforms. Having established this, this chapter will apply existing human rights-based obligations frameworks to an examination of digital platforms. Thus, this chapter will suggest that states have obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil concerning digital platforms. Further, it will delineate these obligations. In doing so the aim is twofold. Firstly, to establish that states have obligations (founded in human rights law) concerning digital platforms and, secondly, to delimit the content of these obligations as to empower individuals to ‘enforce’ these obligations versus states.

Period	10 Jan 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Hong Kong, Hong KongShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International