ÜTI teadusseminar "Are human rights online and offline the same?"

Abstract: Very often the proposition that the same rights as people have offline must also be secured online is accepted without hesitation. Yet it is important to view whether this idea of the sameness of offline and online human rights carries more than just a rhetorical component. This is the question about the justification of the idea of sameness. Several steps can be taken to verify, or in alternative, reject the idea of sameness. On a philosophical level, various approaches to justify the existence of human rights can be explored and compared. Another possibility is to ask the question about the origin of human rights rules and principles – that is, do human rights online merely reflect the image of offline human rights, are the rights transposable and to what degree, whether something “is lost” during transposition from offline to online, or is the digital domain capable of generating independently standing human rights law. An existential question is related to the level of abstractness – whether human rights online still meet the criterion of abstractness and universality which is usually associated with the definition of human rights in general. All these considerations can also be placed into the framework of lexical semantics by looking into the meaning of words. Do freedom of expression and the right to privacy have the same meaning offline and online? A skeptic would argue the difference in meaning, which by itself can be translated to counter the idea of sameness. A non-skeptic would, in turn, ask for evidence that the meaning of words and consequently the content of human rights offline and online is at variance.