Policy Department, Directorate-General for External Policies
principles (‘GNI Principles’) and implementation guidelines to ‘guide responsible company, government, and civil society action when facing requests from governments around the world that could impact the freedom of expression and privacy rights of users 277.
3.6
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Toronto Declaration 278 – A set of standards protecting human rights in the age of artificial intelligence, focusing on protecting the rights to equality and non-discrimination in machine learning systems, developed by civil society organizations working on digital rights.
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Santa Clara Principles 279 – A set of standards ‘outlining minimum levels of transparency and accountability that online platforms should provide around their moderation of user-generated content 280, drafted by a group of organizations, advocates, and academic experts who support the right to free expression online.
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Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index 281 – An index evaluating ‘the world’s most powerful digital platforms and telecommunications companies on their disclosed policies and practices affecting users’ rights to freedom of expression and information and privacy’.
Conclusions
The recent developments in the human rights framework described in this chapter are a sign of a growing awareness among the international community of how technologies affect societies and almost every part of our day-to-day lives. They also demonstrate an increasing caution and healthy scepticism towards application of new technologies, as it has been acknowledged that, alongside potential advantages, there may be unintended adverse consequences, or sometimes the potential to be used as deliberate tools of repression. The existing legal framework tackles many threats identified in Chapter 3, including practices described as part of a 'next generation repression toolkit’. In particular, it responds to problems such as internet shutdowns and other network disruptions, mass and biometric surveillance, government hacking, export of surveillance tools, or cyber harassment. At the same time, there are fields that can be improved or should be further addressed. The main conclusions, built on the analysis of existing norms and interviews with different stakeholders 282, have been listed below with the aim of informing discussions on future development of human rights protection in the digital era. Among the new and emerging technologies, which may be used for repression and social control, AI and algorithmic decision-making systems have dominated the most current agendas of human rights organisations. Building upon general principles on personal data protection, the right to privacy, freedom of expression or non-discrimination, there have already been several soft law instruments and other initiatives that aim to respond to the certain threats posed by those technologies. The existing instruments focus mainly on particular technological applications of AI technologies or their impact on selected rights. Still, there are gaps in the current level of protection. Most importantly, a comprehensive, international legal instrument, specifically tailored to challenges posed by AI, is lacking283. At the same time, there are already advanced debates on how this gap could be filled. There seems to be a consensus that such an
GNI, ‘Global Network Initiative Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression’, 2015 278 Amnesty International and Access Now, ‘The Toronto Declaration: Protecting the rights to equality and nondiscrimination in machine learning systems’, 2018. 279 Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation (2018), currently under review process. 280 York, J. C., ‘The Santa Clara Principles During COVID-19: More important than ever’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2020. 281 Ranking Digital Rights, op. cit. 282 See Section 2.2. ‘Note on the methodology’ and Annex 7.2. 283 Council of Europe Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CoE CAHAI), op. cit., 2020. 277
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