GeoLegal Weekly #64: Human Wrongs?
In the wake of the State Department's new human rights posture, we dive into human rights with Yale Law's Nicholas Bequelin.
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Are Human Rights Still Rights?
Human rights aren’t what they used to be. The State Department is changing the meaning of human rights–or more specifically what constitutes violations of human rights. From 1977 until last week, the Congressionally-mandated State Department’s annual human rights report highlighted a broad array of human rights violations across the world. But following last week’s change, violations like abuses in prisons, government corruption, denial of the freedom of assembly, imprisoning prisoners of conscience without due process, repression of women’s and LGBTQ rights, or shortcomings around free and fair elections will no longer be included. Now the State Department will only document human rights violations minimally required by law.
The change is predictable for an administration that is deeply opposed to international covenants in principle. But odd because, like the elimination of development aid, things like human rights have been at least as likely to be used as a cudgel to strong arm countries as to actually improve lives in them. The outrage from Beijing following the yearly criticism of China’s dreadful human rights record was at times a significant foreign policy issue, probably as divisive as today’s trade war, though less economically destructive and actually, in its own way, morally righteous.
The unruly world is changing human rights standards and policies. Starting in the late 1970s, human rights became largely synonymous with political and social rights and freedoms, as well as a central driver in many Western countries’ foreign policies and UN initiatives. Human rights drove sanctions and trade deals, international agreements, and even wars (recall the Taleban’s treatment of women or Saddam Hussein's absolutely nightmarish human rights record were among the justifications for the War on Terror).
Clearly human rights have been on the decline for years–and that comes with its own obvious victims–but it also changes political and business dynamics. Since China moved to become a larger global player in the world, countries across Africa and the Middle East embraced Chinese investment and military aid that came without human rights strings attached–or even stern lectures. For Western companies that embraced human rights policies and ESG scores as a competitive advantage against Chinese companies that would work for less, what does this evolving landscape mean?
To determine how we got here and where we might go next, I interviewed Nicholas Bequelin, a human rights expert currently based at Yale Law School, about the state of human rights. In our discussion, Nicholas noted the general deterioration of human rights and explained that a key driver has been the global erosion of democracy. Nicholas explains: “Human rights are closely linked to the health of democracy. And over the past 15 years—especially recently—we’ve seen democracy declining across the globe.” And with limited consequences for violations, countries feel little pressure to improve.
When it comes to global challenges like climate change and artificial intelligence, new human rights perspectives arise. “Climate change isn’t going to be solved through human rights law. Neither is the rise of AI. But human rights can highlight the impacts—like when poor people are displaced by climate disasters while the wealthy build protective barriers. Or when AI systems deny people access to healthcare or jobs. Those are human rights issues.”
He also warned about the power of AI to infringe on liberty through surveillance and, more ominously, prediction, such as anticipating behavior for drone strikes or voting.
Looking ahead, Bequelin pointed to the U.S. as a human rights flashpoint. “There’s legislation under consideration that could allow the Treasury Department to strip nonprofits of their charitable status if they’re accused of supporting terrorism—a very loosely defined term. That’s a classic authoritarian tactic. It mirrors what we see in Russia, China, Hungary—go after civil society funding first.” Nicholas goes into greater depth about this in his excellent piece for Foreign Policy magazine (also on his Substack).
I spoke to Nicholas before the Trump administration had begun sending deportees to the brutal Salvadorean CECOT prison, but it fits with the themes he suggested. While the US may not have a perfect human rights record, a US administration essentially partnering with another country to imprison alleged gang members to avoid US due process procedures and protections is likely without precedent. This not only points toward sharply declining human rights norms in the US, it also shows the extent to which the US is likely on balance less inclined to raise human rights concerns globally.
Based off of this summary of the state of human rights in the world today, I want to zero in on Nicolas’ highlighting of AI as a vector for rights abuses and thinking about ways in which human rights will come under new technologically driven threats. So what does human rights mean going forward?
Surveillance
With the ability to surveil dissidents, political opponents, or wealthy individuals with influence in ways that go far beyond previous capabilities, government security services will be able to track and assess threats–or gather compromising material–highly efficiently. Will this make authoritarian governments less prone to violence and extraconstitutional arrests?
Conversely, will governments use their ability to surveil their entire population’s actions and thoughts both online through monitoring and offline through enhanced facial recognition of ubiquitous cameras in public? With this data, governments are likely to see vastly more “threats” from far more people and unleash law enforcement to take a much more aggressive stance.
In this world, will companies be victims, accomplices, or both?
Deepfakes
As AI technology advances, deepfakes are already a significant social issue (especially teenagers) and emerging news credibility issue whereby social media can show basically any politicians saying basically anything a creator would want. But how might a government use this technology? Most obviously, to humiliate political opponents and dissidents, but potentially also to create "evidence" of incidents that might empower it. Scenes of immigrants committing crimes and migrants sneaking across a border good for your next political initiative, create videos of that happening.
The ways that companies could be harmed through this are commonly discussed, but what if it is used for competitive intelligence or to harm a competitor?
Control of information and propaganda through AI rather than censorship
Governments have typically controlled information through censorship ranging from blacking out magazine articles to erecting the Great Firewall of China. But as AI becomes more deeply integrated into our information flows, governments–and maybe even more worryingly, private LLM companies–will have the ability to recalibrate information rather than crudely block it, all with the consumer of that information largely unaware. This can be subtle as in tweaks to social media algorithms to drive consumption of desired messages and suppression of undesired ones; it could be deeper within GenIA models to orient answers and thinking around certain principles.
Data privacy
As noted by Nicholas, particularly in Europe, data privacy–or the principle that data about you should be yours to control–is increasingly viewed through a human rights lens. Some governments may seek to protect it for their people as a defense of human rights and others may vacuum it up to create more sophisticated systems of control.
But given that the vast majority of data is held by the private sector, companies may be more in the center of how data privacy intersects with human rights than ever before. With highly fragmented international regulations around data privacy, what constitutes the human right of data privacy may vary from country to country, at least from a strict legal perspective. Companies operating globally will need to account for this lest they become violators of human rights in Europe while carrying out business as usual in the US and in violation of Chinese law for preventing government unrestrained access to all personal data.
-SW & DB