HKS Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, sparking global concern over its risks, from misinformation and wealth concentration to discrimination, surveillance, and weaponization by state and non-state actors. While efforts like the EU AI Act and national initiatives in the U.S. and Netherlands seek to regulate AI, many frameworks remain fragmented, corporate-friendly, or insufficiently grounded in human rights. The UN argues existing human rights law provides a foundation, though some scholars call for new protections against the intrusiveness of digital surveillance capitalism. Latin America faces unique challenges due to structural dependencies on foreign technology and regulatory models, leaving its institutions vulnerable amid global power asymmetries.

This paper examines legislative initiatives in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, assessing their rights-based provisions and institutional capacity, and asks whether these measures effectively protect rights and enable democratic oversight. It concludes by identifying key gaps—including environmental justice, epistemic rights, and participatory governance—and suggesting directions for reform.

As the products of the IT industry have become ever more prevalent in our everyday lives, evidence of undesirable consequences of their use has become ever more difficult to ignore. Consequently, several responses ranging from attempts to foster individual ethics and collective standards in the industry to legal and regulatory frameworks have been developed and are being widely discussed in the literature. This paper instead makes the argument that currently popular methods of software engineering are implicated as they hinder work that would be necessary to avoid negative outcomes. I argue that software engineering has regressed and that introducing rights as a core concept into the ways of working in the industry is essential for making software engineering more rights-respecting.

AAs 2022 draws to a close, the Carr Center and its affiliates are reflecting on events and issues around the world that continue to shape our approach to protecting human rights. As new developments unfold in the political, social, economic, and technological spheres, the strategies by which we protect our fundamental rights must continue to evolve and adapt to our changing world.

To honor International Human Rights Day this year, we are examining several of the top human rights issues the United States and the world have faced in 2022, including challenges to democracy, racial equality in the US, the Russia-Ukraine War, Iran’s women’s rights movement, and more. Comments from several of our Carr Center faculty and fellows identify how these issues can be better addressed to lay the groundwork for a better world.

Human rights are dynamic, rather than static. The contemporary status quo emerged via a three phase process, from conceptualization, to clarification, and to consolidation. The present is an interregnum between two significant eras, a fact which the generations metaphor does not adequately capture. The future of human rights will be shaped by how individuals and institutions engage with advances in technologies that transform and extend the mind and body. Particular attention is paid to innovation in superintelligence, social robots, and augmented humans. One implication of this analysis is that changes to the mind and body are likely to transform the subject of rights and to require the development of more a sophisticated rights ecology. Human rights scholars and advocates should engage in a proactive and ambitious program to prepare for such developments. Such efforts will ensure there are rights to clarify and consolidate in the era to come.

During the Cold-War-era, intelligence agencies in both the Eastern and Western blocs set up secret experiments to devise methods of mind control and brainwashing in order to gain an advantage over the enemy. The most notorious of these endeavours was the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) illegal MKUltra program, which ran from 1953 to 1973. In its quest for a truth serum that could be employed to force confessions from subjects who are not cooperating and the desire to be able to manipulate people’s behavior, the CIA experimented on thousands of subjects – partly without their knowledge or consent, and often with disastrous consequences. In this paper, I will first scrutinize the MKUltra program, investigating some of the experiments that it comprised. I shall then map the program’s aims onto the latest technology available for interfering with the brain – so-called “brain-computer interfaces” – to determine whether one could, in principle, use these novel devices for the purpose of mind control. Finally, I will be looking for indications that stakeholders may actually plan to employ the technology to achieve what had been beyond technological reach during the Cold War. I conclude that brain-computer interfaces could indeed be used to realize some of the original goals and that an interest in mind control still prevails.

In recent years, there has been growing concern regarding the unintended mental health impact of online platforms and whether they might be driving a public health crisis, especially among children and teens. There is emerging evidence that spending too much time on digital platforms—like gaming sites, online pornography sites, and social media—can be associated with negative mental health effects such as depression and social anxiety, at least in some users. Yet most policy action and advocacy in this industry have focused on the issues of privacy and misinformation, relegating the mental health impact of digital technology as a secondary byproduct of the industry. In this paper, we provide an overview of the documented negative mental health effects associated with prolonged use of video games, online pornography, and social media. We outline the measures that have been taken to address the mental health impact of these technologies. Finally, we suggest that induced overuse is at the heart of the problem and we propose an incentive-based policy mechanism to address it.

To mitigate inefficiencies in manual contact tracing processes, digital contact tracing and exposure notifications systems were developed for use as public-interest technologies during the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) global pandemic. Effective implementation of these tools requires alignment across several factors, including local regulations and policies and trust in government and public health officials. Careful consideration should also be made to minimize any potential conflicts with existing processes in public health, which has demonstrated effectiveness. Four unique cases—of Ireland, Guayaquil (Ecuador), Haiti, and the Philippines—detailed in this paper will highlight the importance of upholding the principles of Scientific Validity, Necessity, Time-Boundedness, and Proportionality.

With the current political climate and advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the stakes are higher than ever to advance new laws that make technology work for the people and promote access, equity, and justice in the digital age. When we were last at a similar historical crossroads in the early 1970s—at the cusp of massive technological change with the rise of computerization and fights for the future of this country raging across movement issues—the people of California passed the constitutional right to privacy. It is the last truly comprehensive privacy law passed in the United States. This modern right to privacy, enacted in 1972, addresses both autonomy privacy and informational privacy and protects against privacy invasions by both government and business. At its core is an allocation of power to the people to control how technological advances can invade private lives and undermine fundamental rights. But, by the mid-1970s, political energy for similar robust substantive privacy protections that limited information collection, use, and disclosure had been undermined. United States privacy protections had been pummeled into weak procedural due process frameworks, like notice and choice, that have now occupied the privacy field for decades. It is urgent to explore what we can learn from history and interrogate current US privacy law and movement power to light a path to defend existing protections and enact stronger privacy laws that can properly support rights and democracy in the AI age.

A well-informed citizenry is essential in a democracy to preserve American values and make sound decisions in every area, from the school board meeting to the voting booth. Yet, arguably, in no other way have Americans fallen so short from what the Framers intended than in their understanding of and participation in democratic governance. A 2019 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that only 39 percent of respondents could name all three branches of government, and 22 percent could not name any. Voting rates average only 56 percent in presidential elections, and are as low as 40 percent in mid-terms, ranking the U.S. far below most other democracies in voting participation. In short, the American people are not well-informed about their own government, do not turn out to vote in high numbers, and do not engage significantly in politics and civics. In addition to providing a set of policy recommendations, this issue of the Reimagining Rights and Responsibilities paper series outlines historical origins of civic education, the status of state and federal requirement, the dearth of federal funding, and the current political tensions within civic education.

Starting with the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, and gaining steam throughout the next decade, the prevailing view on criminal justice was that “tough on crime laws make crime rates go down.” That sentiment was predicated on the notion that criminals were not being sufficiently punished for their offenses, and that sentences must be increased—including mandatory minimums and “three strikes laws”—both to remove criminals from communities, and to deter others from committing crimes. The incarceration rate more than tripled between 1980 and its peak in 2008, from 310 to 1,000 prisoners per 100,000 adults—some 2.3 million people in all. Today, the United States leads the world in incarceration, with a rate more than 4 times that of comparable democracies in Western Europe. Reform of the criminal justice system must take into account each stage of the process, respecting the due process rights of individuals throughout their interaction with the system while at the same time bringing criminals to justice and improving overall public safety.

Nearly 61 million Americans have a disability, making the group the country’s largest minority. Individuals with disabilities cut across race, gender, and sexual orientation. Since people with disabilities are disproportionately older, they have also made up an expanding share of the general population as the U.S. population has aged. Unlike other more fixed identities, any person can become disabled at any time, due to severe injury, illness, trauma, pregnancy, or simply aging. In fact, while only 11% of people under ages 18 to 64 reported having a disability in 2017, 35% of people ages 65 and over reported having one, illustrating the fluid nature of disability status. Disabilities include a range of conditions, both visible and invisible, and including physical, mental, and cognitive impairments—all of which require different types of protection against different types of discrimination. These complexities make understanding and advancing disability rights more challenging. Moreover, people with disabilities continue to face challenges as a result of policies that affect them both directly and indirectly. Renewing rights for people with disabilities requires both reinstating and extending equal protections, and affirmatively expanding accommodations to better allow them to participate meaningfully in all aspects of society.

A right of equal access to public goods and services is rooted in the rights to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ With these rights, the Declaration of Independence asserts the concept of equality as a founding principle, while nearly a century later in the nation’s “second founding” after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution goes further in guaranteeing equal protection of the law. These documents create the principle from which a right of equal access is derived, including access to education, health care, housing, and environmental protection.

Throughout American history, the concepts of liberty and equality have been intertwined but also conflicted.

Current trends within public education, health care, housing, and environmental protection reflect burgeoning disparities in opportunity. Public policy in recent years has centered around the promotion of macroeconomic growth but has done little to guarantee individual and societal well-being, reinforcing the focus of the private sector on maximizing shareholder value, often at the expense of employees and consumers. These policies have exacerbated the inequality of access to public goods and services, such as health and education, among significant portions of the population, who lack the agency and the opportunity to sustain themselves. It is critical that the United States responds to the public health and economic crises by protecting liberty, equality, and securing equal access to public goods and services.

The First Amendment guarantees some of the most fundamental rights provided to Americans under the Constitution. The right to free expression is a foundational tenet of American values. In fact, it was the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and the press that provided much of the basis for the revolution that led to America’s founding. The First Amendment provides broad protection from government censure of speech, although limitations on some forms of published or broadcast speech, such as obscenity and hate speech, have been allowed.

As the traditional public square governed and protected by federal regulation moves online to spaces governed by private corporations, the rules for how speech is both expressed and censored are also changing. How should legal protections for speech adapt to these new tech-powered, private forums? This chapter will explore the current landscape of free speech and the associated information landscape as well as the threats that they face.

In March 2018, hundreds of thousands of young people walked out of school and marched on their local statehouses and on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to advocate for stricter controls on gun sales and ownership. The March for Our Lives was initially organized by students at Margery Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a school shooting had killed 17 students. Collectively, the marches were the largest-ever protest against gun violence, and one of the largest protests of any kind in American history.

The growing consensus over the need for some “common-sense” gun laws to regulate the sale and ownership of firearms stands in sharp contrast to the incendiary rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, which has sounded the alarm in recent years that Democrats are coming to “take away” guns or institute a national registry of firearm ownership. Indeed, the reasonableness on both sides of the debate implies that there is a middle-ground that can be achieved to limit gun violence in the United States, while still allowing for responsible ownership of firearms for hunting, sport shooting, and personal protection.

The Department of Justice began prosecuting federal hate crimes cases after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Thus, the literature on hate crime is new, though rapidly growing. The first American use of the term “hate crime” emerged during the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the 20th century. The term typically refers to bias-motivated violence. But the variation in hate crimes laws and data collection policies per state has created disparities in protection against hate crimes, which leaves people vulnerable depending on where they live. Without proper hate crime statutes and data collection, it is difficult to know the true nature and magnitude of the problem of hate crimes in the United States. In order to allocate resources and deter future hate crimes, law enforcement agencies need to understand the problem at hand.

The United States is a nation of immigrants. For centuries, waves of migrants and refugees have arrived in America seeking economic opportunity or religious freedom. While many have found what they desired, and assimilated into American culture, many others have encountered persecution, resentment, and xenophobia. As the third rail of American politics, immigration has long been a source of controversy, with policy split between two competing visions of what the country could be: on the one hand, a rights-oriented, humanitarian vision that imagines open doors to opportunity and shelter; on the other hand, an exclusionary and Ameri-centric vision that imagines protected, walled-off borders. Recently, our politics and media have been flooded with images of the latter: children piled into cages at detention camps, migrant caravans “invading” the southern border, endless fights in the courts over walls and travel bans. These images did not originate with the Trump administration—previous presidents have also pursued anti-immigration policies on asylum and deportations—though the current administration has greatly exacerbated them. Building on the well-established legal foundation for a rights-based vision of immigration, comprehensive reform in due process and humanitarian protections are necessary for those arriving at our borders.

As Yogi Berra once said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” Nothing could be truer when it comes to money in American politics. In the 2000 election, candidates and outside groups spent a combined 3 billion dollars on the presidential and congressional races. Not two decades later, in 2016, the amount spent more than doubled to a combined 6.5 billion dollars. For 2020, forecasters project that the total amount spent on political advertising alone will reach 10 billion dollars.

There’s a simple reason for this exponential rise in political expenditures: the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment to preclude the regulation of many aspects of campaign finance. That decision in 1976 first opened the floodgates of contributions to political campaigns.

In this issue of the Reimagining Rights and Responsibilities in the U.S. paper series, the authors outline how the bipartisan use of money in politics undermines the democratic process.

Privacy has always been one of the most precarious rights of American life because it lacks clear protections in the U.S. Constitution. The right to privacy is under attack in this moment in our history like no other previous moment. Privacy defenders are attempting to fight a two-front war, as increasing incursions are made by private industry and government law enforcement.

The complicated relationship of religion and government predates the founding of the United States. The Founders grappled with this dilemma for years before compromising on the final language of the First Amendment. Even then, the issue was far from settled: the US has struggled since its founding to reconcile the right of religious freedom with the reality of governing a pluralist democracy with an increasingly diverse population.

Today, a struggle over the scope of religious freedom is taking place in politics, the courts, and across American society. Claims of religious freedom are increasingly receiving preferential treatment in both political discourse and in the courts when religious beliefs come into conflict with other rights. That is particularly true for women’s reproductive rights and the rights of individuals to non-discrimination on the basis of their sexual identity.

At the same time, a controversy has emerged over the meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, in which recent Supreme Court cases have pitted the prohibition on establishment of religion against the right of religious free exercise. The central question over religious rights today is how to strike an appropriate balance between rights when they come into conflict. This question has troubled the American Republic since its formation.

After more than a century of expanding the voting rights of previously disenfranchised groups, the American electoral system today is confronted by political and legal maneuvers to curtail the hard-won rights of these same groups, ostensibly in the name of combating fraud and regulating voting, but actually to change the outcome of elections.

Attacks on the integrity of the electoral system are not new. Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century dominant political forces suppressed voting by African Americans and other minorities, women, immigrants, and young people. Manipulation of voting in the 20th century included racist suppression of African American votes, first by Democrats and later by Republicans. These practices are blatant examples of the vulnerability of the electoral process to partisan manipulation and the necessity of reform to safeguard voting rights, especially among these vulnerable groups.

In his timely addition to the Reimagining Rights and Responsibilites in the U.S. paper series, authors John Shattuck, Mathias Risse, and team outline the expansion of the vote through history, the disproportionate impact of voter suppression, and propose a set of policy recommendations accordingly.