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Human rights and the on-line persona

Posted by William Heath in e-ID at May 28th, 2007

Jaco Aizenman writes

You may want to consider including the human right of having or not virtual personality for the July 9 event?

I’m a bit perplexed by this. Surely “human rights” has a specific meaning, despite the misleading and sloppy usage in Britain by politicians and the media. Human rights are specifically enshrined in law. Is anyone proposing a law about whether or not we have a virtual personality?

Well yes, it seems. In Costa Rica, where Jaco is based, a senior judge called Magistrate Carlos Chinchilla is leading work on taking just such a law through Congress. What’s the thinking behind it? We in the UK might have something to learn from this.

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One Response to “Human rights and the on-line persona”

  1. William Heath Says:
    May 28th, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    Jaco writes again:

    please note the difference between human right and fundamental right….

    Human right is more for politicians and a general concept, as you wrote in the blog message.

    Fundamental right is for lawyers and Judges. Fundamental rights are the basis of the Constitution. For example, in the USA they call it Bill of Rights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

    Since virtual personality (digital identity or digital transactions) will control everything in future society (already today it does…!) it is intuitive that it should be a fundamental right(*)…. However, the details of how this will be implemented is something that it will be developed in the XXI century…., and since we are living already in a globalized world and society, it is something that we all be developing together… (it will take lots of time, since we are talking about a major Constitutional change…)

    I see the Costa Rican development as a starting point regarding this new fundamental right, and your blog effort hopefully as the trigger to start globalizing this exchanges, starting with the UK…! ;-)

    (*) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_right

    There may be a language issue here Jaco. Here in the UK - weirdly - we don’t have a Constitution, just laws and an accretion of practices. But we DO have human rights legislation (Human Rights Act, based on the European Convention on Human Rights). I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing about virtual personas in that. Which isn’t to say we dont need one…I suspect the Dutch are closest to having checked this out.

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