A Universal Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights — Help Shape the Rights of the Digital Future

Human rights must remain effective in an age shaped by platforms, networks and artificial intelligence. This independent eighteen-article Charter is a proposed ideal toward which laws and institutions may evolve—not a claim that every proposed right is already legally binding.

Lire la version française de cette Charte

Open licence · CC BY-SA 4.0

Contribute by 18 October 2027: choose one article, identify one omission or conflict, and suggest a specific amendment. One useful contribution is enough.

Comments require registration/sign-in. You can also contribute by email: therebelmarketer@jlkreiss.com

PREAMBLE

Human dignity does not end where a network begins. The rights and freedoms of every human being must remain real when relationships, opportunities, public services and shared knowledge depend on digital technologies.

We affirm that technology exists to serve people, not to place them under unaccountable digital power. Freedom without practical access is incomplete; innovation without responsibility cannot excuse the denial of human dignity.

The law of today is evidence of what humanity has recognised, not the measure of all that humanity can yet recognise. This Charter is an ideal: a common standard toward which our laws, institutions and digital systems should advance.

Rooted in equal dignity, universality, freedom, non-discrimination, pluralism and protection of the rights of others, it proposes eighteen interdependent safeguards for current and future generations. These provisions invite public deliberation and the gradual construction of accountable, fair and humane institutions.

ARTICLE 1 — DIGNITY, UNIVERSALITY AND PERSONHOOD

Every human being is born equal in dignity and rights. No network, platform, model, database or automated judgment may reduce a person to a score, profile, digital credential or commodity. A person remains a rights-holder whether connected or disconnected, identifiable or anonymous, documented or undocumented.

Where digital identification or attribution materially affects a person's rights, everyone shall be entitled to proportionate, accessible means of proving, correcting or contesting identity and falsely attributed acts. Protection against fraud shall not become an excuse for compulsory universal biometric or real-name identification.

ARTICLE 2 — CONTINUITY AND ADVANCEMENT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Human rights endure wherever human life is mediated by technology. Their effective exercise shall not depend on whether a decision is made by a human being, a digital system or a combination of both.

This Charter affirms established rights and proposes additional protections where new forms of digital power expose people to material harm or exclusion. Existing legislation shall not be treated as the ceiling of human dignity or future rights; governments, institutions and technologies should progressively align with this higher standard.

ARTICLE 3 — MEANINGFUL ACCESS AND EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVES

Everyone has the right to a fair and meaningful opportunity to access affordable, accessible and sufficiently reliable digital connectivity, essential digital skills and the means of participating in contemporary civic, social, cultural and economic life.

States and institutions shall pursue inclusive access, paying particular attention to persons with disabilities, children, older people, low-income households, rural communities and linguistic minorities. A fundamental right or indispensable public benefit shall not become practically inaccessible merely because a person lacks a device, connection, recognised credential or digital literacy.

Where digital access is essential to a right, an accessible, effective and reasonably equivalent route to that right shall be available. This principle does not require identical service formats, unlimited public bandwidth or access to every commercial product.

ARTICLE 4 — PROTECTION FROM ARBITRARY EXCLUSION AT INDISPENSABLE DIGITAL GATEWAYS

No person shall be arbitrarily or discriminatorily excluded from a digital gateway when the exclusion would substantially prevent the effective exercise of a fundamental right or an indispensable social function and no realistic alternative exists.

Indispensability shall be assessed by the actual function involved, realistic substitutes, structural dependency and the severity of the harm. Popularity or market size alone is insufficient. The responsibilities of public bodies, private infrastructure operators and expressive private platforms shall be evaluated distinctly.

Safeguards for indispensable access must coexist with the safety of others, protection from fraud and harassment, legitimate security requirements, freedom of expression, editorial autonomy and effective contestation. Public provision, interoperability and portable alternatives shall be considered before compelled admission to a private expressive venue. This right is not an unconditional uptime guarantee.

ARTICLE 5 — EXPRESSION, PLURALISM AND CIVIC PARTICIPATION

Everyone has the right to seek, receive, create and communicate information and ideas through digital means, individually and collectively, without arbitrary censorship, retaliation, discriminatory suppression or blanket disconnection.

Public authorities shall not employ infrastructure control, opaque automated enforcement or public-safety pretexts to silence lawful dissent. Any restriction affecting expression must be justified, necessary, proportionate, reviewable and compatible with other fundamental rights.

Private moderation may legitimately protect the rights and safety of others. When it materially affects fundamental interests, rules and reasons should be intelligible and avenues of challenge effective. This Article does not impose an unconditional duty on private publishers or associations to amplify or host every expression.

ARTICLE 6 — NOTICE, REASONS AND FAIR DIGITAL PROCESS

Anyone materially harmed by a digital decision affecting rights, livelihood, essential services or comparable fundamental interests has the right to timely, intelligible notice of the decision and its material reasons, as well as an accessible opportunity to challenge it.

Review must be suitably impartial, prompt and capable of correction. It shall consider relevant evidence, including the applicable rule, scope, time and grounds of the decision. Security, third-party privacy and genuine confidential interests may justify proportionate redaction, meaningful summaries or confidential competent review, but shall not extinguish effective contestability.

An urgent step to prevent serious harm may precede notice where strictly necessary. Its basis must remain examinable, and subsequent notice and review must follow as soon as compatible with legitimate protection needs.

ARTICLE 7 — NECESSITY AND PROPORTIONALITY OF DIGITAL RESTRICTIONS

A digital restriction that seriously impairs essential participation must have a legitimate objective, an adequate evidentiary basis and a scope and duration no greater than necessary for that objective. A less restrictive equally effective safeguard should be preferred.

Warnings and progressive responses should be preferred for remediable or minor conduct. Immediate exclusion may nevertheless be appropriate for grave threats, exploitation, fraud, harassment or repeated serious abuse, with review and reconsideration proportionate to the consequences.

Substantive proportionality applies before an appeal is filed and need not depend upon proving that a platform is indispensable. It does not require repeated warnings before urgently protecting a child, victim or threatened person.

ARTICLE 8 — DIGITAL CONTINUITY, RECOVERY, PORTABILITY AND EXIT

Everyone has a right, proportionate to the stakes, to recover, understand and move their own lawfully portable data, contributions and essential elements of digital activity, especially when a service is suspended, terminated or fails.

Where significant rights or livelihoods depend on continuity, fair transition, notice, reasonable recovery windows, interoperable export or reconstruction routes should be made practicable. No provider shall be required to preserve everything indefinitely or to reveal another person's data, confidential security material, proprietary systems or unlawfully retained information.

Recovering content, obtaining reasons for a decision and obtaining evidence relevant to an appeal are distinct rights with different safeguards. No right to a third party's correspondence, perpetual hosting or restoration of every account is implied.

ARTICLE 9 — FREEDOM OF CHOICE AND COGNITIVE AUTONOMY

Every human being has the right to form, reconsider, express, refuse and act on choices free from deceptive, coercive or exploitative computational interference that materially compromises practical autonomy.

Adaptive persuasion, manipulative interfaces or persistent profiling must not exploit specific vulnerabilities in ways that defeat meaningful refusal or independent judgment. Proportionate rights of explanation, reset, refusal and challenge should accompany consequential influences.

Advocacy, education, journalism, lawful advertising and ordinary persuasion remain protected. An influence on conduct, by itself, does not establish prohibited manipulation.

ARTICLE 10 — PRIVACY AND INTEGRITY OF THE MENTAL SPHERE

Intimate thoughts, convictions, intentions and mental integrity deserve effective protection against intrusive collection, person-linked inference, exploitation and interference, regardless of whether the signals are neural, biometric or behavioural.

Direct access to core intimate mental content and highly consequential attribution of such content should face especially strong safeguards. For transient emotional or cognitive states, the nature of the inference, purpose, intrusiveness, consent conditions and foreseeable harm must be assessed together. Ordinary consumer preferences do not automatically qualify as intimate mental information.

Necessary assistive, medical and safety uses shall remain possible under robust safeguards, oversight and meaningful remedies. This right does not depend on the existence of a particular sensor or scientific model.

ARTICLE 11 — TRANSPARENCY AND SCRUTINY OF CONSEQUENTIAL ALGORITHMIC POWER

Where digital systems significantly influence access to protected opportunities, public information or civic participation, affected persons shall be entitled to an intelligible account of the principal factors relevant to material decisions and effective avenues of challenge.

Independent competent bodies should be empowered to examine serious systemic effects that cannot be uncovered through isolated individual explanations. Such review may require secure testing, appropriate records and proportionate access to information; it must protect personal data, trade secrets and other legitimate interests.

No person is entitled merely by virtue of this Article to a particular ranking, the publication of every algorithmic parameter or uncontrolled access to confidential data.

ARTICLE 12 — PRIVACY, DATA PROTECTION AND COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY

Everyone has the right to privacy, secure communications and effective protection against unjustified digital surveillance, tracking and exploitation of personal information. Collection and use of personal data must be limited by legitimate purpose, necessity, meaningful safeguards and accountability.

People shall have practical means of knowing, accessing, correcting and, where appropriate, erasing information about them, subject to the rights of others and lawful evidence preservation. Intrusive surveillance must be subject to stringent safeguards, competent independent oversight and effective remedy.

Digital security must not be weakened systematically or indiscriminately for all merely to facilitate investigations concerning a limited number of people. Lawful targeted investigation may be justified where necessary and proportionate, but blanket surveillance, indiscriminate retention and compelled systematic vulnerabilities require exceptional scrutiny.

ARTICLE 13 — EQUALITY, ACCESSIBILITY AND EFFECTIVE INCLUSION

No technological design, identification requirement, automated outcome or digital policy shall deprive people of equal rights through unjustified discrimination, foreseeable exclusion or inaccessible means of participation.

Public and functionally essential services shall provide accessible design, reasonable accommodations and practicable ways of reaching the underlying right, not merely formal digital availability. Disability, language, connectivity, poverty or inability to pass a rigid digital identity check must not render a fundamental right illusory.

Safeguards shall be implemented without turning accessibility into intrusive monitoring or excessive demands for personal information.

ARTICLE 14 — CHILDREN AND PEOPLE AT HEIGHTENED RISK

Children are rights-holders entitled both to protection and to participation, privacy, expression, learning and development. Their best interests shall be a primary consideration, while their evolving capacities and individual circumstances remain meaningful.

Digital measures protecting children and others facing heightened risks shall be proportionate to identifiable harm. They shall avoid blanket surveillance, unnecessary biometric collection, automatic exclusion and unjustified substitution of institutional control for personal agency.

Effective, age-appropriate routes to assistance and challenge must exist, including confidential routes when disclosure to a parent, guardian or other authority would itself create a serious risk.

ARTICLE 15 — ACCOUNTABILITY FOR DELEGATED AND AUTONOMOUS DECISIONS

No actor shall evade responsibility by delegating consequential decisions to automated systems. This Charter proposes safeguards beyond existing legislation where human rights require them.

Public authorities and private actors exercising consequential digital power should be subject to clear allocations of responsibility based on actual control, authority, reasonable foreseeability and contribution. Systems should support appropriate records, intervention or suspension of harmful operation and access to an entity empowered to provide redress.

Responsibility shall not be mechanically identical across designers, developers, deployers and users. Yet technical complexity shall never be accepted as an adequate explanation for leaving an injured person without any effective route to remedy.

ARTICLE 16 — EFFECTIVE REMEDY, PUBLIC OVERSIGHT AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

Everyone whose fundamental rights are infringed through digital systems has the right to effective, accessible, affordable and timely remedies, including cessation of harm, explanation, correction, restoration or compensation where justified.

Independent, competent oversight shall be available for serious and systemic digital harms. When individual action cannot realistically address widespread injury, suitable representative or collective procedures should be accessible while safeguarding procedural fairness and the rights of defence.

A representative petition, standing to bring a claim, a decision on its merits and enforceable relief are distinct stages. This proposal does not confer automatic jurisdiction or guaranteed compensation in any existing legal system.

ARTICLE 17 — COOPERATION, SUSTAINABILITY AND FUTURE GENERATIONS

States, communities, research institutions and technology providers should cooperate to advance universal digital dignity, meaningful access, pluralism, resilient public infrastructure and effective rights protection across borders.

Digital progress must account for ecological and resource impacts, linguistic and cultural diversity, the rights of affected communities and the interests of future generations. Materially affected people should have meaningful opportunities to participate in decisions that shape their living conditions.

Obligations should respect proportionality, institutional capacity and fair distribution of burdens. Participation is not always a veto; neither innovation nor sustainability shall be used to conceal disproportionate harm to vulnerable communities.

ARTICLE 18 — INTERPRETATION, BALANCE, NON-REGRESSION AND REALISATION

Nothing in this Charter may be used to destroy, weaken or deny an existing fundamental human right. Its proposed protections should be interpreted together, giving practical effect to human dignity while preserving the equal rights and freedoms of others.

Limitations should be exceptional, reasoned, necessary, proportionate and subject to effective scrutiny. No emergency, security claim, proprietary interest or technical difficulty provides an automatic licence for arbitrary or discriminatory interference. Any future treaty must specify its lawful limits, procedures and institutions openly.

This Charter states the ideal toward which laws, technologies and institutions should evolve. Publication, endorsement or support for this independent proposal does not itself create a treaty obligation, legal entitlement against a named provider or institutional endorsement.

FINAL DECLARATION — INDEPENDENT PROPOSAL

This Charter is proposed by Jacques-Louis Kreiss / The Rebel Marketer with AI drafting support and internal Strategic Governance Council analytical perspectives. It is not a treaty in force, a national law, an official international declaration or a claim of independent legal endorsement. Its ambition is to shape the next generation of rights protections. Contributions, disagreement and suggested improvements are invited through a separately approved public consultation.

PARTICIPATE IN THE CONSULTATION

We invite lawyers, civil-society organisations, youth and disability advocates, technologists, researchers, and citizens worldwide to help strengthen this text.

Which article needs more ambition? Which right is absent? Which safeguards may conflict with others' rights? Please refer to article numbers and cite sources where possible. Respectful disagreement is welcome.

The public consultation is open for one year from 18 October 2026, until 18 October 2027.

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE

© 2026 Jacques-Louis Kreiss / The Rebel Marketer. Proposed with AI drafting assistance and internal SGC analytical perspectives. Independent proposal, not endorsed by the UN or any government.

Original Charter content: Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Third-party material, trademarks, and public contributions are excluded unless separately authorized.

CONTRIBUTION TERMS

Contribution terms — updated 23 October 2026.

This Charter is intended as a common good of humanity. Every contribution admitted to this consultation must be offered under Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0), the same licence as the Charter.

Consultation closes on 18 October 2027. Please explicitly confirm:

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