Research Associates | Three Generations of Digital Human Rights

Yohannes Eneyew Ayalew

Yohannes Eneyew Ayalew’s current research explores the ways in which regional approaches, such as the African, European, and Inter-American human rights systems, inform, complement, and possibly depart from international human rights law (IHRL)

regarding human rights in the digital environment. While IHRL seeks to protect digital human rights in various ways, such as transposing existing offline rights to the online sphere, creating new digital rights, and imposing rights and obligations on big

tech companies, regional systems, on the other hand, offer normative and institutional frameworks that are unique to local realities and contexts across different regions.

Despite IHRL’s potential to provide a universal framework, it often ignores (and renders invisible) regional contexts in the Global South, which grapples with a wide digital divide and other structural challenges.

Alon Jasper

Dr. Alon Jasper is a Lecturer in Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law

He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Global Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU School of Law, affiliated with the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ).

He holds a PhD, LLM, and LLB from Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law. During his studies, he was a fellow of the Azrieli Foundation and the Chief Justice Meir Shamgar Center for Digital Law and Innovation.

Alon’s research explores the concept of infrastructure as a legal category, both historically and concerning contemporary regulation.

As part of the 3GDR project, he examines how recent European legislation governing digital services and global value chains embeds infrastructural logics, and how these intersect with digital rights-based approaches.

Konrad Ksiazek

Konrad’s current research explores the extent to which automated influence through targeted advertising and digital manipulation through other means can violate our human rights,

whether our existing human rights frameworks are sufficiently well-placed to respond to such threats, and what further developments might be needed to tackle them.

His wider interests lie in investigating how the correct interpretation of human rights treaties and instruments should develop over time,

how and in view of what considerations judges sitting in international human rights courts should interpret human rights, and how human rights law should adapt to contemporary challenges.

Tamar Megiddo

Tamar Megiddo’s current research explores the limitations of human rights law in addressing and curbing the harms resulting from the international trade in spyware.

While human rights are apt to describe the relationship between a spyware target and the government spying on them and provide redress, this is arguably not the case with respect to the victim’s relationship with the state exporting or permitting the

export of military-grade spyware. It would often be difficult to attribute spyware-related violations of rights to the exporting government

and such abuse often takes place outside its jurisdiction and in a manner which would not meet the tests of extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Tomer Shadmy

Tomer Shadmy’s current research explores the construction of digital rights through non-human-rights law arrangements

These arrangements include technological design, private ordering, corporate governance, investment practices, and ethical mechanisms.

The study maps, conceptualizes, and problematizes the actual and potential use of these alternative sources for advancing the needs and interests served by digital human rights.

It also examines the interplay between these parallel tracks, as well as the pros and cons of advancing digital human rights through extra-legal arrangements.

Maria Varaki

Maria’s research addresses from a theoretical perspective the question if the state remains the beginning and the end point of reference for the protection of human rights.

while traditional human rights theories attributed. The central role to the state, the emergence of powerful non state actors that exercise elements of public power, invites a reassessment of the foundational conceptualization about the potential duty

holder(s). In this endeavor, several angles will be explored such as the concept of publicness and of governing space, the existence of HRs blackholes, the evolution of extraterritoriality (topos), the “risks” of self-regulation and the role of ethical

considerations within the broader context of what we call law of global governance.