It’s easy to get swept up in the dazzle of the digital age, the sleek interfaces, the AI axioms, the dreams of cashless societies and biometric border crossings. But beneath the promises of digital progress lies a grittier truth: as governments and corporations sprint to digitize everything from taxes to identities, not everyone is crossing the finish line together. So, it’s quite obvious why, a few days ago, OHCHR stepped into the digital rights arena once again.
Last week in Geneva, Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stood before a packed audience at the twentieth anniversary of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and offered a warning, not a celebration. “It is precisely in the face of massive change, that we need more human rights, not less,” he said. In that single sentence, Türk captured a growing unease: digital technologies are advancing, but human rights are not automatically along for the ride.
Consequences Aren’t Theoretical
The discussion around OHCHR perspective of digital rights, the UN’s commitment to embedding human rights into the digital world, has now become more urgent than academic. From AI-driven surveillance and algorithmic discrimination to misinformation wars and digital disenfranchisement, the pace of technological advancement has far outstripped our moral and legal guardrails. And the consequences aren’t theoretical.
Access to education, healthcare, voting, or even the right to exist in a legal sense, these are increasingly mediated through digital tools. Lose access, and you’re no longer just disconnected. You’re erased.
The WSIS, originally launched in the early 2000s, once sounded like a hopeful acronym. It offered a shared space for states, tech companies, civil society, and multilateral organizations to sketch out a people-focused digital future. And to be fair, some progress was made. But today’s challenges are more tangled, the stakes much higher. From how data is stored and used, to who controls the algorithms shaping public opinion, we are not just discussing tools anymore, we’re shaping the architecture of society.
And yet, the digital conversation still tends to orbit around efficiency, profit, and “innovation”, often skipping over who might be left voiceless, vulnerable, or violated.
5 Key Takeaways
1. Digital rights aren’t catching up. As governments and corporations race to digitize everything from taxation to identity systems, the protections meant to guard individual freedoms are falling dangerously behind. The OHCHR digital rights agenda isn’t just timely, it’s overdue.
2. Technology is neutral; its deployment is not. From algorithmic bias to state surveillance, the tools themselves aren’t the problem; it’s how they’re used, who controls them, and who gets written out of the code that determines whether rights are upheld or violated.
3. Access is not equity. Just being online doesn’t mean inclusion. When digital systems exclude undocumented people, misidentify minority groups, or require devices and literacy many don’t have, they reproduce, and often deepen, existing inequalities.
4. The private sector has a seat and a responsibility. Companies building public digital infrastructure aren’t just vendors. They’re actors with moral and legal duties. The RegTech perspective is clear: deliver, yes, but with conscience, humility, and accountability to universal human rights standards.
5. This isn’t about innovation. It’s about survival. Access to healthcare, education, legal identity, and even freedom of expression now passes through digital channels. Strip away digital rights OHCHR advocates for, and you’re not just disconnected, you risk being erased.
OHCHR Digital Rights Dilemma: Rights for Some, Risks for Others
The High Commissioner didn’t mince words. Digital tools, he said, can “connect people, improve access to health and education, and much more.” But they can also “restrict free expression, violate privacy, and spread discrimination.” In short, technology is neutral. Its application is not.
Take, for instance, algorithmic bias, a term that might sound academic until it’s your job application tossed out by AI, or your face misread at an airport checkpoint because the system was never trained on your skin tone. Or consider how certain autocratic regimes use spyware, social scoring, and internet shutdowns to quash dissent and surveil critics. The problem isn’t the technology. It’s the unchecked power behind it.
The push for digitalization has opened up what Türk called a “window of opportunity.” But that window is creaking shut unless urgent steps are taken. A global consensus is forming around the need for regulatory mechanisms on AI and data governance. But these efforts will only work if rights come first, not as a post script or a PR campaign, but as the very foundation of policy and design.
Rights Must Scale Too
At The RegTech, we don’t claim to hold the solution. But we do believe we’re asking the right questions. Based in Dubai and operating across diverse economies, some flush with infrastructure, others still fighting for basic connectivity, we’ve seen firsthand how the digital gap can quickly become a digital chasm.
We work in e-government services, digital fiscalization, and national digital ID systems. Which means we sit in that uncomfortable space where ambition meets bureaucracy, where tech optimism collides with regulatory caution, and where the lives of real people, especially those in the Global South, are often abstracted into checkboxes on a donor report. Our position is not new: the private sector must do more than deliver. It must listen.
Digital development can’t be something done to countries. It must be something built with them. That means respecting not just the legal environment, but also the social, cultural, and economic context in which systems are deployed. It means refusing to look away when our tools get misused, or worse, when we’re asked to build something that would compromise privacy, weaponize data, or exclude vulnerable groups from basic services.
Human rights, including OHCHR vision for digital rights, must be treated as non-negotiables, not just talking points for shiny brochures. From how consent is obtained to how data is stored, from who audits the algorithms to who gets a seat at the decision-making table, these are governance choices, and they demand ethical courage.
OHCHR Digital Rights: States Can’t Do This Alone.
The RegTech model is grounded in collaboration. Not because it sounds good on paper, but because the alternative, going it alone, leads to systems that are brittle, unfair, or worse, complicit in abuse. Türk called for “States, technology companies, international organizations, civil society, and others” to join forces. That’s not a nice-to-have. That’s the minimum requirement.
Let’s say a government wants to implement a national digital ID. The questions pile up fast: Will it be accessible to people without smartphones? What about undocumented individuals or ethnic minorities who already face discrimination? Who controls the database? Who audits it? What happens when the system fails? These aren’t technical questions. They’re human rights questions.
Companies like ours must be part of those discussions, not as vendors, but as partners with a conscience. That means pushing back when systems are designed to exclude. That means building for transparency, not obscurity. And it means accepting that “responsibility” doesn’t stop at implementation.
A Moment for Moral Clarity
There’s a sense now, more than ever, that the tech world is running out of excuses. The days of “move fast and break things” are over, or they should be. What’s needed now is moral clarity.
Volker Türk is right: “We need more human rights, not less.” But rights don’t materialize out of thin air. They must be built in, tested, defended, and upheld. The digital future is already here. The question is whether it’s one we are proud to live in, or whether it’s simply the fastest route to a more efficient form of inequality.
OHCHR focus on digital rights offers more than guidelines. They suggest that there is a chance to recalibrate before we go any further. But that recalibration requires humility, especially from those of us building the very systems that shape tomorrow. After all, rights don’t protect themselves. We must build them into the code.
Founder of The RegTech, focused on inclusive digital policies and scalable solutions through multilateral collaboration for global governance and development.
