Human Rights and the Future of Being Human

Abstract

The seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) comes at a time of more contestation than usual over the future of human rights. A sense of urgency animates debates over whether the institutions and ideas of human rights can, or should, survive current geopolitical changes. This symposium, by contrast, shifts the lens to a more slow-moving but equally profound challenge to human rights law: how technology and its impacts on our social and physical environments are reshaping the debate on what it means to be human. Can the UDHR be recast for a time in which new technologies are continually altering how humans interact, and the legal status of robots, rivers, and apes alike are at times argued in the language of rights?