Abstract
Human rights, which is the legacy of the Enlightenment and one of the best ideas that humanity has come up with, are defined as the rights that all humans have just by virtue of being human, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), human rights appear as principles concerning special treatment to the members of certain (human) species. However, although the common definition is in this direction, there is no consensus on the concept of human rights in the doctrine. This confusion on the conceptualization of human rights makes it difficult to evaluate new problems that arise, and as a matter of course, we face human rights violations or rights inflation. It is possible to observe such situations, in terms of developing technologies and economic transformations. The requirements related to human rights, which are set forth in the UDHR with a certain understanding and subsequently intended to be protected by international law instruments, generally take into account the existing situations and technologies at the time of establishment of the relevant instruments. Therefore, the impacts of rapid advancements of new technologies on human rights are tried to be handled through interpretation of existing documents and/or through formation of additional protocols or new principles. On the other hand, since the international instruments impose obligations on the state parties, which bind themselves with these documents, the existing documents are not sufficient to protect human rights within the framework of the economic and technological transformation experienced and the role of the business in this context. Therefore, both different approaches of the concept of human rights, as well as the social, technological and economic transformations that have been experienced, create new problems that need to be solved in the relationship with human rights. In this context, although there is not an obvious definition of Metaverse, the impacts of Metaverse on human rights, which occupies the World agenda nowadays, seem to be frequently questioned in the coming days. Therefore, in this article, Kuçuradi's perspective on human rights as a foundation to address potential risks associated with the Metaverse concept will be explored, and subsequently potential solutions to arising human rights concerns will be proposed.
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Notes
- 1.
While the fact that international human rights instruments only address states is one problem, the inadequacy of the instruments in the face of developing technologies, the records of states regarding their sovereign rights, and the contradictions within the instruments themselves can be counted among the reasons for the inadequate functioning of such human rights instruments and mechanisms. Kuçuradi also cites the contradictions in the existing main human rights documents among the reasons for the human rights problems and emphasizes that these documents should be revised in the light of clearer concepts and experiences to date [1].
- 2.
In 2011, after the adoption of the Guiding Principles, Ecuador and South Africa took the issue of negotiations for a binding treaty to the United Nations, and after the adoption of this proposal by the United Nations Human Rights Council, an open-ended intergovernmental working group was established and negotiations on a treaty began. These negotiations have been ongoing since 2015 (Wettstein 2020, p. 31).
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Cobansoy Hizel, G. (2023). Metaverse and Human Rights: Do We Need Metaversal Declaration of Human Rights?. In: Esen, F.S., Tinmaz, H., Singh, M. (eds) Metaverse. Studies in Big Data, vol 133. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4641-9_15
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