This article reviews how children’s rights can be considered a driver of internet governance based on general comment No. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. This ...instrument translates the rights derived from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child from the pre-digital era to the application of children’s rights to current issues of digitization. In the introduction, I explain how this general comment was drawn up and what its legal significance is. This article briefly summarizes the content of the general comment and then goes on to discuss the main impacts of this instrument on internet governance, namely, substantial shifts, children’s rights by design, the law’s binding nature, and participation.
How should international treaties be interpreted over time? This book offers fresh insights on this age-old question. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) sets out the rules for ...interpretation, stipulating that treaties should be interpreted inter alia according to the 'ordinary meaning' of the text. Evolutive interpretation has been considered since the times of Gentili and Grotius, but this is the first book to systematically address what evolutive interpretation looks like in reality. It sets out to address how and under what circumstances it can be said that the interpretation of a treaty evolves, and under what circumstances it remains static. With the VCLT as its point of departure, this study develops a functional reconstruction of the rules of treaty interpretation, and explores and analyses how the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights have approached the issue.
Commentaries on international law abound and proliferate. To reflect upon this trend in international legal scholarship, three commentaries on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties are ...reviewed. They are compared with regard to the ways in which they deal with three pertinent issues in the law of treaties: the ascertainment of jus cogens norms, the notion of object and purpose and grounds of invalidity, termination, and suspension. As a scholarly genre, commentaries form part of the legal culture of legal systems. So the review discusses their function in the past, in the present, and in their possible future. Their roots lie in the schools working on Roman law in the Middle Ages. They gained importance for international legal scholarship when international law entered the process of codification. Today, commentaries fulfil several functions in international legal discourse, the most important of which is that they structure this discourse. Digitization will seriously impact on all fields of scholarly publishing. The review concludes by discussing the possible changes in this scholarly genre. Those are accessibility, layout, referencing, inclusion of other media, and the possibility of enhanced discourse within the commentary.
Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term for a set of technologies that can solve complex problems independently. The most recent wave of AI systems builds on advances in machine learning from the ...early 2010s that allowed AI systems to improve in such a way that they perform better at an ever-increasing number of tasks. This has prompted continuing discussions of the societal impacts of AI leading to more than 170 ethical frameworks1 and over 700 policy initiatives2 on AI. These frameworks and initiatives show that AI not only poses risks and opportunities for individuals, but also has systemic and general consequences for democracy. AI impacts democracy on a variety of levels and in different ways.
After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural ...Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?
Technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) represent a crucial governance challenge for policymakers. This study contributes to the understanding of how states plan to govern AI with respect ...to the role they assume and to the way they develop AI in a responsible manner. In different policy instruments across 22 countries plus the European Union, there is considerable variation in how governments approach the governance of AI, both regarding the policy measures proposed and their focus on public responsibility. Analysing a set of policy instruments we find multiple modes of AI governance, with the major difference being between self-regulation-promoting and market-based approaches, and a combination of entrepreneurial and regulatory governance approaches. Our analysis also indicates that the approach to public responsibility is largely independent of the chosen policy mix of AI governance. Therefore, responsibility seems to be a cross-cutting issue that cannot be tied to a specific approach of states towards technology.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a major issue in international relations. As a general-purpose technology, it is considered both as promise and a threat. States and international ...organizations can use AI to further humanitarian and development purposes. At the same time, it can be applied for lethal autonomous weapon systems. Consequently, a rule is needed to govern AI for the common benefit. AI unfolds an enormous potential for sustainable development. The United Nations can influence that process by regulating and using AI. At the same time, the UN can also provide parts of the infrastructure for a sustainable AI development.
Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) ist in den internationalen Beziehungen ein wichtiges Thema geworden. Für die Debatte um KI birgt das Konzept der nachhaltigen Entwicklung ein großes Potenzial. Mit Fragen ...zur Anwendung, Regulierung und Schaffung von Infrastrukturen für KI müssen sich die Vereinten Nationen auseinandersetzen.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a major issue in international relations. As a general-purpose technology, it is considered both as promise and a threat. States and international organizations can use AI to further humanitarian and development purposes. At the same time, it can be applied for lethal autonomous weapon systems. Consequently, a rule is needed to govern AI for the common benefit. AI unfolds an enormous potential for sustainable development. The United Nations can influence that process by regulating and using AI. At the same time, the UN can also provide parts of the infrastructure for a sustainable AI development.
Artificial Intelligence raises new, distinct governance challenges, as well as familiar governance challenges in novel ways. The governance of AI, moreover, is not an issue of distant futures, it is ...well underway - and it has characteristics akin to 'herding cats' with a mind of their own. This essay introduces the contributions to the special issue, situating them in broader political and social science literatures. It then provides a sketch of an interdisciplinary research agenda. It highlights the limits of 'explainable AI', makes the case for considering AI ethics and AI governance simultaneously, identifies as an underappreciated risk 'system effects' that arise from the introduction of AI applications, and calls for policymakers to consider both the opportunities and the risks of AI. Focusing on the (ab)uses of AI, rather than the complex, rapidly changing and hard-to-predict technology as such, might provide a superior approach to governing AI.
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