Slumbering Sentinel: Elaborating a Right to Protection from the Adverse Effects of Scientific Progress and its Applications

The human rights enumerated by article 15 of the International Covenant for Economic Social and Cultural Rights, and by article 27 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, have been described as under elaborated, underdeveloped, and neglected. It is only through the concerted efforts of dedicated scholars and commentators interested in elucidating the normative content of article 15 that the right to science has begun to awaken from its slumber. This led, in 2020, to the CESCR publishing General Comment No. 25. In a globalised age of technology, there has never been a greater need for a human right to science. Access to the benefits of scientific and technological progress and scientific freedom are rights fundamental to human flourishing. However, commentators have repeatedly asserted that article 15 also guarantees a right to protection from the adverse effects of scientific progress and its applications. More than any other aspect of article 15, this right to adverse effects protection still remains under elaborated, underdeveloped, and insufficiently analysed, if indeed it can be properly interpreted from article 15. In particular, positive obligations on States to prevent or mitigate harms arising from emerging technologies, or to anticipate and minimise the risk of those harms occurring, remain almost entirely unspecified.

During this seminar Andrew will situate the articulation of that right in its proper context. His presentation will be based on his PhD thesis. The latter discusses instrumental tensions, conflicts, and uncertainties that exist as a consequence of the inextricable relationship between enjoying the benefits of, and protection from the risks of harm arising from, scientific and technological progress. The context in which a right to adverse effects protection must operate is one of increasing uncertainty, complexity, and sociotechnical
change. Measures to prevent or mitigate adverse effects, or minimise risks, must account or these tensions, conflicts, and uncertainties. Part of the process of elaborating the right involves specifying a legal regime of harm prevention and precaution, qualified by obligations of due diligence. Andrew’s thesis sets out the legal provenance and justification for such a regime under article 15, and relies on existing regimes of harm prevention, particularly in international environmental law, in order to specify the positive obligations of prevention and precaution that comprise it. Such obligations may be controversial in international human rights law, which is primarily concerned with ‘real and immediate’ risks of harm rather than the longer term and more uncertain risks presented by emerging technologies, but they are now essential.

Andrew Mazibrada is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for European, Comparative, and Constitutional Legal Studies at the University of Copenhagen and a senior research associate with the Global AI Risks Initiative at the Center for the International Governance of Innovation in Canada.

Andrew holds a Ph.D in international human rights law from the University of Copenhagen.

This seminar is organized by Associate Professor Vladislava Stoyanova with the support of the
Center for European Studies at Lund University.