Digital Trade Law and Human Rights

Trade and human rights have had a complex and contentious relationship. While trade experts assume that human rights and trade law are mutually supportive, human rights lawyers have seldom shared this opinion. Rather, they argue that across different contexts, such as climate change, culture, and development, the hard rules of international trade law focus almost exclusively on economic values and sideline human rights. This essay seeks to shed more light on these interfaces, focusing particularly on the tensions between trade law and the first generation of human rights, like privacy and free speech, that have been rarely discussed so far. It also addresses a gap in the literature on international economic law and human rights with respect to the impact of digitization. In particular, the essay focuses on the human rights implications of digital trade rulemaking, as a relatively new and dynamic subset of international trade law.