Introduction to the Symposium on Digital Trade

Many people around the world are now digital natives. Our daily life is becoming ever more digitalized—and this digital revolution has also fundamentally changed international trade over the past decades. With one click, one can purchase goods thousands of kilometers away. And in services, immediate, ongoing international collaboration through web platforms, telecommunication, or transborder e-payment are becoming standard now. These new digital technologies offer new opportunities, especially for developing countries that seek to integrate themselves into global value chains, but they also pose considerable risks for human rights, including inequality between people and countries as well as for national security. Adapting trade law to the new digital world is just one challenge of rapid technological development and is the theme of this AJIL Unbound symposium. This symposium addresses the questions of what digital trade is; how existing trade law covers it and what challenges arise from the current legal norms; and how digital trade rules account for national security and human rights concerns as well as inequality and developmental concerns of the Global South. It discusses how one should approach the delicate interlinkages between trade, technology, human rights, development, and security. Digital trade cannot be seen in isolation from other concerns such as human rights or geopolitics. It is a crucial component of a bigger package of rapid changes, technological and otherwise, facing the world. As the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General has warned: “The world is at a critical inflection point for technology governance.”1 Digital trade law can help to find suitable solutions for the problems facing the world, or it can hinder them. The UN High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation has identified many challenges on how to adapt to the new digital world, pertaining to inclusivity, human and institutional capacity building, human rights and human agency protection, promoting trust in digital technology, security and stability, and fostering global digital cooperation.2 The 2024 UN Summit of the Future aims at finding ways to achieve a just digital transition that unlocks the value of data and protects against digital harms. The UN High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, as a preparatory Board for the Summit, has formulated several priorities: strengthening public capacities to adequately participate and regulate in the digital age; ensuring that the benefits of digital innovation are more widely shared; improving digital literacy; preventing digital harms; securing human rights online; and creating adequate data governance. As the Board has stressed: “The wealth and safety of nations over the next century may well depend on our ability to unlock data’s potential in fair, equitable, and safe ways.”3