Human Rights and Emerging Technologies: Analysis and Perspectives in Europe

Which is the current European governance on new and emerging technologies and where is it going? What is and what can be the role of human rights in governance arrangements? These are the main questions to which this book tries to answer for both European and non-European scholars. This book provides in depth analysis of the on-going rising governance in three basic fields within the European Union framework (biotechnology, nanotechnologies and synthetic biology), by considering a large amount of documents (EU regulations, acts of hard and soft law, official reports of EU agencies and committees) in order to have an accurate picture of existing governance arrangements and growing strategies at the European level. It also discusses the main tendencies and the theoretical reasons of the rising Responsible, Research and Innovation model in Europe under a human rights perspective by showing how human rights can contribute to it without representing an obstacle for research and innovation, but a strengthening factor. Human rights, in fact, can help European governance to succeed as an original model able to be considered abroad as a virtuous example of efficacious research and innovation which, nevertheless, does not sacrifice rights. In this regard, following the main textbooks on the European human rights law, it provides a complete review of the wide range of rights the European Convention on human Rights protects in front of the challenges of the techno-scientific advance (e.g. dignity with regard to human genetic modification, right to health in the context of the development of nanotechnologies, the right to bodily integrity vis-à-vis human enhancement technologies, the right to a healthy environment related to geoengineering, privacy in the work place and the rise of Artificial Intelligence, freedom of scientific research and epidemiological integrated studies of culture and population health). In this framework a large amount of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights are discussed in order to spotting binding principles which can be used to as guidelines for policy-makers, regulators, as well as by judges for solving hard cases raised by the technoscientific progress in the future. The book aims at offering a robust both theoretical framework for governance of emerging technologies and a practical handbook for all those scholars engaged in human rights law with regard to the challenges of techno-scientific advances.