Hi there.
I am Reuben Kirkham at Monash University.
In this talk, I'll present my paper on using European human rights jurisprudence
for incorporating values into design.
So, what is this talk really about?
Probably the best starting point is value.
Sensitive design which over the last decade or so has become a
particularly important concern in HCI, with computers being increasingly
present in the wider world.
VSD aims to take into account human values in design including ones
which are human rights such as freedom of expression and privacy.
But VSD is not the only thing that attempts to do this.
Human rights law does too.
The ECHR or the European Convention on Human Rights attempts to do a
similar thing, but it also has the advantage of having the force of law.
So in some circumstances, one might expect it could be more effective.
At the same time, as VSD is becoming more human rights focused, lining
up the two concerns may also have a positive influence on the law.
My paper is a critical essay on this topic.
It looks at how we might be able to join these two concerns together.
I'll start by looking a bit more closely at VSD.
And I think it's worth saying it's not perfect.
There have been some ongoing challenges which I'll outline.
The first is whose values we consider with there being the
difficulty of the researchers values or alternatively universal values
being inappropriately applied.
The second shades into the first concern.
What's a fair way of balancing people's values, especially where
there are competing concerns that have to be traded off?
At the same time, they're also practical concerns, including the lack of training
to make value sensitive decisions.
And the fact that VSD is not normally put into practice in the
real world outside of academia.
The burden to do is simply too great in terms of workload and other concerns.
Perhpaps the overarching concern is legitimacy, which I identified as
being the main concern in my paper.
Why after all would self appointed value experts be allowed to decide
themselves as to what balance we should have on social issues?
And at the same time in not taking full account of the law, there's also a risk
of values experts in effect arrogating decisions to themselves, which we've
already been taken through an alternative and legitimate societal process.
There's also a wider question of why policy makers should
follow what value experts say.
Is that really a good reason for them to do so?
At the minute it's a bit difficult to see compelling case for it.
As I mentioned in the introduction, human rights might be a solution
to this problem with VSD.
For this paper, I'll talk about the ECHR.
i.e.
the European Convention on Human Rights and how we can make this fit.
Sp from the outset.
The ECHR has a lot of advantages.
As well as being the most recognized and effective human rights regime,
it is set up as a living instrument that moves with the times.
It has a whole infrastructure, including its own court, the European Court
of Human rights and it's embedded in national legal systems for at least
several hundred million people in Europe with a lot of case law that's
already balanced individual rights in a wide range of circumstances.
And what's more, it has the force of being law and along
with that an inherent legitimacy.
In my paper.
I've split the content of the ECHR into four different notational tiers,
which I see as a way of making it more accessible and usable for people in HCI.
either when, taking value sensitive decisions or researching
the law more generally.
I'll go through each of these tiers in turn.
Tier one is the hard edged or absolute values, like the right
to life and found in article 2.
Or the prohibition on slavery and forced labor found in article 4.
These can be said to be hard eged because there are very few get outs.
For example, the right to life.
Might be violated to protect others being murdered or massacred.
But only insofar as absolutely necessary.
If it was possible to arrest someone instead, then the
state should arrest them.
Rather than killing them.
Tier two is probably the one that will crop up the most in HCI.
These are qualified rights, where there is a balancing exercise and engage issues
like privacy and freedom of expression.
Including the appropriate balance between them.
For the State to interfere with these rights, they have to do so
only in accordance with the law.
Only to an extent necessary in a democratic society.
And for a permitted reason.
As you can see in the table on the right.
The permitted reason varies across the different articles.
Tier three is particularly interesting.
I've elevated the article nine into being its own tier because
it's actually a mechanism for dealing with beliefs and values.
It is incredibly flexible.
With nearly any belief being accepted, with perhaps strange things like
light worship being covered, even though that in of itself is not a
comprehensible belief to most people.
Some more conventional matters that are covered in clear things like veganism,
climate change, and even the British broadcasting corporations values.
However the article nine protection applies in practice
only to manifestations of beliefs.
And the catch is that the person making the article nine claims needs to show a
intimate connection between their belief and the manifestation of that belief.
To give him a couple of examples where a belief wasn't really being manifested.
someone who did not believe in voting could for example, instead
choose to spoil their ballot.
So a state requiring 100% voting turnout is not against the ECHR.
And to give another example, someone who did not believe in funding, the
military could not avoid paying tax in general, just because this is not
connected enough to their belief and not funding in not funding the military.
There's also a further limitation in that even if someone's
successfully, gets through the hurdle of manifesting a belief.
Then the same issue that applies to other, tier two values also
applies in that they are qualified?
So that's another base in which a state can lawfully restrict someone's practice
of how they manifest their beliefs.
Finally, there is tier four, which is really important.
In that it provides a general nondiscrimination provision.
Which also includes an expanding set other statuses that are protected.
For example, disability was not in the original convention of 1950, but
it has become protected over time.
So that's my short tour of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The other key thing that I do in this paper, is make proposals after
all, this is a critical essay.
I made five proposals in the end and they reflect different ways that
people might engage with the ECHR when considering values in design.
These also vary in the degree to which they implement the ECHR approach.
And it's the most part they are complimentary to one another so
you can adopt some but not others.
The first and simplest approach is just use the ECHR as a sort of library.
In effect, just like with value sensitive studies that have already
been completed, one can reuse, to a greater or lesser extent that other work
to further inform VSD type exercises.
In this case, the ECHR case law would just serve as a further set
of examples, expanding what is available, saving time and helping
to have more legitimate decisions.
The second approach that I propose is to apply the ECHR and the tiers, I set out
as in effect a value, tensioning process.
This has the advantage of legitimacy.
And also helps solve the what values problem because the balance between values
is already predefined and structured.
A third proposition that I add is to expressly test for nondiscrimination.
Currently there isn't an express test set out in VSD and adopting one would
avoid accidental discrimination.
Mimicking this part of the ECHR would perhaps overcome what is arguably
a striking flaw in how VSD is currently followed and implemented.
Approach 4 is being rights sensitive, rather than value sensitive.
In other words, we shift our thinking and follow a more legal approach.
This would be more a substitution of VSD with the ECHR.
This goes quite a bit further than the other proposed approaches as
we will be doing law in effect.
What would result would dovetail more with the practical expectations of
public authorities and organizations making the resulting system more likely
to be operable in the real world.
The fifth and final approach, is more a linguistic one.
If a value has already been recognized as being such under the ECHR, then
we're best off putting our arguments and reasoning in those terms.
This may down the line have the real advantage of helping develop the law.
And thus making it more centered to the concerns of HCI practitioners.
This means we would go beyond the reactive approach to responding to law and
instead actually contributing towards it.
Of course, my paper is a critical essay.
So I don't claim to have all the answers.
And putting this into practice might not be 100% straightforward.
What's more, if we're getting to do human rights, then we need to make sure
this is genuine and not just a 'nod'.
It's also worth noting at the same time that human rights is a minimum.
Even if it is quite an insistent standard.
So you have to be careful you don't just meet the minimum
of sounds of human rights.
Not least because there are causes and values that matter outside the
ECHR and other human rights systems.
Just to give a quick example, the widening gap between rich and poor matters, but
there's no human right to be well off.
So the ECHR is an important concern that we should integrate, but
not in an uncritical fashion.
Thank you very much.