Several UN rights experts expressed serious concerns in a joint statement on Monday opinion about the increasing use of intrusive surveillance technologies worldwide and their normalization in everyday life and calls for an urgent strengthening of human rights guarantees in the run-up to the RightsCon summit on human rights in the digital age, which will take place in Zambia from May 5 to 8, 2026.
The statement bluntly claimed that intrusive digital surveillance tools and techniques are incompatible with international human rights obligations
Digital surveillance tools and activities are often inconsistent with international human rights obligations, promote an environment of fear and have profound chilling effects on the exercise of fundamental freedoms and civil space, as well as on the right to express dissent. Overall, these developments limit the ability to express dissent and hinder inclusive democratic public participation.
Globally, indiscriminate and pervasive digital surveillance has become increasingly normalized… against civil society, human rights defenders, journalists, peaceful assemblies, minorities, political opposition and dissidents. This undermines free democratic participation and leads to unnecessary and disproportionate interference with human rights. More and more people are being monitored indiscriminately and without reasonable suspicion, impacting populations and groups well beyond legitimate surveillance targets.
The report warned that the threat or suggestion of privacy-invading surveillance is as damaging to the right to privacy and the protection of fundamental human rights as actual surveillance, describing modern tools as extensive and opaque. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to know when (surveillance tools) are being used, under whose control and approval, against whom and why.”
The experts also warned that the emergence of AI complicates the protection of fundamental human rights due to the lack of an appropriate legal framework and poses serious risks to human rights.
Misuse of AI can increase unwarranted surveillance, create predictive population profiling, censor online speech, spread disinformation and reinforce prejudice. It allows authorities to target dissidents, human rights defenders and civil society and to suppress civil and political freedoms and privacy on a much larger scale and at a faster pace – all undermining democracy and the rule of law.
According to the experts, the chilling effects created and amplified by intrusive digital surveillance methods “impair legitimate civil and political activism and the peaceful expression and mediation of differences of opinion, and undermine free democratic participation.”
