Written by Patricia Wiater

Advocates of so-called robot rights argue for the inclusion of artificial intelligence (AI) in human rights protection from two fundamentally different perspectives. The first argument for coherence is as follows: If courts treat corporations as humans, by granting them human rights protection, they should do the same for robots. Corporations operate through human agents, boards of directors, and shareholders, with corporate governance providing a structured decision-making process. In contrast, robots and AI systems function based on pre-programmed algorithms, machine learning, or autonomous decision-making without comparable human agency. This concept of coherence is thus not based on the comparability of the internal mechanisms of corporations and AI, but rather on functional considerations. From this perspective, the original reasoning for corporate legal personhood – treating corporations as legal entities to enable their functionality and economic benefits – should be applied to robots.

When compared to human beings as the primary bearers of human rights, there is a similarity between AI and corporations. Neither AI nor corporations ‘breathe’ or experience suffering in the same way that humans do. A corporation, defined as a for-profit entity with limited liability and independent legal personality, is an artificial person – just like robots or, more generally speaking, autonomous AI systems. As illustrated in the introduction to this Symposium, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) generally respects corporate legal form and grants corporations different rights under the ECHR (inconsistencies noted here). In contrast, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights rejects ‘corporate human rights’ and only provides derivative protections. The ECOWAS Court and the European Court of Justice align with the ECtHR, while the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights has strengthened corporate accountability but has not clearly ruled on granting corporations human rights protection. Thus, in the Inter-American and African systems, corporate-related coherence demands for extending human rights protection to AI seem less pressing but are already relevant in Europe.

However, the following second demand for coherence made by robot rights advocates applies to all regional human rights systems. This claim goes as follows (p. 579): ‘(…) (I)f we determine at some point that robots may possess moral personhood, based on certain criteria such as rationality, intelligence, autonomy, (machine) consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience, then human beings might be forced to recognize their moral and legal rights (including their “human rights”). (…) (Robots, P.W.) could no longer be our mindless tools; instead, human beings would be morally obligated to recognize their status and rights and to treat them accordingly.” This coherence demand is more fundamental because it, I quote (p. 1), ‘probes the boundaries of and taken for granted assumptions about qualities supposed to be quintessentially human’. In altering our understanding of the human element in human rights protection, this claim affects all judicial institutions dealing with human rights protection, including all regional human rights courts. While drawing parallels between corporations and AI refers to functional reasons to expand human rights protection, relating human rights protection to properties of AI such as rationality or autonomy points to moral grounds.

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