Slumbering sentinels : law and human rights in the wake of technology

The preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads: 'Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.'

These values have been threatened before. In the name of an all-powerful state, a compelling religious belief or national aspiration, the 'interests of the masses', 'progress', or the unabashed pursuit of power, human dignity and equality have often been trodden underfoot and people converted into objects of ownership or manipulation. Under such overt attacks, legal protections, such as they were, have crumbled overtly.

Today the attacks are more subtle. Paradoxically, the pro cess is defended in the name of freedom and the threat comes from one of mankind's greatest benefactors. Science and technology have burgeoned in the post-war years into instru ments of power, control and manipulation. But the legal means of controlling them have not kept pace. Outmoded and outmanoeuvred by the headlong progress of technology, the legal principles that should control it are unresponsive and irrelevant. Legal structures and concepts and people who work the system are proving unequal to the task of protec tion, in the midst of a set of problems without precedent in the law. Assumptions long regarded as fundamental no longer hold true. Values once held unquestionable no longer command acceptance. Procedures once adequate no longer yield results. Lawyers are out of their depths, their concepts out of touch, their techniques ineffectual.

Sociologists, philosophers, economists, environmen talists, ecologists and politicians have sensed some of these dangers and prepared for them. Lawyers have been slow to do so, hampered by outdated concepts and methods.