THE 2048 COMMISSION – Rethinking global governance for now and our future

© Seddik Boubaker

First published: here

Overview

Today’s world – and tomorrow’s – is one of turmoil. This is the result of overlapping and intertwining threats and challenges: an unchecked climate crisis; pandemics; deep and growing inequalities between and within states; and the latest of the industrial revolutions, centred on artificial intelligence, that could turn everything upside down – even what it means to be “human” – a revolution that we do not seem to fully understand, much less control. Superpowers are competing for hegemony, at the cost of growing instability and increasing conflict.

This is an instability of force 10 on the scale of our human history.  It is generating unprecedented human rights violations and widespread anxiety. People the world over are divided, disillusioned, and increasingly exposed to disinformation. There is a growing mismatch between what publics expect and what governments can, or are willing to, deliver. 

In 1948, in the globally ruinous aftermath of world war, the world sought international cooperation founded on universal principles, norms and standards to lead us out of the abyss. It was an imperfect vision, which from the very first months of its existence, ignored the plight of 700,000 Palestinians violently displaced. It was a victor’s project which nevertheless gifted the world with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and unleashed a disruptive force far beyond the control of the powerful that had participated to its drafting, and far into the arms of those standing up against them.  

Today, once again, we face ruinous scenarios globally, including those potentially even greater in scale, complexity, and appalling consequence.  

How might we (re)assume collective responsibility, and global cooperation, commensurate with the possibilities for progress and disaster around and in front of us?

To this end, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard is establishing the 2048 Commission, tasked with helping to bring global governance of human rights into 21st century relevance.

What are the goals of the 2048 Commission?

The 2048 Commission will approach its work as essential to fulfilment of the duty of care that current generations owe to the generations to come.   

It will advise on the transformations and innovations needed to design, operate, participate in, and resource a revitalized global governance system.

It will closely examine the implications of challenges that could not be foreseen in 1948 – such as those associated with climate collapse, digital and bio-technological transformations, hyper-concentrations of wealth under economic globalization and the persistence of historically rooted inequalities.  It will advise further on ways to reconcile constructs of state sovereignty with those of global governance, by identifying options that will strengthen civil society and also help drive global accountability to local levels, and actively engage the responsibilities and accountabilities too of non-state actors.

How will the 2048 Commission work?

The Commission’s mandate will evolve as its work unfolds, but at this stage, it is focused on the following crucial and interrelated areas:

  • UN Institutions in the short and long-term: Re-imagine global institutions beyond the UN treaty body reform process, and the purposefully ineffective UN Security Council.
  • Global civic space: A current weakness of the international system is the relative lack of stable and significant mechanisms that allow space for civic engagement and participation in its workings. This echoes another major challenge now and for the future, which is the shrinking of civic space at national level through regressive laws, regulations and policies. Identifying ways to strengthen civic space in the context of rapid change will be key, including engagement and participation processes that work globally but which connect to human rights activists locally.

  • Offering strategic and practical ways of integrating historical injustice into the international legal and accountability prism and mechanisms: To be fit for the 21st Century, international law and formal accountability cannot turn its back on the past. On the contrary, it should fully acknowledge the crimes in our history and the selectivity with which we have sought to address them.  Slavery, colonialism, systemic racism, gender inequality, violence against women and sexism are wrongs that obligate us to build a fairer international society.

  • The Commission’s work will involve a rethinking of the roles, duties, and participation of non-state actors – primarily corporate actors but also armed groups. Wherever states relinquish their human rights duties through, for example, privatization, corruption or collapse, non-state, often commercial, actors step in to fill the void. Examining the human rights implications of corporate actors’ actions in the contexts of climate crisis, technology, conflict and economic globalization, the Commission will consider how to incorporate their associated human rights responsibilities and agency more fully into the future international system.

  • Advancing respect for the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; addressing how to acknowledge the rights for future generations, as well as “rights” in respect to other species and biodiversity, given the threats associated with climate collapse. In 2021, for the first time the UN Human Rights Council recognized the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.  A year earlier, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights expressed its openness to recognition of the rights of nature due to its importance to all life on Earth, rather than to human beings alone. The Commission would build on this momentum, identifying ways to elaborate and strengthen that human rights trajectory as a crucial contribution to global efforts to end the climate crisis.

  • Elaborating how human rights principles and norms will better apply, and be better enforced, in contexts of technological innovation and roll out. Information technology, artificial intelligence, neurological and biotechnologies are all affecting daily life more and more and in ways few people understand, and most cannot hope to track. This momentum and its consequences are difficult to grasp, but it’s clear that these advances may transform even the very meaning of the “human” in human rights. Without human rights woven into the very heart of the technological development process – including explicit and transparent attention to the implications for equality, dignity, and accountability – all rights are at risk. The Commissions will advise on how to “upstream” human rights in processes and investments in technological innovation and their scale-up and will consider how to bring Big Tech to the human rights table and hold them there accountably.

  • Reframing paradigms of human progress, including by challenging paradigms of prosperity, (economic) growth, and redistribution:  Rethink global prosperity definitions and narratives of success and failure in ways that challenge unsustainable economic growth. Consider redistribution of material means for advancing human dignity in a way that can address structural and systemic inequalities and underpin a shared and sustained prosperity for people, planet and peace, and not merely for profit.

  • Strengthening the effective delivery of international accountability: Since the second half of the 20th century we saw more and more mechanisms that aimed to hold states and officials accountable for violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Yet much more remains to be done to achieve effective accountability and avoid double-standards in the application of international justice. The Commission will look at ways to further strengthen accountability in the 21st century, including by identifying new instruments and tools, such as a global human rights court and other innovative accountability mechanisms.