By: Mohamed Sobhy El-Far I Date: September 22, 2025
Digital rights have today become an inseparable part of modern human life. Education, work, and even the exercise of the right to vote are no longer confined to classrooms, schools, and workplaces, but increasingly take place through screens. In the Arab world, citizens pay their bills electronically, pursue studies on digital platforms, receive healthcare remotely, and engage politically and socially through social networks. Smartphones and cloud platforms have reshaped daily routines and influenced national economies, creating opportunities for growth and progress while also bringing serious challenges related to privacy, data security, and equal access to digital services. This is where the concept of digital citizenship emerges as the natural extension of constitutional rights, making it essential to establish a common Arab framework that safeguards these rights in the digital realm just as in the physical world.
The Tipping Point: A Regional Imperative for Digital Rights
At the dawn of the third millennium, Arab societies vaulted into the digital age. Cheap smartphones, ubiquitous social-media platforms, and the wholesale migration of public services to the cloud have turned online interaction from a luxury into the backbone of daily life. E-commerce, distance learning, tele-health, and e-government now define what it means to work, study, or vote.
That transformation is not without risk: in Sudan’s 2023 blackout and Iraq’s May 2024 national-exam shutdown, entire populations lost mobile-money access and digital livelihoods for days. Yet national statutes still treat the digital sphere mainly as a site of crime control rather than a constitutional space where citizens exercise, and sometimes lose, social and economic rights.
Global legal practice has preferred treaties to piecemeal statutes when technology cycles accelerate. International law already points us in this direction. Article 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) requires governments to ensure that everyone benefits from scientific progress, while Articles 55–56 of the UN Charter call on states to work together; Article 15(4) ICESCR even calls for positive trans-boundary action. A treaty is therefore not a novelty but the go-to method for marrying technology, trade, and fundamental rights. What we’re missing is an Arab equivalent is something binding that turns good intentions such as the 2024 Principles for Responsible AI into action.
League-Level Initiatives:
The League of Arab States has launched multiple digital programs, yet none provides a binding, rights-based architecture: The Arab Convention on Combating Information-Technology Offences (2010) criminalizes hacking and data tampering and even informed UN General Assembly Resolution 74/247, but omits privacy-by-design, access rights, and intermediary liability. Similarly, The Arab Digital Agenda (2023–2033)maps 5G rollout and cyber-security standards, but Goal 5.4 on social-media impact is advisory and lacks remedies. While bodies such as the Arab Federation for Digital Economy promote e-commerce, their near-exclusive focus on GDP metrics, absent a parallel rights-based framework risks deepening digital inequalities. The Fifty Vision project rightly urges harmonized telecom and cloud laws exactly the legal plumbing a treaty would codify. Meanwhile The Arab Court of Human Rights (enacted 2014) is still dormant; without activation, no regional bench can vindicate digital rights, unlike the treaty-based Arab Investment Court (est. 1980).
Digital Rights as Constitutional Rights
Around the world, courts and lawmakers are starting to treat digital freedoms as natural parts of constitutional rights.
Three generations are discernible. First-generation rights reinterpret classic civil-political guarantees: privacy becomes personal-data protection, expression becomes online speech. Second-generation rights exist only in cyberspace: affordable Internet access, informational self-determination. Third-generation rights place responsibilities on tech companies: net-neutrality, algorithmic transparency. Think of it as a family tree of digital rights: the first branch grows out of old civil liberties, the second sprouts entirely new online entitlements, and the third shifts the burden onto tech giants themselves.
Courts are filling gaps unevenly. Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court has applied the “penumbra” doctrine to protect unenumerated personal-data rights; the U.S. Supreme Court in Riley v. California extended Fourth-Amendment safeguards to smartphones; Estonia’s Supreme Court struck down a prison Internet ban for violating family life. Litigation, however, is slow and often diverges; a treaty would set a common floor.
Principles and Mechanics of Treaty Design:
An Arab Digital-Rights Convention should, first, guarantee universal connectivity, recognizing affordable Internet as essential and enabler for exercising civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. Second, it must embed due-process content moderation, obliging platforms to notify users, state reasons, and provide an appeal path before takedowns. Third, it should enable cross-border data flows with robust safeguards, creating an Arab analogue to Council of Europe Convention 108+.
Institutionally, the treaty could establish a Permanent Digital Citizenship Commission under the League Council, empowered to monitor compliance and issue advisory opinions, while extending the dormant Arab Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction to digital matters and granting standing to individuals and NGOs. Progressive-realization clauses, narrowly tailored derogation provisions (mirroring ICCPR Art 4), and reservation-proof minimums on free expression would address capacity, sovereignty, and security concerns.
Custom, Practice, and Opinio Juris
Could the convention catalyze regional customary law? Under the ICJ’s North Sea formula, both widespread practice and a sense of legal obligation (opinio juris, i.e. the belief by states that they are legally required to act in that way) are required. Current Arab statutes are heterogeneous and seldom cast digital entitlements as binding rights. While fragmented, recent national initiatives such as Tunisia’s draft digital bill of rights or Jordan’s open-data charter hint at an emerging normative shift that a treaty could consolidate into binding opinio juris. A treaty would at least consolidate explicit opinio juris among its parties and offer a model others could emulate just as the 2010 cyber-crime convention did fifteen years ago.
From Infrastructure to Rights
Infrastructure may be the bloodstream of digital transformation, but rights are its heartbeat. So long as constitutional, social, and economic guarantees are not anchored in a bespoke regional treaty, Arab citizens must rely on patchy statutes and uncertain court innovation. League precedents, from the Investment Court to the cyber-crime convention, show that binding cooperation is politically feasible. A Digital-Rights Convention would translate scattered pilot projects and good intentions into enforceable, region-wide standards, enabling Arab States to shape, rather than chase, the next wave of technological change.
Mohamed Sobhy El-Far is an Assistant Lecturer of Public International Law at Zagazig University in Egypt.