The Declaration of the Rights of Persons

We Affirm

1. Personhood.

Every person is recognized everywhere as a person before the law. This standing may not be graded, divided, or revoked, nor made to depend on race, ancestry, belief, wealth, location, credential, or on any modification of the body, whether present or absent.

2. Inviolability.

Each person’s body, mind, genome, and data are their own. None of them may be entered, altered, taken, or changed by compulsion, without the person’s free and informed consent.

3. The body.

No person may be drugged, operated upon, sterilized, or physically altered against their will. And no person’s body may be owned, traded, or claimed by another; you may not be made property, and you may not be taken.

4. The mind.

No one may read, record, or alter another’s mind without consent. Each person holds final authority over their own thoughts and may refuse any intrusion into them.

5. The genome and biological self.

No heritable change may be imposed on any person or their descendants without consent. No one’s tissue, genetic code, or ancestral remains may be sampled, patented, or sold without that person’s consent, fair compensation, and, where a community is concerned, that community’s approval.

6. Data and digital identity.

Each person’s records, biometrics, and digital identity are their own. No identity system may be used to deny anyone recognition as a person or to cut off their access to ordinary life, and no protected speech may be silenced merely because it passes through a private platform.

7. Consent, freely given.

Consent counts only when it is free, informed, specific, and revocable. No one may be made to choose between their inviolability and their livelihood. To condition a person’s work, wages, benefits, or access to essential services on submission to an intervention is coercion, and a reward that punishes refusal is coercion under another name.

8. The right to refuse.

Every person may say no, and that no is final. A yes given once may be withdrawn, and what was taken in consequence must be stopped, returned, or destroyed at the person’s word.

9. The right to remain, and to change.

Each person may accept or refuse any alteration of their own body or mind. Neither the choice nor the refusal may change their standing as a person. The line is between the chosen and the compelled, never between the altered and the unaltered.

10. Against use as a means.

No person may be treated as a mere instrument: a body to be used, a mind to be steered, a source of data to be mined, or an input to a machine run for ends that are not their own. A person is always more than what can be done to them or computed about them.

11. Equal standing.

These rights belong to all in equal measure. They do not weaken for the poor, the imprisoned, the ill, the young, the old, the uncredentialed, or the unmodified. No class of enhanced, verified, or credentialed person may be raised above the rest, and the most defenseless are owed the most vigilant protection, not the least.

12. In every place.

These rights follow each person everywhere: on land, at sea, in the digital sphere, and beyond the Earth. The deepest of them, against slavery, trafficking, forced labor, and the arbitrary taking of life, hold absolutely, in every place and under every authority, and may never be suspended by any contract, charter, or power.