Give Them an Inch, They’ll Take a Terabyte: How States May Interpret Tallinn Manual 2.0’s International Human Rights Law Chapter

Abstract

An international group of scholars and practitioners with expertise in the legal regimes implicated by peacetime cyber activities authored Tallinn Manual 2.0 between 2013 and 2016 over the course of a series of formal meetings and workshops. Like the Manual itself, it is inevitable that the Manual's IHRL Chapter will be studied and debated endlessly. Less concerned with this overall debate than with the need for practitioners to understand specific assertions made with the human rights Chapter, this Article closely examines certain key terms in the text to ascertain their impact on daily cyber activities at the State (national) level. A granular view of the IHRL Chapter reveals these key terms to be often vague and ill-defined, resulting in definitional gaps capable of being used by States to undermine IHRL progress over time.