How Swiss federalism is helping the rise of a new digital right

The Swiss constitution guarantees the right to physical and mental integrity – have we now evolved a third, digital, form of being? Keystone / Martial Trezzini

Over the past few years, two Swiss cantons have done something activists elsewhere in the world can only dream of – introduce new constitutional protections for the online age. What does the right to “digital integrity” mean, and can it spread beyond Switzerland?

From data abuse to deepfakes, the digital age can seem a minefield of new threats. And when something goes wrong online, it’s not always easy to get redress. Even in comparatively well-protected places like the European Union (EU), not everyone has the know-how to show in court exactly how their data was misused. Nor is everyone up to speed on how to protect themselves in the first place.

Alexis Roussel, a former president of the Swiss Pirate Party, wants to change this.

“The idea of ‘digital integrity’ is to reverse the burden of proof,” says Roussel, who first came up with the concept more than a decade ago. Rather than digital rights being based on our status as data-owners, they should be based on our status as people, he argues – in which case claims could be based on harm caused to us as people.

“This would allow a vision of a digital society where the human is respected – a humanist digital society,” he says.

Quiet revolution

The idea sounds simple but is quietly radical. Since the internet’s beginnings, there have always been idealistic proposals about new rights for the online realm – a “digital magna cartaExternal link”, say, or “universal declaration of the rights of the human mindExternal link”. In reality, basic rights have remained largely unchanged. The attitude towards the digital sphere is often that “the same rights people have offline must also be protected online”; efforts to regulate it are usually concrete and policy-based, such as the EU’s Digital Services ActExternal link, or recent Californian legislationExternal link on the use of one’s image online.

In Switzerland however, helped by the country’s federal and direct democratic political system, Roussel has managed to spark something of a mini-digital-rights-revolution. While the Pirate Party has never entered the Swiss parliament, it has managed to influence the country’s politics at the regional level, including through popular ballots. 

Over the past two years, citizens in Geneva (June 2023) and Neuchâtel (November 2024) have voted in favour of adding digital integrity to their cantonal constitutions, placing it alongside existing rights to physical and mental integrity. In both cases, whopping majorities of over 90% – rare for Swiss votes – were in favour. Political parties were also virtually unanimous about it.

Other cantons are now interested, including Basel City; in Zurich, the Pirate Party collected well over the 6,000 signatures needed for a popular vote. “Even with my bad German, people were signing up left right and centre,” says Roussel, who now works for privacy software company Nym.

Campaigners from the Pirate Party handing in signatures in Zurich for their digital integrity initiative, August 2024. Keystone / Michael Buholzer

And as it moves around the country, digital integrity is picking up new elements along the way.

The versions in Geneva External linkand NeuchâtelExternal link, for example, define it as covering things like the right to be forgotten online, the right to not see your data misused, and “the right to an offline life” – which guarantees that state services can never become 100% digital. The version in Zurich goes further: it includes the rights “not to be judged by a machine” and “not to be tracked, measured, or analysed”.

As for how far it can go, and what exactly it might end up protecting, this will become clearer over time, explains Alexander Barclay, Geneva’s cantonal delegate for digital policy. Like with other forms of human rights, digital integrity will evolve as judges interpret it in court, says Barclay, who was involved in the drafting of the Geneva version. For now, however, he reckons it’s important that it remains a relatively broad idea.

“Technology and the world are changing so fast,” he says. “You wouldn’t really want to nail down a stiff, detailed definition of such a concept.”

Barclay also says it’s “fully legitimate” to place the right at the constitutional level, even if this means it can lose some of the concreteness of specific laws or regulations.

The fundamental status helps to put digital rights onto “a higher normative level”, he says. In his view, this can spark a mentality shift that a normal law might not. And in the Geneva case, the overarching term of “digital integrity” also groups together elements of laws already in place in normal legislation – including a previously existing directive that public services be available both online and offline.

The digital world is a mere swipe away – but for now, walkers enjoy an analogue moment in the sunshine beside Lake Geneva. Keystone / Martial Trezzini

‘More symbolic than useful’?

Not everybody is unanimous about how necessary it is. 

Florence Guillaume, a law professor at the University of Neuchâtel, says there are two ways to look at the situation. The first is to see online rights as mere extensions of the fundamental right to physical and mental integrity, in which case “digital integrity can be protected by applying existing laws”. The second is to see the digital world as a place with “specific challenges” and “its own rules and dynamics, especially with regard to reputation, identity and data protection” – in which case a new fundamental right is needed.

Guillaume sees things this second way – and as such backs the idea of a right to digital integrity. Her colleague Pascal Mahon is not so convinced. He thinks general violations of digital integrity are already covered by article 10 of the federal constitution (the “right to life and personal freedom”), as he previously told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper.

Federal parliamentarians in Bern are equally sceptical. In 2023, a motion to amend the Swiss constitution was roundly rejected, as a majority judged current legal norms to be enough. A new right would be “more symbolic than useful”, argued Radical-Liberal parliamentarian Damien Cottier – a point echoed by Zurich cantonal authorities, who also warn they will have to create costly parallel structures to ensure public services remain available both online and offline.

A mirror of federalism

Whatever the outcome when Zurich votes on the issue in the next years, the trend is thus clear. If digital integrity marks a ‘revolution’, it is very much a cantonal one – and so far, confined to more progressive urban areas. At the national level, Guillaume reckons, the approach of “filling in gaps in existing legislation” is likely to continue through targeted updates to federal laws; she doesn’t foresee any constitutional change.

In this sense, the trajectory of the idea mirrors the Swiss political system: federalism gives a certain autonomy to cantons; direct democracy means citizens can decide how to use it. Ideas blocked at the national level can find success at a lower level.

Minimum wage proposals are another example of how issues unpopular at the national level can find success locally:

Does it take the sheen off the revolution that it’s limited to a handful of cantons in a relatively small country?

It might seem that way, but even by having such a constitutional right in two cantons, Switzerland is “far ahead” on this, reckons Elise Degrave, a law professor at the University of Namur in Belgium. For her part, Degrave wants the Belgian constitution also to include a similar but specific right to remain offline – however, given the make-up of her country’s political system, her advocacy has been confined to an academic paper, a bookExternal link, and an open letterExternal link to EU institutions in Brussels; she can’t just launch a people’s initiative like the Pirate Party in Zurich.

Elsewhere, efforts to introduce such rights are scattered. In Germany, for example, the Digital Courage NGO is currently petitioning for a constitutional clause to ban the “placing of people at a disadvantage in receiving public services when they don’t use a specific device or digital platform”. So far, they have gathered around 40,000 signatures.

Also in Germany, the Pirate Party included a callExternal link for digital integrity in its manifesto ahead of February 2025 elections; but in the end, it got less than 0.1% of the national vote. Its sister group in the French city of Strasbourg had more success, at least at the city level; there, deputies approved a motionExternal link directly inspired by the Swiss examples in December 2024.

Geneva, Neuchâtel, and – potentially – Zurich as regional-level pioneers for digital rights? Activist Roussel, digital expert Barclay and law professor Guillaume are more ambitious. All agree that the idea of digital integrity is something they’d rather see not just at the cantonal, nor even national, but even supranational level.

It would be a tall order to get it there. But the idea “has its place in major international legal texts protecting human rights,” Guillaume says.

Edited by Benjamin von Wyl/sb. Image research: Vera Leysinger