Legislation

GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679)

The GDPR is the European Union's foundational data protection law, in force since May 2018, and the most operationally significant instrument governing any AI system that processes personal data. It establishes six core principles (lawfulness, fairness, transparency, purpose limitation, data minimisation, accuracy, storage limitation and accountability) and grants individuals enforceable rights including the right to erasure, the right to data portability and, crucially for AI agents, the right under Article 22 not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects. This last right is the direct legal basis for mandatory human-in-the-loop pathways in any @Human Agent whose outputs can materially affect a natural person.

EU AI Act - Regulation (EU) 2024/1689

The EU AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, is the world's first comprehensive legal framework specifically regulating artificial intelligence systems, applying to any AI whose outputs are used within the European Union regardless of where the provider is based. It establishes a four-tier risk classification - unacceptable, high, limited, and minimal - and imposes graduated obligations accordingly, with Article 5 setting out a list of absolute prohibitions including emotion recognition in workplaces, social scoring, subliminal manipulation, biometric categorisation to infer sensitive characteristics, and real-time remote biometric identification; Article 14 mandating meaningful human oversight for high-risk systems; and Article 50 requiring that users be informed when they are interacting with an AI system, making it the primary legal source for the behavioural constraints in @Human Agents.

CETS 225 - Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI (2024)

Adopted on 17 May 2024 and opened for signature on 5 September 2024, CETS 225 is the world's first binding international treaty on artificial intelligence, signed by the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, and Mexico, and applying to AI systems throughout their entire lifecycle — from design and development through deployment and decommissioning. It requires that all AI activities be consistent with human rights obligations, human dignity, non-discrimination, transparency, accountability, and the rule of law; it introduces explicit obligations around equality and non-discrimination (Article 10), human oversight and the right to meaningful intervention (Article 11), and accountability for adverse impacts (Article 9), making it the broadest international legal anchor for the @Human Treaty Compliance Layer and the instrument that extends its obligations beyond the EU to all signatory states.

EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

The EU Charter, which has the same legal force as the EU Treaties themselves, enshrines the fundamental rights of all persons in the European Union and binds all EU institutions and member states whenever they act within the scope of EU law. For AI agents, its most relevant provisions are Article 7 (respect for private and family life), Article 8 (the right to protection of personal data, which has constitutional rather than merely regulatory status), Article 20 (equality before the law), Article 21 (non-discrimination on grounds including sex, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, and sexual orientation), and Article 47 (the right to an effective remedy and a fair trial), which together establish the constitutional foundation for data protection, non-discriminatory agent behaviour and the contestability of automated decisions.

ECHR - European Convention on Human Rights (ETS No. 005)

The ECHR is the foundational human rights treaty of the Council of Europe, binding on all 46 member states and enforced by the European Court of Human Rights, whose judgments have directly shaped the law on workplace surveillance and data privacy. For AI agents, Article 8 - the right to respect for private and family life - is the most consequential provision; it has been interpreted by the Court in landmark workplace surveillance cases including Barbulescu v. Romania (2017) and López Ribalda v. Spain (2019) to impose strict proportionality requirements on employer monitoring, directly informing the constraints on worker-monitoring agents in @Human, while Article 10 (freedom of expression) and Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association, including trade union rights) provide the basis for prohibitions on content-suppression and union-activity tracking by agents.

UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2021)

Adopted unanimously by all 193 UNESCO member states in November 2021, this is the first global instrument on AI ethics to be endorsed at intergovernmental level. While it is a recommendation rather than a binding treaty, its endorsement by every UN member state gives it substantial normative authority as the global ethical consensus on AI. It establishes eleven core principles - including proportionality and do no harm, safety and security, fairness and non-discrimination, privacy and data protection, human oversight and determination, transparency and explainability, responsibility and accountability, and environmental sustainability. Its proportionality principle requires that in cases of irreversible or life-altering decisions humans must retain the final say.

UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs, 2011)

Endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2011, the UNGPs establish the global standard for corporate responsibility to respect human rights. It is organised around three pillars: the state duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect them through Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD), and access to remedy for affected individuals. The UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has explicitly applied the UNGPs to AI procurement and deployment, meaning that any enterprise deploying AI agents - including @Human - carries HRDD obligations to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for adverse human rights impacts.

ILO Core Labour Conventions - C87, C98, C111, C190 & MNE Declaration

The International Labour Organisation's core conventions represent the global floor of workers' rights, binding on the 187 ILO member states that have ratified them and forming part of the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Convention C87 (1948) protects freedom of association and the right to organise; C98 (1949) protects the right to collective bargaining; C111 (1958) prohibits discrimination in employment and occupation on grounds including sex, race, colour, religion, political opinion, national extraction, and social origin; C190 (2019) protects workers from violence and harassment; and the ILO's Multinational Enterprises Declaration extends these obligations to supply chain HRDD - together forming the legal basis for @Human's prohibitions on monitoring union activity, algorithmic discrimination in recruitment and evaluation, and abusive surveillance of workers, as well as for the mandatory bias audits required before any employment-context agent is deployed.