(CLOUD 2026) The Functional Positioning of Digital Human Rights: Beyond the Debate over the "Fourth-Generation Human Rights'

The protection of human rights in the digital age has become an urgent issue, and the concept of "digital human rights" has emerged accordingly. Yet regarding whether it constitutes the "fourth-generation human rights," a conceptual dispute has arisen in academia between the affirmative and the negative views. This debate suffers from such predicaments as the disconnect between formal and substantive logic, the dependence on the generational theoretical framework, and the estrangement between conceptual disputes and practical needs. This paper proposes the theory of the "functional positioning" of digital human rights, arguing that we should focus on the substantive safeguarding function of digital human rights for core values such as human dignity, freedom, equality, and development, as well as its normative role in responding to the human rights challenges of the digital age, rather than obsessing over its formal classification within the generational system of human rights. Grounded in the historicity and concreteness of human rights and a practice-oriented problem awareness, this positioning is characterized by three features—substantive orientation, open structure, and pragmatic stance—and presents a dual dimension: on the one hand, it inherits traditional human rights, manifested in the extension and transformation of traditional rights such as the right to privacy, freedom of expression, and equality in the digita2l age; on the other hand, it responds to digital challenges, manifested in emerging rights such as the right to digital access, the right to algorithmic explanation, and digital identity rights. The relationship between functional positioning and the generational theory is one of suspension rather than negation, and transcendence rather than replacement.