Digital justice is a vision of a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented digital order. It can encompass three principles:
- International solidarity for a new global digital constitutionalism – a digital order that is democratic, participatory, humane and cognisant of ecological justice.
- Principled action from governments and international organisations to formulate and enforce policies and laws that curb the monopolistic and extractive powers of corporations, protect individual and collective freedoms, and guarantee the rights of nature.
- Global civic action to organise, speak out, and defend the values of democracy, equity, human rights and justice.
Digital justice seeks to empower the public so that people can participate in the governance of digital technologies across different fields, and so that these technologies are made meaningful and useful to them and their ways of being, rather than imposed on them without clear or rights-affirming consideration of their impact. In this respect, any digital justice movement should be seen as an ally in the struggle to build equality and just and sustainable societies, especially for the most marginalised and vulnerable.
The report titled "Points on digital justice" by Alan Finlay, published in the Global Information Society Watch 2024 special edition, WSIS+20: Reimagining horizons of dignity, equity and justice for our digital future, addresses several points about digital justice which are useful for others who want to develop their own approach to digital justice.
- Digital justice offers a historical analysis.
- Digital justice anchors itself in economic, social and cultural rights.
- Digital justice is about people.
- Digital justice is about the environment.
- Digital justice offers an analysis of power.
- Digital justice contests and reclaims language, and where necessary reframes dominant paradigms laid down by the powerful.
- Digital justice is about the fair redistribution of global resources.
- Digital justice is advocacy distributed.
- Digital justice is not without its ironies, potential contradictions and internal conflicts.