Closed-Loop Brain Devices in Offender Rehabilitation: Autonomy, Human Rights, and Accountability

The current debate on closed-loop brain devices (CBDs) focuses on their use in a medical context; possible criminal justice applications have not received scholarly attention. Unlike in medicine, in criminal justice, CBDs might be offered on behalf of the State and for the purpose of protecting security, rather than realising healthcare aims. It would be possible to deploy CBDs in the rehabilitation of convicted offenders, similarly to the much-debated possibility of employing other brain interventions in this context. Although such use of CBDs could in principle be consensual, there are significant differences between the choice faced by a criminal offender offered a CBD in the context of criminal justice, and that faced by a patient offered a CBD in an ordinary healthcare context. Employment of CBDs in criminal justice thus raises ethical and legal intricacies not raised by healthcare applications. This paper examines some of these issues under three heads: autonomy, human rights, and accountability

Autonomie en privacy als rechtsgronden van het zwijgrecht en het nemo tenetur-beginsel?

Recentelijk is door verschillende auteurs voorgesteld om de rechtsgronden van het zwijgrecht en het nemo tenetur-beginsel te heroverwegen en door in dat verband meer nadruk te leggen op privacy en persoonlijke autonomie. In een tijdperk waarin digitale en andere technologische opsporingsmethoden zich steeds verder ontwikkelen, is aandacht voor de rechtsgronden van het eeuwenoude zwijgrecht en nemo tenetur-beginsel zeker van belang. Het is evenwel de vraag of persoonlijke autonomie en privacy overtuigen als rechtvaardiging van het recht om te zwijgen en om niet te hoeven meewerken aan de eigen veroordeling. Dit wordt in deze bijdrage betwijfeld

Chapter 3 Persuasive technologies and the right to mental liberty

The outline of this chapter is as follows. In section 2 we provide a further definition of PTs, and present some possibilities that PTs offer for the smart correctional rehabilitation of criminal offenders. Next, in section 3, we briefly discuss the right to mental liberty and the extent to which this right is guaranteed by existing European human rights. In section 4, we discuss three considerations that should be relevant in specifying human rights protection against smart rehabilitation. Subsequently, in section 5 we explore whether the use of PTs in the context of smart rehabilitation would infringe an appropriately specified legal right to mental liberty. We suggest that, in this context, it might be difficult to identify compelling distinctions between novel forms of smart rehabilitation and more traditional criminal legal interventions, such as the imposition of a prison sentence or a psychological treatment program