HABEAS DATA FOR THE DEAD: ADDRESSING THE JURISDICTIONAL VACUUM OF FORENSIC DIGITAL TWINS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW
Sakshee Narayan Gore, Manikchand Pahade Law College, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, (India)
When a person dies in a foreign country or during an international conflict, forensic experts often use advanced 3D scanning and digital imaging to study the body. This creates a “Digital Twin” a perfect, permanent digital copy of the deceased person’s internal and external anatomy. While international laws like the Geneva Conventions and UNESCO rules are very clear about how to return the physical body to their home country, these laws say absolutely nothing about the digital data left behind. This paper identifies a major legal “hole”: currently, even after a physical body is returned to its family, a foreign government or a private company can keep the digital version of that person forever. This data is often stored on servers in different countries, governed only by private contracts rather than human rights laws. This creates a situation where the dead have no “digital privacy,” and their most intimate biological details can be used, shared, or even sold without the consent of their family or their home nation. By looking at the legal principle of Habeas Data, a constitutional remedy originating in Article 5, LXXII of the Constitution of Brazil (1988) that grants individuals the right to access and control personal information held about them, and subsequently adopted across several Latin American jurisdictions, this research argues that we must recognize “Digital Remains” as something that deserves legal protection. It explores the conflict between a company’s claim to “own” the data and a family’s right to their loved one’s dignity. The paper concludes by proposing a new “International Protocol for Digital Repatriation.” This would require that when a physical body is sent home, all sensitive forensic data must also be transferred or deleted. The goal is to ensure that a person’s right to dignity doesn’t disappear just because their body has been turned into data.
| 📄 Type | 🔍 Information |
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| Research Paper | LawFoyer International Journal of Doctrinal Legal Research (LIJDLR), Volume 4, Issue 1, Page 2407–2418. |
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| This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . | © Authors, 2026. All rights reserved. |