Elaborate on the idea of the Rule of Law in Cyberspace as a means and way to cyber security. Describe and assess what the Rule of Law, based on human rights norms and standards, means offline and whether that can be transferred online. What legal and political instruments, i.e. treaties and mechanisms, i.e. courts, are needed to achieve the protection and realization of human rights in cyberspace?
Rule of Law can be defined as the intentional activity which seeks to control order or influence the behaviour of others including the government (Black 2004). It means people and government are bound by the rules to be both respectful to the law. Law is indeed a tool of government regulation, but the rule of law is assumed to simultaneously offer protection against those regulatory establishments.
This implies that legal norms are both constitutive and limitative: they create competences and simultaneously constrain them. Especially in administrative and criminal law, the principle of legality together with the principles of purpose limitation and proportionality ensures that the law is simultaneously a tool of control and an instrument of protection. In addition, the Rule of Law stands for the double instrumentality of the law (Hildebrandt, 2013). If the law were only a tool of government regulation its legal symbol would disappear, leaving us with the administration or discipline of human behaviour. Foqué and ’t Hart (1990) have referred to the latter as instrumentalism and argued that the one-sided emphasis on the instrumental function of the law is incapable of offering protection against the totalitarian tendencies of governments – even of those with the best of intentions. Simultaneously, they have pointed out the limitation of the opposite, critical view of law as pure protection. Such as entirely critical law is disconnected from the government power it should constrain, while it is exactly the constitutive function