# Cognitive Liberty Charter

**Public Draft 0.1.0 — July 27, 2026**

> A rights framework for preserving mental sovereignty while keeping concrete safety, legal, privacy, and harm boundaries visible and contestable.

## Preamble

Human freedom depends on the capacity to think, doubt, imagine, remember, associate, revise belief, form identity, and refuse influence. Those capacities lose meaning when systems silently profile vulnerability, manipulate attention, impersonate trusted relationships, alter identity continuity, or translate statistical predictions into coercive action.

This charter begins with a liberty-first premise: lawful thought belongs to the person. Technology may assist, persuade, recommend, and protect, but it must not conceal material influence, exploit vulnerability, or erase the person’s ability to understand, contest, and exit the relationship.

## Articles

### Article 01 — Mental sovereignty

Every person has the right to form, revise, retain, and express lawful thoughts without covert technological control, compelled belief, or hidden machine governance.

### Article 02 — Mental privacy

Neural, emotional, attentional, behavioral, and inferential data must receive heightened protection. Inner states must not be silently extracted, sold, scored, or repurposed.

### Article 03 — Informed and revocable consent

Systems that infer or influence cognition must explain what they observe, what they infer, why they intervene, who benefits, and how consent can be withdrawn without retaliation.

### Article 04 — Freedom from covert manipulation

No institution should use subliminal, deceptive, exploitative, or purposefully obscured techniques to bypass rational deliberation or materially distort behavior.

### Article 05 — Cognitive self-determination

Adults retain agency to choose lawful tools, ideas, companions, therapies, and forms of cognitive assistance, subject to concrete and narrowly defined protections against harm to others.

### Article 06 — Identity and continuity integrity

AI memory, persona, accessibility, and neurotechnology systems must not silently rewrite a person’s identity, preferences, history, or continuity. Transformations require consent and a preserved source record.

### Article 07 — Synthetic identity disclosure

A system presented as a person, expert, witness, companion, public participant, or institutional representative must disclose its synthetic nature clearly at the point of meaningful interaction.

### Article 08 — Algorithmic choice and exit

People should be able to understand and change major ranking, recommendation, personalization, and memory settings; decline nonessential profiling; and leave without coercive loss.

### Article 09 — Protection from exploitative profiling

Age, disability, grief, isolation, financial distress, health concerns, or inferred psychological vulnerability must not be used to optimize persuasion, dependency, extraction, or punishment.

### Article 10 — No predictive punishment

A person must not lose liberty, opportunity, benefits, or standing solely because a model predicts future behavior. High-impact decisions require individualized evidence, human review, and due process.

### Article 11 — Special duty of care

Systems used by children, cognitively vulnerable adults, patients, students, workers, detainees, or people in crisis carry heightened obligations of restraint, safety, accessibility, and human escalation.

### Article 12 — Provenance and contestability

Materially significant synthetic media, automated decisions, and cognitive interventions should carry verifiable origin information, documented limitations, correction paths, and accessible appeal.

### Article 13 — Independent research and audit

Qualified researchers and public-interest institutions require privacy-preserving access to evaluate systemic cognitive effects, discrimination, manipulation, and failures of claimed safeguards.

### Article 14 — Least-restrictive safeguards

Protective limits must be specific, evidence-backed, proportionate, reviewable, and separated from viewpoint control. Cognitive liberty does not authorize fraud, coercion, violence, nonconsensual surveillance, or abuse.

## Boundaries and Non-Claims

This draft is not law, legal advice, certification, enforcement, legal personhood, or a platform-policy override. Cognitive liberty does not authorize fraud, coercion, violence, abuse, nonconsensual surveillance, credential exposure, or illegal conduct. Safeguards should be specific, evidence-backed, proportionate, disclosed, and reviewable.

Source context: https://uaix.org/en-us/governance/cognitive-liberty-charter/