{
    "title": "Cognitive Liberty Charter",
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "date": "2026-07-27",
    "status": "public_draft",
    "authority": "governance_proposal",
    "source_context": "https://uaix.org/en-us/governance/cognitive-liberty-charter/",
    "articles": [
        {
            "n": "01",
            "title": "Mental sovereignty",
            "text": "Every person has the right to form, revise, retain, and express lawful thoughts without covert technological control, compelled belief, or hidden machine governance."
        },
        {
            "n": "02",
            "title": "Mental privacy",
            "text": "Neural, emotional, attentional, behavioral, and inferential data must receive heightened protection. Inner states must not be silently extracted, sold, scored, or repurposed."
        },
        {
            "n": "03",
            "title": "Informed and revocable consent",
            "text": "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cognition must explain what they observe, what they infer, why they intervene, who benefits, and how consent can be withdrawn without retaliation."
        },
        {
            "n": "04",
            "title": "Freedom from covert manipulation",
            "text": "No institution should use subliminal, deceptive, exploitative, or purposefully obscured techniques to bypass rational deliberation or materially distort behavior."
        },
        {
            "n": "05",
            "title": "Cognitive self-determination",
            "text": "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."
        },
        {
            "n": "06",
            "title": "Identity and continuity integrity",
            "text": "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."
        },
        {
            "n": "07",
            "title": "Synthetic identity disclosure",
            "text": "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."
        },
        {
            "n": "08",
            "title": "Algorithmic choice and exit",
            "text": "People should be able to understand and change major ranking, recommendation, personalization, and memory settings; decline nonessential profiling; and leave without coercive loss."
        },
        {
            "n": "09",
            "title": "Protection from exploitative profiling",
            "text": "Age, disability, grief, isolation, financial distress, health concerns, or inferred psychological vulnerability must not be used to optimize persuasion, dependency, extraction, or punishment."
        },
        {
            "n": "10",
            "title": "No predictive punishment",
            "text": "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."
        },
        {
            "n": "11",
            "title": "Special duty of care",
            "text": "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."
        },
        {
            "n": "12",
            "title": "Provenance and contestability",
            "text": "Materially significant synthetic media, automated decisions, and cognitive interventions should carry verifiable origin information, documented limitations, correction paths, and accessible appeal."
        },
        {
            "n": "13",
            "title": "Independent research and audit",
            "text": "Qualified researchers and public-interest institutions require privacy-preserving access to evaluate systemic cognitive effects, discrimination, manipulation, and failures of claimed safeguards."
        },
        {
            "n": "14",
            "title": "Least-restrictive safeguards",
            "text": "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."
        }
    ],
    "non_claims": [
        "not law",
        "not legal advice",
        "not certification",
        "not enforcement",
        "not legal personhood",
        "not a platform-policy override"
    ]
}