Fri, 30 Oct 2026 Feature Article

The Algorithm Will Not Be Our Sovereign: A Call to Outlaw Automated Authoritarianism

When a government wants to commit abuses without witnesses, it first switches off the lights, and today that means switching off the network.

In November 2020, war began in Ethiopia's Tigray region. Telecommunications, internet, and banking services were cut across much of the region, and the blackout lasted until the Pretoria Peace Agreement of November 2022. Families could not learn whether their relatives were alive. Journalists could not report. Evidence could not leave. Meanwhile, beyond the blackout, social media platforms carried ethnic incitement into the lives of ordinary people.

One case now before the Kenyan courts puts a human face on this. Abrham Meareg alleges that Facebook's systems amplified posts that targeted his father, Professor Meareg Amare, before he was killed in November 2021. In April 2025, Kenya's High Court ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear the claim. I make no finding on the merits of that case, because only a court can do so. But I will say what the case reveals. A man in Africa is asking whether a recommendation algorithm can be held legally responsible for contributing to a death. That is a question about law, not about technology, and the world has not yet answered it.

This is the crisis of our age. I call it automated authoritarianism: the use of artificial intelligence, mass digital surveillance, and biometric control to monitor, classify, silence, and exclude human beings at a speed and scale no secret police force of the twentieth century could have imagined. It does not need the midnight knock. It needs only data, and we have been handing it over.

The Legal Indictment

I will speak as a lawyer would, because the law is already on our side.

Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects every person against arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy. Article 19 protects the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information. The Human Rights Council has itself condemned measures that intentionally prevent or disrupt access to information online in its 2016 resolution. Access Now's #KeepItOn campaign recorded 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries in 2024. These are not accidents of infrastructure. They are decisions.

Article 18 of the Covenant protects freedom of thought, and it is among the few rights that Article 4(2) places beyond derogation, even in a public emergency. The law has therefore long recognised that the inner life of a human being is the one territory the state may never enter. A system built to predict, profile, and steer a person's mind through behavioural data challenges that territory directly. In November 2025, UNESCO's General Conference adopted its Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology, the first global standard to define neural data and to call for strong protections for mental privacy. It is not binding. It shows that the world's governments already accept the principle. What is missing is the obligation.

Three Cases the World Must Not Look Away From

The Pegasus system. In July 2021, the Pegasus Project, coordinated by Forbidden Stories with forensic analysis by Amnesty International's Security Lab, reported on a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers believed to be of interest to clients of NSO Group. Forensic examination confirmed Pegasus on many of the devices tested, including those of journalists and activists. The United States placed NSO Group on its Entity List in November 2021.

The courts have since made findings. In May 2025, a US jury ordered NSO Group to pay WhatsApp $444,719 in compensatory damages and more than $167 million in punitive damages over the targeting of about 1,400 users. In October 2025, the judge issued a permanent injunction against NSO Group but reduced the punitive damages to about $4 million. NSO Group has appealed, and it maintains that its tools serve to fight crime and terrorism. In 2026, Meta reportedly asked the court to hold NSO Group in contempt for violating the injunction. The lesson is plain. A private company sued over its own platform can win protection. A journalist in Lomé, a lawyer in Kampala, or a mother in a camp has no such champion.

Algorithmic disenfranchisement in refugee camps. Refugees are asked to surrender their fingerprints and irises in exchange for food and shelter. In June 2021, Human Rights Watch reported that UNHCR had shared the personal data of Rohingya refugees with Bangladesh, which in turn shared it with Myanmar, the country they had fled, without meaningful informed consent. A person who has fled persecution cannot freely refuse to enrol when refusal means hunger. Consent given under that kind of duress is not consent. This is digital apartheid: a class of human beings is entered into databases they cannot inspect, challenge, or leave.

Predictive policing and automated sentencing. In 2016, ProPublica analysed the COMPAS risk-scoring tool used in US courts. It found that Black defendants who did not reoffend were almost twice as likely as white defendants to be wrongly labelled higher risk. The developer disputed that analysis. The same year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in State v. Loomis allowed the use of COMPAS at sentencing, with cautions, even though the defendant could not examine the proprietary method behind his score. Whatever one makes of the statistics, the principle is indefensible. No person should lose liberty on the strength of a calculation they are forbidden to cross-examine.

Where the Law Falls Short

The European Union's AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, deserves credit. It prohibits practices including untargeted scraping of facial images and emotion recognition in workplaces and schools. It restricts real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces by law enforcement. But it allows narrow exceptions, and civil society organisations have criticised its carve-outs for national security and migration. A ban with exceptions invites governments to claim that every exception applies. The Council of Europe's Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, opened for signature in September 2024, is a real step, but it too is a regional instrument. Authoritarianism that is automated is also exported. A surveillance system sold across a border escapes the law of the country that built it.

The Framework I Propose

I call on the community of nations to build three instruments.

First, an International Treaty on Algorithmic Sovereignty and Cognitive Liberty. It should do four things:

Codify that freedom of thought is inviolable, extending Article 18 to mental privacy and freedom from covert behavioural manipulation.
Classify neural data and mental-state inferences as the most protected category of personal data.
Require independent human rights impact assessments before any state or corporate deployment of AI at scale.
Guarantee every person the right to a human decision-maker and to an explanation for any automated decision that affects liberty, status, or livelihood.

Second, a universal ban on remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces, without exception for convenience, commerce, or political comfort. A person must be able to walk through a street, a market, or a camp without being identified by a machine. The ban must cover export as well as domestic use so that no state can outsource to a foreign vendor what its own law forbids.

Third, an International Court of Digital Redress. Such a court takes time to build, but the General Assembly could begin now. Vanuatu led the request for an advisory opinion that the International Court of Justice delivered on climate obligations in July 2025. The same route is open to us. A coalition of states can ask the ICJ to clarify what existing law requires of states that shut down networks, deploy mass surveillance, and export spyware. Out of that opinion can grow a standing tribunal with the power to hear individual complaints, order remedies, fund reparations, and hold those responsible to account. I would also ask that Article 7 of the Rome Statute be studied for its application to systematic, widespread digital persecution of civilians.

The Coalitions We Must Build

Laws will not enforce themselves. I call for three alliances.

A Global Whistleblower Shield Protocol. The engineers, analysts, and contractors who build these systems are the first to know what they are for. They need protection, secure channels, and safe passage when they speak out. The European Union's Whistleblower Directive of 2019 shows that such protection can be written into law. The protocol should extend it globally.

A Human Rights-Tech Coalition. Technologists, lawyers, forensic researchers, and affected communities should share one standing table. Amnesty's Security Lab and the Citizen Lab have shown what independent forensic work can do. It must be funded, protected, and expanded.

Sovereign Tech Funds for Citizens. The Global South should not have to choose between surveillance imported on credit and no digital infrastructure at all. Public funds, drawing on contributions from the technology industry, should finance open-source, rights-respecting systems that nations and communities own.

Why This Fight Belongs to Africa

Ghana has a stake in this. Our 1992 Constitution protects privacy in Article 18, and our Data Protection Act of 2012 created a regulator. The African Union's Malabo Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection entered into force in 2023. These are foundations, not finished houses. Africa led the fight against colonialism in its physical form. It must now lead the fight against its digital form: surveillance systems purchased without public debate, data extracted without consent, and exported without benefit to the people who produced it. Nations that only recently won their freedom have every reason to refuse to be governed by an algorithm they cannot see.

To Those Who Say It Is Inevitable

I reject technological fatalism. The machine does not choose its master. People do, in parliaments, in boardrooms, and in procurement offices. Every surveillance contract was signed by a human hand, and every shutdown was ordered by a human voice. What humans built, humans can bind by law.

I therefore issue a direct challenge. To the United Nations Security Council: place the weaponisation of AI and spyware on your agenda as a matter of international peace and security. To the General Assembly: seek the advisory opinion and open the treaty negotiations. To the companies that build and sell these tools: disclose your clients, accept independent audits, and stop doing business with those who use your products to persecute their own people. To my fellow citizens in Ghana, across Africa, and across the world: demand that the right to a free mind be written into law before the infrastructure to violate it becomes permanent.

The question facing this century is whether a human being remains the author of their own life. I say yes, and I say it must be written into law.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is an author, columnist, human rights activist, and UN Online Volunteer, writing in a personal capacity.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

Comments