In Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Hood Maker,” first published in 1955, a group of mutant humans can read minds. Their capacity to decode thoughts is used by a repressive state, and any attempt to hide your thoughts is classified as a crime. The Hood Maker of the title is an unknown subversive who makes the hoods that provide the only possible protection against the mind readers.
In the 1950s, Dick’s writing was easily classified as dystopian science fiction, but a report from the UN Secretary-General presented on October 15, 2026, on the use of neurotechnology in the administration of justice places the sci-fi writer’s work firmly in the present. There may be no mutant mind readers, but neurotechnology has advanced rapidly in the twenty-first century. What’s more, we cannot afford to give any credence to the old cliché that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear — mind-reading tech may be used to make inferences about what you are thinking that can be used to condemn you regardless of what is actually going on inside your mind. The absolute right to freedom of thought has long provided a key legal protection in international law, but its practical meaning has not been elaborated.
This is not a future problem. In countries around the world, neurotech has already been used in the justice sector for many years. In 2008, in India, a young woman named Aditi Sharma made legal history. Accused of the murder of her fiancé against the backdrop of a dramatic love triangle, circumstantial evidence and a thinly spun motive, Sharma was subjected to a polygraph lie detector test to assess whether she was telling the truth about her innocence. When the analyst concluded that her responses suggested she might be lying, she agreed to be subjected to a new test that involved attaching sensors to her head to read her brain activity — a brain electrical oscillation signature profiling (BEOS) test.
Analysis of her brain activity following the BEOS test concluded that she knew about the murder through direct experience, not through reading about it. She was found guilty of murder and was widely reported as becoming the first person ever to be convicted primarily based on evidence extracted directly from her brain. A year later, she was released on bail pending appeal due to concerns about the reliability of forensic evidence regarding the poison used in the murder — her life sentence effectively suspended.
The UN report describes neurotech as forms of technology “that directly measure, access, monitor, analyse, predict or modulate the nervous system to understand, influence, restore or anticipate its structure, activity and function.” Neurotech developments often start in the medical sphere as therapeutic solutions to significant health problems, but the report addresses their uses beyond the laboratory or the clinical setting, particularly in the sensitive context of the justice sector. Here, there is an urgent and acute need to clarify the legal limits of potential use cases for neurotech in justice to prevent the dystopian outcomes Dick warned of.
Courts in India, the United Kingdom and North America have been grappling with the human rights issues surrounding this type of neurotech use over the past 25 years in criminal, civil and family proceedings. In 2010, the Supreme Court of India, reviewing a range of appeals regarding the use of this kind of technology in trials, ruled it to be unconstitutional — rendering Aditi’s trial a historical anomaly. Privacy, dignity, personal liberty and fair trial rights — such as the presumption of innocence and the right not to incriminate oneself — have been considered in the search for legal parameters around the use of neurotech in the administration of justice.
An Absolute Right Without a Rulebook
The groundbreaking report from the UN Secretary-General, however, puts a clear focus on the right to freedom of thought inside the mind as a fundamental pillar of the legal framework needed to guide future uses of neurotech in the justice sector.
I have been making this argument for the past 10 years and developing it through CIGI’s special report, Freedom of Thought: Reviving and Protecting a Forgotten Human Right. The right to freedom of thought has been described as “the forgotten right” — its importance belied by the limited attention it has received in jurisprudence. But shifting to place freedom of thought at the heart of the discussions around neurotechnology is important from a practical perspective.
While rights such as privacy or freedom of expression can be lawfully limited to prevent or prosecute crime or to protect others’ rights, for example, the right to freedom of thought inside your mind is absolute and permits no restriction. There are only a handful of rights given this level of protection in international law, including the prohibitions on torture and slavery. Absolute rights are fundamental to human dignity and can never be limited.
The limited use of the right to freedom of thought in courts around the world and at the international level compared with the complex development of privacy and freedom of expression laws means that the exact contours remain to be explored.
The UN report provides a springboard for these discussions, but more clarity is needed. One way to clarify international human rights law is by issuing what are called “General Comments” by UN human rights bodies that explain the application of provisions in treaties. The Human Rights Committee last adopted a General Comment on freedom of thought in 1993. Unsurprisingly, it does not mention neurotech or any other form of technology. As courts around the world grapple with how human rights law should apply to very real and novel technologies, a new UN General Comment on the right to freedom of thought in the context of technology should be an urgent priority. This type of guidance would help to establish ways our brain data can and cannot be used, applications that may never be acceptable, and the line between legitimate and manipulative technology used to influence our minds.
In Dick’s story, the only defence against the mind readers was a hood made in secret, with the risk of arrest. More than 70 years on, the mind readers are no longer mutants but machines already finding their way into courtrooms. We should not have to rely on a hood to protect our thoughts. Our protection must come from the law, and it must be in place before the technology outruns it.
