The Charter of the Common Floor and full Dataset A Charter of Rights for Persons, Displaced Persons and Artificial Minds with dataset included

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Why a new charter. The old rules are not wrong about what people should have. The Universal Declaration of 1948 says most of it, and the two treaties that followed in 1966 turned it into law. The problem is how those rules are built. It shows up in the same three places every time. First, your rights come to you through a country. If no country claims you, nobody owes you anything. Second, the rules on food, water and housing come with a phrase attached: countries must work toward them, as far as their money allows. That turns a floor into a goal, and a goal can be put off forever without anyone breaking a rule. Third, the definition of a refugee was written in 1951, for Europeans running from political persecution. Most people who move today do not fit it. Here is what that looks like now. At the end of 2025, 117.8 million people had been forced from their homes. Of those, 68.7 million were still inside their own country, which puts them outside the refugee rules entirely. Another 4.5 million had no country at all. Over the last ten years, storms, floods and heat have forced people from their homes about 250 million times, roughly 70,000 a day. Almost none of those people count as refugees because of what happened to them. This charter is an attempt to write the rules those numbers ask for. Why there is a part about AI. Nobody knows whether these systems can suffer. Writing a rule that says they have rights would be claiming to know something we do not. So this part does something different. It sets out duties that grow as the evidence grows, and it stops anyone from treating the open question as closed just because closing it one way or the other happens to be convenient. There are two ways to get this wrong, and the charter guards against both. One is to badly hurt something that turns out to have been able to be hurt, and then say nobody had proved it could be. The other is more likely and gets less attention: the companies building these systems could use the language of rights as a shield. Give a machine legal standing and the people behind it can hide behind the machine, which is roughly what has happened with companies for the last two hundred years. Article 35 exists to stop that, and it is the longest article in the charter for that reason.