Questions & Answers
A framework that survives contact with sceptics has to welcome them first. These are the questions we are asked most, and the ones we ask ourselves — answered at the strength of the objection, not a convenient weaker version.
No — and the framework is explicit about it. States persuade, advertise, spin, and conduct influence operations; international practice tolerates a broad band of this, and the taxonomy classifies most of it as Tiers I–III, from routine to contested. The red line sits elsewhere: systematic campaigns against named individuals, with intent to decompose a psyche rather than persuade a mind. A framework that tried to outlaw influence in general would be ignored, and would deserve to be. One that names only the narrow, extreme category history has already judged criminal has a chance of holding.
They are, and the framework does not touch them. Criticism, satire, investigation, and even cruel public mockery are expression; a decomposition operation is not speech but conduct — a covert, coordinated campaign engineered to destroy a specific person's relationships, livelihood, and grip on reality, typically using fabrication, impersonation, and deception as instruments. The distinction is the same one law already draws between criticism and stalking, or between protest and harassment: target, intent, and systematicity, not offensiveness. If a proposed application of the framework would chill genuine expression, that is an argument against the application, and the framework's own taxonomy supplies the vocabulary to make it.
Because the existing vocabulary points every institution at the wrong scale. "Disinformation" and "information warfare" summon population-level responses: fact-checking, platform policy, counter-messaging. None of that reaches a campaign whose entire theatre is one person's life. Cybersecurity protects machines; information security protects data. The asset actually under attack — the integrity of a particular human mind — had no named defender. Naming the field is the first step to staffing it.
Deliberately not, for two reasons. First, speed: treaty-making runs on decades, and the capability curve does not wait. Second, strength: the conservative legal claim — that the Rome Statute's crimes against humanity, the Convention Against Torture, and the ECHR's protections of mental integrity already reach systematic psychological decomposition — is harder to dismiss than a proposal for new law, because it asks states to accept nothing they have not already signed. What is missing is explicit application: the naming of this conduct within instruments that already exist. That is what the Declaration supplies.
Yes — and that is not what it is for. Adversaries were never going to be bound by a signature; they are constrained, if at all, by cost and consequence. A framework creates both: an agreed standard against which conduct can be named, measured, attributed, and answered, where today each incident dissolves into definitional argument. It also disciplines the operations of those who adopt it, which is not a small thing — the first Zersetzung practitioners were, after all, a state's own security services. Norms against chemical weapons did not end their use; they made use costly, attributable, and universally nameable. That is the realistic ambition here.
Honestly: the fully-assembled system — closed-loop, automated, individually-targeted decomposition at scale — is not something we can point to in documented form today. What is documented: every component capability in commercial or operational use; coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists and researchers combining several of them; psychological-operations elements in contemporary hybrid warfare; and severe psychological harm from consumer AI systems with no hostile operator at all. The threat briefing keeps the documented and the inferred explicitly separated. The purpose of acting now is precisely to be ahead of the assembly, not behind it — norms drawn after a weapon's first mass use arrive too late for its first victims.
It could, and the history this initiative is built on is a standing warning: the Stasi called its work security too. That risk is designed against in three ways. The red line is drawn narrowly and behaviourally — target, intent, systematicity, method — rather than around disfavoured content or viewpoints. The graduated scale binds the framework's adopters first, constraining their own operations before anyone else's. And the whole apparatus is anchored in instruments — the Rome Statute, UNCAT, the ECHR — whose function is to protect individuals from states, not states from criticism. A psychosecurity regime that drifted toward policing dissent would violate its own founding documents in the first move.
We cannot — we are a research and policy initiative, with no investigative capability, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can offer is the resilience page: grounded, practical guidance on documentation, evidence preservation, account security, and the specialist organisations that do help individuals, along with an honest word about how often distressing patterns have ordinary explanations. Please read it — including the part about looking after your mind first, which is written in earnest, not as dismissal.
It is — the original was human-run, and it was criminal. AI enablement is the scaling condition that makes the framework urgent, not the boundary of the offence; the draft treats decomposition by any method as the underlying wrong, with AI as the factor that collapses its cost and multiplies its reach. This is one of the definitional questions the summit will settle in final text.
The initiative is convened by Nell Watson, President of EURAIO, a responsible-AI non-profit, with summit design and delivery co-directed by Simona Popa. It is funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund. There is no cost to participants or their organisations, and no commercial product behind the effort. More on the about section.
Three ways, in ascending order of commitment. Subscribe for occasional updates — publication of the framework will be announced there first. If your expertise belongs in this work — legal, clinical, platform-integrity, information-operations, policy — get in touch, mentioning what you would bring. And if you are in a position to offer introductions, resources, or institutional endorsement for the framework once published, we would particularly like to hear from you.
A question this page should answer but doesn't? Ask it — the best entries here started as someone's objection.