Human Rights and Digital Surveillance in the Era of Smart Governance

The rapid diffusion of smart governance an administrative paradigm that fuses artificial intelligence, big-data analytics, the Internet of Things, and biometric identification into the machinery of public administration has fundamentally reconfigured the relationship between the state and the citizen. While proponents celebrate smart governance as a vehicle for efficiency, transparency, and responsive public service delivery, its infrastructural backbone is inseparable from pervasive digital surveillance: continuous data collection, algorithmic profiling, facial recognition, and predictive analytics deployed by both public authorities and private technology vendors. This article examines the resulting tension between the developmental promise of smart governance and the human rights obligations that bind states under international and domestic law, with particular attention to the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, non-discrimination, and due process. Employing a normative legal method that combines statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, the article analyses international human rights instruments, national data-protection legislation including Indonesia's Law No. 27 of 2022 and recent doctrinal literature to map the legal gaps that permit surveillance overreach. The findings indicate that existing legal frameworks remain reactive, fragmented, and structurally ill-equipped to govern the algorithmic and biometric surveillance embedded in smart-city infrastructure. The article concludes that a human-rights-based approach to smart governance design, anchored in proportionality, purpose limitation, transparency, and independent oversight, is indispensable to reconciling technological modernisation with the protection of fundamental rights

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