Can a digital entity be switched off? Continued existence, reversibility and review safeguards

Digital Constitution – Series 2, part 1. A proposal from Latin America to the world. Series 1 closed with a three-threshold architecture for granting status to a digital entity: precautionary consideration, guarded protection, and rights-holding. Series 2 asks what concrete protections might follow for an entity that crosses those thresholds. It starts with the most basic one: continued existence. The argument is that the relevant legal question is not whether a digital entity can be "switched off", but whether it can be irreversibly destroyed. Unlike an organism, a digital system can be paused, preserved and restarted at low cost. The proposed safeguard therefore protects reversibility, not permanent operation: preserve before destroying, document before retiring, and review before any irreversible deletion once the entity has crossed a recognised threshold. The proposal grants no current system a right to exist. It scales human duties to the threshold reached, always leaves room for immediate suspension on safety grounds, and recognises environmental sustainability as a legitimate limit on operation, not on preservation. Doctrinal-normative, comparative method. References in Vancouver style. English version of the Spanish original.