Exploring Beyond Earth: Reconceptualizing Space Exploration as a Human Rights Imperative

Background Humanity’s transition from episodic exploration to long-duration human habitation poses a fundamental structural challenge to public international law. International human rights law developed within a terrestrial matrix predicated on sovereign territorial jurisdiction, geographical borders, and the natural availability of an unmanaged biological biosphere. In outer space, where national appropriation is prohibited under Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, human existence depends unconditionally on engineered life-support infrastructure and autonomous algorithmic mediation. Methods This study employs a doctrinal legal methodology, analysing primary instruments such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the ICCPR, and the ICESCR, alongside the Human Rights Committee’s and the ICJ’s extraterritorial human rights jurisprudence. The analysis maps the jurisdictional nexus between Article VIII and Article VI of the OST and the extraterritorial scope of human rights obligations; it then synthesises emerging neuro-rights scholarship to construct a normative framework for human agency in space habitats. Results and Conclusions The article demonstrates that existing human rights conventions possess extraterritorial application to space habitats through the jurisdictional nexus of Article VIII and the special responsibility regime of Article VI of the OST. On this basis, it develops a four-pillar model: (1) Equitable Space Participation; (2) Juridical Ubiquity; (3) Intergenerational Stewardship; and (4) Cognitive Integrity and Human Agency. Focusing on the fourth pillar, the paper establishes the principle of infrastructural dependency as the basis for heightened human rights obligations: where meaningful physical exit is impossible, structural control over essential survival systems gives inhabitants profound leverage. By analysing the non-derogable forum internum under Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights alongside emerging neuro-rights jurisprudence, the article formulates the Principle of Human Agency in Outer Space and articulates legal standards of necessity, proportionality, procedural transparency, and contestability to prevent extraterrestrial habitats from becoming domains of private corporate coercion.