Human Rights in the Digital Age: A Renewal Rooted in the School of Salamanca

This article critically examines the anthropological and metaphysical foundations of human rights in light of the challenges of the digital age. It argues that their modern formulation —paradigmatically expressed in the 1948 Universal Declaration— rests on a minimal rational consensus that leaves the ontological status of the person insufficiently articulated, thereby weakening both its claim to universality and its normative force. Beyond this limitation, the study proposes recovering the law of nations (ius gentium), as developed by the School of Salamanca, as a framework capable of providing a philosophical foundation for human rights. By articulating the relationship between rational nature, freedom, dominion, and natural law, the Salamanca tradition offers a coherent understanding of dignity as an ontological principle from which truly universal rights derive. This legal, philosophical, and anthropological foundation is developed in dialogue with contemporary philosophy (Zubiri, Zorroza, Polo). On this basis, the article maintains that so-called digital rights do not constitute an autonomous sphere but rather a historical extension of the ius gentium, oriented toward safeguarding the fundamental conditions of personal life —truth, freedom, rationality, and relationality— within the digital environment, in a humanistic spirit.