Sovereignty Allocated, Not Asserted A Jamaican Rejoinder to the Inniss Data Nullius Framework

This working paper is a doctrinal rejoinder to "The Inniss Data Nullius
Framework: A Legal and Institutional Instrument for Contesting Vacant
Data Claims in Global South Digital Governance" by Dr. Abiola Inniss
(DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20029772). Inniss proposes a "Principle of Data
Reversion" under which rights over data generated within a territorial
jurisdiction would revert by default to the state or the generating
collective, drawing the analogy to terra nullius and its repudiation in
Mabo v Queensland (No 2) [1992] HCA 23.

Accepting the political-economic diagnosis on which Inniss draws, this
paper argues that the framework's foundational doctrinal claims, its
proposed Principle of Data Reversion, and its appeal to the Mabo
lineage are constitutionally incompatible with the Jamaican order to
which the framework is expressly addressed, empirically inaccurate in
their diagnosis of the location of the governance gap, and
interpretively reversed in their use of the colonial-repudiation
tradition.

The argument proceeds through three Caribbean authorities the framework
does not engage: (1) Julian Robinson v Attorney General [2019] JMFC
Full 04, in which Jamaica's Constitutional Court located informational
privacy as an individual constitutional right under section 13(3)(j)
of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms; (2) Nervais &
Severin v The Queen [2018] CCJ 19 (AJ), in which the Caribbean Court
of Justice rejected the colonial-savings logic that would treat
Caribbean rights as frozen at independence; and (3) the operational
architecture of the Data Protection Act, 2020, which codifies a
protective duty of the state exercised through statute, supervisory
authority, and contract.

Data sovereignty in Jamaica is not vacant but allocated: vested in the
citizen, with the state holding a protective duty. The actual
governance gap is not legal architecture but third-party management
discipline at the controller level. The paper proposes a Three Locks
framework — Law, Function, Contract — as the constitutionally faithful
operational counter-doctrine.

Audience: legal academics, data protection practitioners, Caribbean
policy makers, and contributors to the digital sovereignty literature.