On 14 April 2026, I took part in the Seminar on Human Rights and ICT Standardisation, organized by the European Commission, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and ITU, with support from the EU funded StandICT.eu 2029, INSTAR, and InDiCo-Global projects. The event, held in Brussels and online, brought together more than 190 registrants and around 100 live participants from standards bodies, industry, academia, civil society, and the human rights community.
ICT standardisation is going through a real shift. For a long time, standards development organizations focused mainly on interoperability, security, and technical efficiency. They are now actively working human rights considerations into the technical fabric of digital technologies, even if that integration is still uneven across organizations. Standards function as a kind of soft law: they quietly determine how software, algorithms, and networks behave at global scale. Building human rights into the design phase, rather than bolting them on afterward, is what makes privacy, non-discrimination, and accessibility protections real rather than aspirational.
On the first panel, I presented where this stands at ITU-T. Human rights considerations are already present across several of our ten study groups: sustainability and e-waste in Study Group 5, people centred IoT and smart sustainable cities in Study Group 20, accessibility work including telehealth in Study Group 21, and privacy in Study Group 17. The Global Digital Compact gives this work a clear policy anchor, calling on standards bodies to collaborate on interoperable AI standards that uphold safety, reliability, sustainability, and human rights, a direction reinforced by the ISO/IEC/ITU Seoul Statement from the 2025 AI Standards Summit.
The question is no longer whether human rights are relevant to ICT standards, but how to integrate them more systematically, more practically, and more consistently across the standardisation process.
I also shared findings from an internal ITU-T survey across our study groups and TSAG: 84 percent of respondents see human rights as relevant to ITU-T’s work, but 40 percent report low or no familiarity with human rights concepts, a gap between growing recognition and uneven understanding that a companion comparative study of other standards bodies found echoed elsewhere. WTSA-24 marked a turning point on this front, with its side event on ICT standards and human rights, the Freedom Online Coalition’s statement signed by 42 countries, and two resolutions, Resolution 101 on AI standardization and Resolution 105 on metaverse standards, both explicitly tying ITU’s technical work to human rights protection.
The rest of the seminar mapped out how far other standards organizations have gotten with this same challenge. ETSI has introduced exploratory checkpoints at three stages of standards development to flag possible human rights impacts. IEEE’s Ethically Aligned Design initiative and its 7000 series treat ethical values as first class engineering requirements, alongside a certification scheme, IEEE CertifAIEd, and dedicated standards on children’s rights and ethical AI procurement. W3C embeds accessibility, privacy, security, and internationalisation reviews directly into its design process through horizontal review groups. ISO/IEC pointed to Peru’s adoption of ISO/IEC 42001 as a national technical standard for AI management, and CEN/CENELEC highlighted how EQUINET’s participation in JTC-21 working groups has helped translate equality and non-discrimination into technical requirements for the EU AI Act. Standards Australia described embedding its national Human Rights Commission directly inside the technical committee responsible for AI, IT-043, and NEN shared a Dutch case study on profiling algorithms used by public authorities that showed how narrowing the conversation to one concrete use case, rather than staying at the level of abstract principle, is often what actually gets stakeholders to agreement.
The seminar converged on a few practical recommendations: give every new standards work item an early screening for human rights relevance, add checkpoints at the start of work, at first stable draft, and before final adoption, make participation genuinely meaningful rather than just formally open, especially for civil society, accessibility advocates, and stakeholders from underrepresented regions, and build the shared vocabulary that technical and human rights communities still lack. A StandICT.eu Technical Working Group on Human Rights is now being set up to carry this forward, alongside further training modules and a follow-up workshop expected within the year.
What stayed with me most from the day is something one of the recommendations put plainly: being invited into a room is not the same as being heard, understood, and taken seriously. That gap, between formal openness and meaningful participation, is exactly the kind of thing standards bodies can still get badly wrong even with the best intentions, and exactly the kind of thing worth returning to at the next seminar.