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UN Child Rights Committee to clarify expectations for emerging technologies
Five years after General comment No. 25, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child will develop new guidance on emerging technologies, building on growing global calls for children’s rights to be protected from the outset.
Five years after the adoption of its pioneering General comment No. 25, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has decided to provide guidance on children’s rights in the context of emerging technologies.
The announcement follows the Committee’s continued leadership, including in developing the Joint Statement on Artificial Intelligence and the Rights of the Child which sets out concrete expectations to ensure that AI systems are designed to respect children’s rights from the outset.
Welcoming the decision, 5Rights Executive Director Leanda Barrington-Leach said:
“We know from bitter experience the dangers of letting tech run ahead of childhood, and how fiendishly difficult it is to roll back lucrative entrenched practices. If the next generation of children is to thrive, the next generation of tech must support, not undermine, their thriving. Children and their rights – today and tomorrow – must be at the heart of how frontier technologies such as AI, neurotech, virtual reality and robotics are not just governed, but imagined.”
5Rights supported the Committee on the Rights of the Child with the development of General comment No. 25, which for the last five years has underpinned accelerating efforts around the world to embed privacy and safety by design and default into tech policy and enforceable law. The new General comment will build on these foundations to set standards for States to secure children’s rights across emerging and frontier technologies.
5Rights, as Chair of the Global Alliance for Children’s Rights in Digital and Emerging Technologies, will convene and support child rights organisations, researchers and campaigners around the world to feed into the new initiative, building on an established strong consensus for an upstream and precautionary approach to tech development.
Ahead of the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance, 5Rights led a joint call from over 125 leading civil society organisations and experts across all continents urging Governments to require tech companies to demonstrate that systems likely to affect children are safe and rights-respecting before they are deployed. This demand has already been endorsed by leaders including UN Secretary-General António Guterres and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Now, the Committee has an opportunity to build on this global alignment and its existing guidance to ensure emerging technologies embed children’s rights as they are imagined, designed and developed, and well before they reach the market.
