Opening remarks by Christina Meinecke, Representative to the European Union.14 April 2026, Brussels.

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I would like to thank the co-organizers of this event, the European Commission and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for bringing us together today, - so many stakeholders interested in the relationship between human rights and technical standards.

This is not the first event our institutions are organizing together. During the last ITU-T’s World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-24) in New Delhi, the European Commission, together with the Czech Republic, France, OHCHR and ITU organized an event that reinforced “the critical link between technical standards and human rights in the digital age”, recognizing that “technical standards can either promote or hinder human rights, depending on their design and implementation”.

This recognition derives from the obligations under the nine core international human rights treaties, widely ratified by States around the globe, under which Governments have duties, but also the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights under which companies have responsibilities to ensure that technical standardization upholds human rights.

Also, Member States have recognized in the UN context, e.g. in the Global Digital Compact, that when developing AI standards, States and standard setting organizations should put human rights front and centre.

Beyond that recognition, embedding human rights and human rights principles into standards is the right thing to do, it improves them. It helps adapt them to the needs of people and to take account of the diversity of environments where they are implemented, and it avoids unwanted side-effects.

We are seeing increasingly examples that show how different actors are moving towards addressing human rights concerns in standardization, including in AI.

I would like to highlight some efforts in which our Office was involved:

Firstly, in December 2025, major actors, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) came together in South Korea in an event that OHCHR co-organized, and launched the Seoul Statement on AI Standards. This is a turning point because 3 out of the 4 commitments of the statement directly relate to human rights.

Secondly, also last year, our Office published a new study on human rights and standards: ‘Making technical standards work for humanity – New pathways for incorporating international human rights into standards development for digital technologies'.

And we are grateful for the collaboration with so many different stakeholders here today that brought insights and provided feedback to this study. We also express our gratitude to the EU, since this study was a deliverable from an EU funded project which ran until September last year and on which we would like to build in the future through an Advisory Service on Human Rights in the Digital Space under the UN Global Digital Compact (para 24) to provide tailored, independent, and authoritative guidance to States and other stakeholders grounding digital transformations in international human rights law.

Lastly, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) human rights checkpoints and checklist, approved by its board established a test phase for a human rights assessment for standards development as an exploratory process. This is an important and concrete example that I understand will be presented and discussed in detail this afternoon.

As in the AI Standards Hub Global Summit last year and when addressing the World Standards Cooperation meeting a couple of years ago, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk highlighted “Developing standards is hard work, as is understanding human rights and translating them into practice. But it is abundantly clear that overcoming these challenges will require consistent and joined up efforts by all our different expert communities.”

We have come a long way. Together, with the EU, Member States, standard-development organizations, civil society, technical community and business, we have brought this from a niche to a mainstream issue, but we must now seize this momentum and move forward, which is why we are so grateful to you, our colleagues from the European Commission, DG Connect, from ITU and all colleagues that are here in person or following online today.

I wish you all a fruitful discussion, resulting in some concrete commitments continuing on this trajectory.