Embedding Human Rights in Technical Standard-Setting: Institutional Change and Governance
Standards engineers discussing support for human rights in technical standards
This July, just before a week of meetings on internet protocol details in Madrid, CDT invited a group of engineers — leaders from industry and civil society and participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Consortium — to a workshop organized by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The convening was assembled to investigate how the institutions and practices of technical standard-setting affect the human rights of internet users. CDT Visiting Fellow Nick Sullivan introduced the workshop discussion in Madrid, while Senior Technologist Nick Doty joined remotely along with several other participants.
A few key insights from an active discussion:
Community leaders within standard-setting bodies can set norms and procedures and develop tools to highlight human rights in these multistakeholder processes.
We need ways for engineers inside tech companies to establish their expertise and reputation for working on better support for human rights, encouraging a public interest field in industry.
Coordination with policymakers is essential and still underdeveloped, given the increased importance for policy and technical architecture to work together.
Standardization has its most direct impact after real-world implementation. We need to review standards and implementations over a longer timeframe as part of evolvability.
This workshop was one of a series of consultations that led to a report from OHCHR on pathways for human rights to be incorporated into technical standards processes, with recommendations including mitigating barriers to participation and inclusion, making institutional commitments to human rights in standards bodies, and building networks for multistakeholder collaboration. That technical standards have a profound impact on the human rights of internet users has been widely recognized, including in the 2023 report to the Human Rights Council, which made clear that “many of the decisions made in the development process [of technical standards] have crucial ramifications for human rights”. But the work still remains for nation states, companies, standards bodies, and civil society organizations to implement these recommendations throughout the technical standardization process. We’re grateful to these workshop participants, the OHCHR and all others engaged in that work.
