IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 54

Feature
Emerging Technologies
and Human Rights at
the United Nations
Kinfe Yilma
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa 1176, Ethiopia
 New aNd emergiNg technologies have recently
taken center stage in public policy debates around
the world. From the European Union's (EU) Artificial
Intelligence (AI) Act [1] and the Council of Europe's
(CoE) treaty process [2] to soft laws introduced by
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) [3] and a proposal for a bill
of rights in the United States [4], new and emerging
technologies have galvanized policymaking at various
levels. An overarching objective in such legislative
initiatives is upholding human rights not only
in the operationalization, but also in the conception
and design of new and emerging technologies. But
much of the recent legislative and policy initiatives
are occurring in the Global North. Partly due to
the low uptake of new and emerging technologies,
similar initiatives are yet to proliferate in the Global
South. In the few jurisdictions where such initiatives
exist, one sees clear marks of the regulatory initiatives
in the Global North. In Egypt, for instance, a
national AI strategy developed based on the international
benchmarks mentioned above has recently
been tabled [5]. Other countries in Africa have introduced
rather generic digital transformation strategies.
At the regional level, the African Union appears
to pursue two parallel processes aimed at developing
a continental AI strategy for Africa in which the
influence of AI initiatives from the Global North is
inevitable [6], [7].
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3241297
Date of current version: 7 March 2023.
The United Nations (UN) has recently charted a
discourse that examines the human rights implications
of new and emerging technologies on human
rights. Launched under the auspices of the UN
Human Rights Council (HR Council), the discourse
primarily consists of a series of resolutions and thematic
reports prepared by the Advisory Committee
of the Council. As the truly universal intergovernmental
organization, the discourse at the UN is best
placed to systematically distill international best
practices on the governance of emerging technologies
and ultimately provide a set of framework standards
to parts of the world where policy initiatives are
yet to take root, particularly in the Global South. In
that sense, the ongoing UN discourse has a unique
potential of evolving into a global model law on the
governance of new and emerging technologies from
a human rights perspective.
Through a process of cross-fertilization of standards,
the most recent HR Council resolutions are
increasingly embracing progressive human rights
standards widely recognized in initiatives launched
in the Global North. But a closer look at the trajectory
of the discourse thus far reveals a fragmentary
discursive approach. This is occurring in two levels.
One is that resolutions adopted under the label " New
and Emerging Technologies and Human Rights " are
increasingly collapsing into other longstanding resolutions
adopted by the HR Council. The second
concerns the tendency to create " subdiscourses "
by which resolutions dealing with the human rights
implications of specific digital technologies are
adopted by the HR Council. Taken together, the
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023

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