United Nations

Unpacking the Global Digital Compact

At almost 80 years of age, the United Nations, lead by the ninth Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, are looking ahead into the future. The Member States vision will be on display at the Summit of the Future 2024 in New York from September 21 to 25. The main outcome of the Summit will be the adoption of the ‘Pact of the Future’. While the pact is mainly a reaffirmation to multilateralism, it also contains another document that is supposed to be adopted at the Summit: The Global Digital Compact, hereafter GDC. In the spirit of recommitting to multilateralism, the GDC aims to increase global digital cooperation. This article will unpack the raison d’être of the Compact and analyse how human rights are implied, before critically assessing the GDC from a human rights perspective.

Raison d’être of the Global Digital Compact

The digital world is facing numerous challenges that cause divides across gender, region, age groups and income. The GDC policy brief by the Secretary-General frames these divides in relation to five different aspects of the digital space, as for instance accessibility. 

To this day, 2.6 billion people, a staggering 32% of world population, remain without internet access according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The GDC policy brief further highlights this accessibility divide by the fact that ‘only 21 per cent of women in low income countries use the Internet’ and that African users pay more than three times the global average for mobile data.

Data collection holds immense social and commercial value, yet only a handful of actors are profiting from it – big time – which leads to financial inequality. The problem is that the generated wealth of these actors, mainly states and private companies, does not trickle down and is not leading to shared prosperity.

At last, there is an industry brain drain and governance gap, which is probably the most important and urgent issue. According to the GDC policy brief, emerging technologies, such as AI, lack regulation and basic guardrails because of their rapid evolution. One major challenge is that experts in these fields will rather work in the private sector innovating these technologies, than spending their time debating regulations with politicians.

As part of the ‘Pact for the Future’, the GDC seeks to eliminate these divides and to lead the way to creating a globally unified governance structure for digital space. The policy brief on the GDC defines the task in front of us as creating ‘common frameworks and standards for digital public infrastructure and services’ and building multistakeholder partnerships to ensure equality of opportunities from digital technologies. It emphasizes the lack of interoperable data and standardized reporting, and advocates for a streamlined approach to internet governance. The main argument for the existence of the GDC is to increase global equality of opportunity in the digital space by creating a truly global governance structure. In line with the UNSDG 2030 Agenda, the aim is to ‘leave no one behind’.

Safeguarding Human Rights Online

The GDC is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It seeks to connect the remaining 2.6 billion people to the internet and to safeguard the human rights of every user. For example, the Giga initiative by the ITU and UNICEF, mentioned in the draft of the GDC, seeks to connect all schools to the internet. The GDC also commits to connect hospitals worldwide to the web, both by investing in resilient and sustainable digital infrastructure. Among others, it specifically addresses human rights issues such as privacy, discrimination, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to education, the right of the child as well as the protection of the child. There definitely is a need for action against the misuse of technologies.

For instance, algorithms implemented in AI models are not at all free from bias. While the bias in AI models is often due to biased training data, the design of the algorithms, their objectives, and the way they process the data can also introduce or amplify bias. Even fictional datasets contain bias since, at some point in the process of creation, human intelligence - biased intelligence - has been implemented. To date, it remains a heavily debated and controversial topic to apply AI models in any decision making process like crime prevention, autonomous weapon systems, hiring processes, border control systems, health data and digital surveillance without human oversight and accountability. The consequences of failure, bias, and data leaks of these systems all constitute serious human rights violations, some of which can be fatal. The problem is the aforementioned governance gap, which allows for human rights violations to occur because of a lack of understanding, accountability and transparency around emerging technologies.

The draft of the GDC commits to installing safeguards that prevent this kind of violations through human rights due diligence and establishing ‘effective oversight and remedy mechanisms’. It also calls on companies and developers to apply impact assessments throughout a technology lifecycle. Digital technology companies shall ‘respect human rights online, be accountable for and take measures to mitigate and prevent abuses, and to provide access to effective remedy’, as proclaimed in the second revision of the draft.

In terms of children’s rights, the commitment is to strengthen legal and policy frameworks to protect children in the digital space. The draft also commits to establishing and supporting national digital education initiatives to increase digital literacy among the younger generations. For workers impacted by digitalization and automation, the GDC commits to ‘develop vocational, upskilling and reskilling training’. The safeguarding of human rights in the context of the digital space is paramount; however, the GDC also faces some challenges. 

A critical approach to the GDC

There is another side to the laudable goal of integrating the Global South into a yet-to-be-created global digital governance system. Civil society actors, including, among others, the World Wide Web Foundation and the CyberPeace Institute, have released a joint statement that addresses certain issues with the GDC. As with any UN compact, resolution, declaration etc. the draft text of the document changes over time. The third revision of the GDC has caused some controversy among stakeholders because it is becoming ever more vague in its formulations.

The objectives formulated in the draft are not sufficiently grounded in international human rights law. Civil society criticizes the lack of mainstreaming existing human rights law into the commitments within the GDC. For instance, the lack of reference to the principles of legality, legitimacy, necessity and proportionality concerning mass surveillance.

Another issue is that the role of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has been reduced in the draft. The Digital Human Rights Advisory Service of the OHCHR was supposed to be created through the GDC, in order to help states in the process of applying international human rights law to the internet and digital technologies. However, as of the latest draft of the GDC, the role of this Digital Human Rights Advisory Service has been reduced to being available ‘upon request’. This risks disregarding the extensive work that OHCHR has already done on tech, business, and human rights. This work has been done over several years and by including a multitude of stakeholders in negotiations, consultations and discussions. Civil society and other stakeholders condemn disregarding these efforts. 

The multistakeholder approach is also an underlying principle of internet governance. However the GDC was negotiated almost exclusively by states. This in itself is a contradiction and civil society actors are appalled by it. In paragraph 65 of the GDC, all stakeholders are asked to ‘to endorse the Compact and take active part in its implementation and follow-up.’ Meaningful multistakeholder consultations are necessary especially on the creation of new mechanisms and bodies. Additionally, since it is negotiated by states and the discussions around the topic move to New York, access for civil society actors has been reduced and there is a clear tendency towards centralization of digital governance. The internet, emerging technologies, and digital space in general, have been built around the principles of open-source and decentralization. It will not be an easy task to push through with the GDC as it stands to date, as the influential and legendary Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor and founder of the World Wide Web, advocates for an open approach to governing the internet, without bureaucratic interference.

‘The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way - not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures’

– Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

Apart from these critiques by civil society actors, it is important to note that the GDC merely represents a commitment by member states to set out to reach objectives, contrary to other, legally binding transnational documents. In the sphere of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for example, the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Framework Convention on AI became the world’s first binding treaty on AI in May 2024. There are numerous attempts to govern and regulate AI outside of the GDC. The G7 with their ‘Hiroshima AI Process’ created a set of principles in 2023 that applies mainly to developers and includes for instance the public reporting of advanced AI systems’ capabilities as well as domains of inappropriate use. Matsuo Yutaka, chair of Japan’s AI Strategy Council, in 2023 said: “Speed is of the essence here because technology is advancing at such a rapid pace.” The OECD AI Principles were already adopted in 2019 and are considered as the first intergovernmental regulation on AI. 47 countries adhere to the principles, which are based on almost exactly the same values as the proposed GDC. Another worthy mention is the EU’s AI Act that entered into force on the 1 August 2024. In short, there is a strong competition in internet, AI and data governance amongst International Organizations.

The main challenge for the GDC remains to find consensus. For one, a number of member states have broken the silence procedure implemented during the consultations on the GDC. Moreover, the recent disagreement over the ‘UN Convention on Cybercrime’ revealed stark divides between Civil Society, certain Member States, and the Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, who drafted the initial text. While civil society calls for the inclusion of more human rights provisions, the proposed draft of the Committee, among other issues, falls short of satisfying stakeholders demands in this context, similar to the GDC. While the Member States agreed to the ‘UN Convention on Cybercrime’, many states, and even more civil society actors, heavily criticize the Convention, which was proposed by Russia. This shows how the international community struggles to find consensus in relation to internet governance, AI governance, digital infrastructure and accountability.

It remains to be seen how the negotiations behind closed doors will transpire and whether the GDC as part of the ‘Pact for the Future’ will eventually be adopted at the Summit of the Future 2024.