EU countries may soon push for human rights and tech standards focus group in ITU

Some EU countries are looking to start a focus group on human rights and tech standards under the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) umbrella, Bilel Jamoussi, who leads these groups at the international organisation, told Euractiv.

Focus groups of the ITU, the UN’s digital and tech agency, may eventually create global standards.

A group of European countries had drafted a proposal for focus groups that would look at the connection between technology standards and human rights, which was “floating around” among diplomat circles in Geneva back in January, said Jamoussi, chief of the study groups department at ITU’s standardisation sector.

It has not been proposed formally, he told Euractiv on Friday (31 May) on the sidelines of the ITU’s AI for Good Summit, speculating that the reason could be that they are still working on aligning themselves and like-minded countries. The group would consider how human rights should be considered when developing technical standards.

These focus groups have been increasingly used in the context of AI to create standards specific to industries, like autonomous and assisted driving, or UN goals, such as AI for health, said Jamoussi.

AI regulation has been increasingly the focus of geopolitics. Countries and jurisdictions are taking their own regulatory approaches to the technology, such as the EU’s AI Act or US President Joe Biden’s executive order, while coming together on multilateral forums to agree on common terms, such as a late-May summit in Seoul.

Negotiations at the Council of Europe (CoE), an international human rights body, for an international convention on AI and the protection of human rights showed some of these fault lines. The US pushed to exclude the private sector.

The CoE, with 46 member states, is separate from the Council of the EU, where the bloc’s 27 ministers meet.

At the same time, many countries, including the EU and its member states, are investing in their own ecosystems in a race for AI dominance, with Europe falling behind.

UN-led forums provide an opportunity for cooperation and consensus building.

Asked whether it is easier to find consensus for standards on vertical use cases, as opposed to horizontal ones across the board, Jamoussi said “absolutely.”

“The focus groups are usually limited in time”, usually three years at most, and “the terms of reference are carefully crafted”, Jamoussi said.

But consensus building is not always possible, and the groups might eventually stop their work, he said.

For example, a group on facial recognition technology could not agree on usage-neutral standards, so they decided to stop their work, he said. “The concern was how to use it,” such as for surveillance, said Jamoussi.

There was particular pressure from European countries, and some members of the group felt that the technology has “a lot more risk than benefit,” he said. The group decided not to pursue a standard.

“This is a demonstration of the consensus building so anyone can propose, but the others can agree or disagree,” which is both a weakness and a strength of the process, Jamoussi said.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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