Tech and Human Rights Study: Making technical standards work for humanity – New pathways for incorporating international human rights into standards development for digital technologies

Executive Summary 

The decisions and processes encoded in technical standards related to digital technologies can have downstream impacts on the enjoyment of human rights. For instance, technical standards can influence whether certain services or products strengthen users’ privacy or make the internet more accessible for persons with disabilities. As such, injecting human rights considerations when technical standards are designed is an effective way to ensure that services and products are conceived with equality, privacy, accessibility and other human rights in mind.

Based on gaps identified by relevant stakeholders in a series of consultations convened by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and having explored a range of promising practices, this study lays down four building blocks for technical standards to ‘work’ for humanity and advance human rights. While stressing that each stakeholder group and in particular, each standards development organization (SDO) has to tailor measures to its own area of work, mandate, and scope of responsibility, the building blocks provide an innovative framework to improve the integration of human rights into standard development processes.