The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has recently issued a landmark report “Technology and Human Rights: Making Technical Standards Work for Humanity”, highlighting the crucial role technical standards play in shaping how people exercise their rights in the digital age.
Central to the report are four building blocks for integrating human rights considerations into technical standards, including the importance of building or strengthening institutional paths and procedural mechanisms that enable human rights to be addressed at multiple points throughout the standardization lifecycle. In this regard the joint project between the IEEE and the Council of Europe on the impacts of the metaverse on human rights, rule of law and democracy is specifically highlighted.
The report also recognizes IEEE’s leadership in ethical design, including its Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, launched in 2016, which places human rights as its first foundational pillar. This initiative has since led to the IEEE P7000™ standard on values-based system design and a series of AI ethics and governance standards, as well as related certification programs.
This recognition directly reflects IEEE’s broader, long‑standing commitment to advance technology for the benefit of humanity, including initiatives that place human rights as transparency, privacy, and accountability at the core of autonomous and intelligent systems design and deployment.
The report, published in September 2025, is the result of extensive multistakeholder consultations involving governments, United Nations entities, standards development organizations, civil society, and the technical community. It is available at the following link.