Human rights and ICT standardization: What is W3C doing about this?

European Council Building in Brussels (photo by Simone Onofri)

On April 14, 2026, in Brussels, I participated on behalf of W3C in the Seminar on Human Rights and ICT Standardization, organized by the European Commission in collaboration with OHCHR and ITU, with the support of StandICT.eu 2029, INSTAR, and InDiCo Global.

In the seminar, it was clear that Human Rights in Technical Standardization had entered a new phase. It was no longer about debating whether human rights are relevant to standardization, but about figuring how to bring them into technical processes without turning them into a rhetorical layer added as an after thought, once the architecture, data flows, and responsibilities have already been set.

W3C spoke on the third panel, What are standards organizations doing for human rights?, along with other standards organizations that are experimenting with different ways to make these concepts viable. The value of the day was bringing standards development organizations, policy makers, technical experts, lawyers, civil society, and the human rights community to the same table. It is not an easy composition. Languages change, priorities change, and even the word “impact” often does not mean the same thing to those writing a specification, those assessing legal risk, or those representing a user group exposed to exclusion, surveillance, or discrimination.

W3C principles and Human Rights