Thematic discussion 4: Respecting, protecting and promoting human rights - Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance - Day 2

Please take your seats. We're going to begin. Wonderful to see you all on this second day of the AI Governance Dialogue. We are looking at a pretty full room, and I'm sure there will be others coming in, but we have a very tight schedule that I'm in charge of keeping you on. My name is Peggy Hicks. I'm the Director of the Thematic and Special Procedures Division at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the thematic cluster focusing on respecting, protecting, and promoting human rights, transparency, accountability, and human oversight. You're going to hear today from a diverse range of experts on AI governance from the lens of human rights. OHCHR and the World Bank have been the UN system co-leads in conceptualizing and supporting this session, and I welcome you on behalf of both of our organizations. This dialogue, under the leadership of the co-chairs, Ambassador Griselda López of El Salvador and Ambassador Reen Tamsar of Estonia, is a remarkable achievement of how the UN system is meeting today's moment, bringing government, civil society, and the private sector in the UN system together to answer fundamental questions on our shared governance. So with that, I'd like to give the floor to Jeremy Ning of the World Bank to introduce himself and the High Commissioner. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Peggy. Excellencies, colleagues, it's a real pleasure to be here today for this really timely and important dialogue. I want to thank OHCHR, our co-chairs, for really doing a lot of the heavy lifting preparing this session. So thank you so much to Lee Cho, in particular, my colleague and counterpart at OHCHR, for his really, really massive efforts on this. Thank you so much. Without further ado, I'll pass it directly to Volker Türk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, for some opening remarks. Thank you.

Ministers, Excellencies, distinguished participants, before a new drug reaches the market, it undergoes years of clinical trials, regulatory review, and market authorization, and this process can last between 10 and 15 years. Many drugs fail due to lack of effectiveness or safety concerns. And even with all these safeguards, mistakes can still happen. Are we taking the same care with artificial intelligence? AI is already transforming societies. It's being developed and deployed at warp speed. It is fueling mass surveillance, disinformation on social media, and enabling bias, including from a gender perspective. Harm to children from AI-powered algorithms is growing. Data centers housing AI servers are choking our environment. At the same time, AI holds remarkable potential. It is already helping to support medical diagnosis, accelerated scientific research, strengthened public services, and more. So this is precisely why we must ensure people can trust AI. So we need to ask ourselves, why is regulation around the public good even up for debate? We have been here before. We lost precious years in addressing climate change because powerful players cast doubt on science, delayed action, and prioritized short-term economic and political interests. Today we are asked to accept on faith that AI systems will improve our lives rather than question how they work, who benefits, who loses, and who is accountable. Critical thinking is cast aside with the greatest of ease. It reminds me of the protagonist K in Franz Kafka's book The Castle. K arrives in a new village as a land surveyor and spends the rest of the novel trying to understand a system that remains inaccessible and unaccountable. Are we, like K, trapped in a system of opaque power in which we are losing our agency? And AI is about power over data, markets, resources, and information. But to what end? If you ask people around the world what they want from power, the answers are the same: peace, safety, a decent standard of living. In short, they want their human rights, which are a check on the exercise of power. Human rights help us reclaim our agency and have a say in decisions that affect us. To take back our agency, we need guardrails on the development of AI to ensure transparency inclusion, and accountability. Political leaders who exercise power on our behalf can ensure this happens by regulating in the public interest. The most obvious solution— regulation guided by human rights— is right in front of our eyes. But somehow we keep skirting around it. But there is an opening. Concerns about AI's impact on jobs and the economy are becoming more credible. Momentum is building for oversight of the growing security risks posed by powerful AI systems, including their use in cyber operations and armed conflict. Around the world, especially young people are demanding action. AI is not just about technology. It is about equality and accountability. It touches all areas of our lives, from jobs to crossing a border to accessing information. That is why human rights needs to be embedded into the design, development, deployment, and use of AI. International human rights law— and let's never forget about this— international human rights law constitutes a binding legal framework. To protect data, to avoid discrimination, to access justice, to ensure equality, and so much more. Human rights due diligence and impact assessments of AI systems are essential. And so are robust data protection and privacy safeguards. Some areas need specific attention, for example, protecting children online. And I encourage you to draw on my Office's guidelines that we issued last month. Every country is involved in the AI value chain, whether through data, critical minerals, labour, markets, compute, or cloud capacity. And that means that all should have a meaningful stake in shaping and benefiting from AI. Otherwise, AI will deepen inequalities rather than help close them. It is also about directing AI investment towards the building blocks of resilient societies, including health, education, social protection, and climate action. Decisions around AI need to be transparent about how data is being used and where people can seek justice. When AI gathers data or carries out a decision without human agency, Responsibility can disappear into the system, and this is increasingly the case as AI agents are deployed in healthcare, finance, recruitment, and more. We know all— we all know the frustrations of dealing with automated systems when we want to change a doctor's appointment. We get caught in a human-free vortex with nowhere to turn. So now imagine that level of unaccountability around life-altering issues, whether you are hired, whether you can get credit, whether you return to a country where you could face torture. The stakes do not end there. As AI is increasingly integrated into military systems, automated decisions can mean life or death. Human oversight of AI systems cannot be just a rubber stamp. It requires that an identified person be granted authority, competence, time, independence, and power to alter and even stop a system. Distinguished participants, I asked earlier why regulation of AI systems is even up for debate. One argument that is sometimes advanced is that regulation will stifle innovation. But it is not a trade-off. We don't consider safety standards for medicines, cars, or aircraft as obstacles to progress. They are the reason why people trust those technologies in the first place. It is possible to design technologies that advance rights, economic opportunity, and safety simultaneously. And I encourage you to share examples during this session. My office is ready to support efforts that translate principles into practical action. Tomorrow, we will launch the Human Rights Data Exchange, HRDX. This is the world's first open, authoritative service with evidence of where rights are under threat, what happened, why, and what to do about it. My office's Human Rights Advisory Service that was set up under the Global Digital Compact is also aimed at helping states and others to govern AI in line with human rights responsibilities. The unofficial slogan of the tech and AI industry is bigger, faster, better. I would rather advocate for smarter, kinder, wiser. The historian and politician Lord Acton famously wrote, and I quote, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. History has shown time and again that power needs to be kept in check. So our task is clear: to ensure that AI serves people, not the other way around. And human rights provide the compass, So let us use them to the fullest. Thank you very much.

Thank you, High Commissioner, for those thoughtful words that I'm sure we'll come back to in the course of this discussion. At this point, I'm delighted to introduce the thematic co-chairs for this session, Linda Banyo, founder and CEO of the Lawyers Hub of Africa, And His Excellency Oscar López Agüero, the Minister for Digital Transformation and Civil Service of Spain. As I said, they're the thematic co-chairs, and I will give the floor next to them for their opening remarks. First, to Linda Baño.

Excellent. Thank you so much. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, My name is Linda Bonnyo. I am the founder of Lawyers Hub. We're an African organization working at the intersection of law, technology, and justice since 2018. For close to a decade, we have been training lawyers and governments and technologists on how they can engage on digital rights across the African continent. We run the Africa AI Policy Lab. We also run the Africa Startup Law Accelerator because we believe in a multi-stakeholder approach to digital governance. This week, Lawyers Hub launched the Africa AI Governance Index. It tracks AI strategies, laws, and institutions across all African states. For the first time, we have an assessment that covers everyone across the African continent. I invite you to go to aipolicy.africa and interact with the work that we do at the AI Lab, courtesy and supported by various partners, including the Patrick McGovern Foundation, that I want to thank. But why does this matter in this conversation? I think that human rights is individual rights. I want to speak for the gig workers who are managed by algorithms in Kenya, who really hope that this conversation will take them to the next level. But I also want to acknowledge the asymmetry of power and to acknowledge the voices of the Gen Zs and Gen Alphas that may not be in this room today. I also want to acknowledge the civil society organizations that are here, yet constrained by, you know, least resources, but also the Africans and the Global South who are in this room and had difficult time getting here using visas and spending so much time. We see you and we will speak for you. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. And I'll now turn the floor to Minister López Aguado.

Good morning, everybody. I will go in Spanish. Dear colleagues, it's an absolute honor. It is a true honor for Spain to co-chair this session together with a number of governments and such as organizations as Linda mentioned. One of the most challenging parts of the Declaration of Human Rights, which was established many years ago— there are many of us here today But we still feel that we need more voices. So in Spain, we'd like to open a discussion, a democratic discussion that is also inclusive, where all of these voices lie, especially voices from Africa. How can I put this? Either we do something or the Global South will just serve as a battery for the greater powers. Because it is also just going to be someone who provides data. So we have to be inclusive and global when we consider AI. In Spain, we would like to open up this global dialogue and to move towards AI that is trustworthy, innovative, sustainable, ethical and human-centered, and not the other way around. AI for science, transparency, common good, and cooperation. The geopolitical times show us that AI is not a consumer good, it is a political tool. Therefore, the world needs AI. That finds cures for cancer and which can detect earthquakes, but is not a tool to exploit our data. Today, AI is powerful and only has 2 paths: that of digital rights, or that towards an oligarchy. From working with UN, we can govern AI. And this is what we're going to look at in Spain. Since 1948, the UN has served to craft human rights, and the UN has to promote these digital rights given the menace of algorithms. In Spain, we have— During our presidency of the EU, we have signed the EU AI Act, which is the first ambitious legislation in this area. We have moved towards a prohibition of sexual deepfakes, deepfakes and child pornography within the EU legislation. We've put in place a Spanish agency for the supervision of AI, which is the first in Europe. We've been pioneers in driving forward digital charter. Which is also opening up for the Ibero-American Digital Rights Charter. Also in Parliament, we have a child protection law in the digital era which, which is going to restrict under-16s to digital networks. Spain sees it very clearly. We all have to be very clear: no digital technology No is only going— has to work to protect human rights. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Minister. We are now going to move. I'm going to allow our distinguished co-chairs and High Commissioner to move off the podium, and we're going to change over to the first of our panels within this session. which will focus on human rights, accountability, and justice, including for children. So I will now ask the panelists and moderator from— for that session to come forward as we do this changeover and announce their names to save us a little time along the way. So we're very fortunate to have as the moderator for this session Ambassador David Lametti, the Permanent Representative of Canada to the UN and former Minister of Justice of Canada. Welcome. Ambassador Lametti. And then we have a very distinguished panel including Sima Bahaus, the Executive Director of UN Women. Pleasure to welcome you, Madam. His Excellency Amal El Fala Segraouchni, the Minister Delegate from Morocco. Welcome. Samuel Arsenault, the Judge of the First Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Dominican Republic. We are also very fortunate to have with us Sonia Livingstone, who's a member of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and a noted expert in this area and on child rights. And as well, Sasha Lucioni, co-founder and chief scientific officer of the Sustainable AI Group. And finally, Jalekim Kakkar, the executive director, Center for Communication Governance of the National Law University of Delhi. welcome to the panel and moderator. Over to you, David.

Thank you, Peggy. Thank you, Peggy, for that kind introduction and for the efforts to organize, uh, this discussion. And thanks to the thematic co-leads and co-chairs as well. Pleased to be joining you today as the moderator on this panel on human rights, accountability, and justice in the age of AI. It's close to my heart as a former justice minister and as a former law professor. Our discussion will explore the role of the justice system in delivering accountability and upholding human rights for people affected by AI, including children. The justice system, I think it's obvious to a jurist, has a critical role in ensuring that the AI revolution is just and lawful, and it's grounded in the rule of law, trying to ensure, as, as, as Dr. Turk has pointed out, transparency, inclusion, accountability through human oversight. Civil liability is a principle that exists in most justice systems, and it's focused on human responsibility. But what happens when it's, it's a machine making the decision? Human beings bring not only intelligence but also judgment and wisdom to choices that have to be made. So, the challenge for AI is being subject to that human judgment and human intelligence. In Canada, we have a new policy, AI for All, which is trying to ensure privacy rights and safety in the use of AI. And in particular, a new proposed law on children, which would, A, restrict any social platform to children under 16 until it until it was proven to be safe. And also true for AI, that AI would have to be proven to be safe, a chatbot, before it could be, uh, before it could be, uh, exposed to children, uh, and with a digital commissioner to ensure, ensure that. So there are measures being taken, and, and, uh, the co-chair has mentioned the European, a number of European measures. So with that, I won't reintroduce the panelists, uh, because Peggy has already done that. We'll move right to the questions. I will allow all the panelists to weigh in on questions in the language of their choice. I would ask them to moderate their answers to a couple of minutes, perhaps going longer on one of the 3 questions if they feel a particular need on that, but in order to get through this, I have to ask you to all be economical. So the first question, I invite the panel to share their perspectives on what's already been done, or what is needed and how justice systems or other accountability mechanisms can be strengthened to respond to harms related to AI. For those of you engaged in issues of AI and gender, I would welcome your reflections on how AI governance can strengthen accountability and ensure that the rights of women and girls are protected online in light of the gendered impacts of AI highlighted in the preliminary report of the scientific panel. So I shall begin with Seema Bahus. Please go ahead.

Thank you, thank you very much, Ambassador Lametti. It's great to see you here also across the ocean in Geneva. And let me start by saying that I thank you all for being here and also for being a keen audience on the rights of women and girls in this age of technology and digital divides also. So, if we can start— if I can start by saying, left unregulated, AI becomes not only a mirror of the inequalities that already exist in our societies, but it becomes also a powerful mechanism for amplifying discrimination, amplifying exclusion, and violence against women and girls. At a time when we are witnessing a growing global backlash against women's rights, AI governance really cannot be treated solely as a technical issue, and it is fundamentally a human rights issue, as we have heard from our colleague Turk a little bit earlier this morning. The gendered impact of AI are already well documented. AI systems reproduce and amplify harmful stereotypes because they are trained on data that reflect— already reflect existing biases. And evidence is showing us that 44% of assessed AI systems demonstrate gender bias. So UN Women research also found that almost 1 in 4 women human rights defenders, activists, and journalists whom we surveyed had experienced AI-assisted online violence, and 6% of them said that they have been victims of deepfakes or digitally manipulated imagery. And so much of this goes undocumented, goes unnoticed, goes unreported. But also, let me tell you that research is showing us that up to 99% of online deepfakes and manipulated sexual imagery target women, so also women and girls. And so we really need to be very careful and cognizant about this and see what are the solutions for all this. This also reveals that impact goes beyond. 41% of all women responders tell us that they self-censor on social media to avoid abuse. These harms are pushing women and girls out of online spaces, limiting their participation in public life, threatening democratic participation, and reinforcing existing inequalities. So the challenge today is not the absence of principles of justice, because as we said, the principles are well established, but the absence of implementation and accountability. So first and foremost, states remain the primary duty bearers. International human rights law already provides a comprehensive framework to protect rights, including through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW we call it, and also all member states have an obligation to respect and protect and fulfill human rights, including by ensuring accountability. At the same time, technology companies and platforms cannot hide behind the complexity of their systems. So responsibility must extend across the entire AI lifecycle, from those who design foundation models to those who deploy them to those who integrate AI into products products and services. So just as we would never release food or medicine or aircraft or vehicle or electrical products for use without rigorous oversight, AI should not be deployed without mandatory safeguards to ensure it is safe, accountable, and does not cause harm for anyone, of course including women and girls. I thank you, Ambassador.

Thank you very much. Excellency Alphalasse Grushny.

Bonjour. Good morning. I'll answer in French, if I may. I think the 3 questions you've raised this morning which bring us together have something in common, which is the existence of rights, human rights, for example. These are already there, but they seem insufficient in the face of this technology which is spreading at breakneck speed. There are 2 points I'd like to raise before I answer the questions. The first point is the concept of something exogenous compared to something endogenous. Now, what do I mean by this? I listened to what was being said at the beginning. People talk about facing up to climate change. Climate change is external to human beings. It's part of the environment. And a lot of what we regulate is external. Yes. Now, when you want to regulate psychological manipulation, that's something that can't be done easily. It's something that will take time. When you use algorithms that manipulate a child's psychology, that's not something you can measure. That's not something that you can even perceive. Therefore, the internal nature of the effects of AI creates significant issues at the level of the rights and the legal mechanisms that we have at our disposal. So the question we could ask is how to audit our neurons. How can we understand that our brains have been transformed? Now you might remember that In the early 2020s, Chile had proposed a law against cognitive manipulation. They'd introduced the concept of cognitive rights, and that was quite visionary at the international level. Today, these cognitive rights must be defended, but that opens up a whole host of questions. And the real issue is when there's a decoupling between technology and laws. To regulate AI and AI systems, we need to be able to open up the black boxes of AI. And there are very few lawyers and there are very few sociologists who are in a position to understand exactly what is going on. And even AI researchers do not have the tools sometimes to understand the complexity of these algorithms. If you take LLMs that exist today, that exist on the market, I'm not going to advertise for anyone, but you have between 175 billion and 180 billion Parameters involved. These are systems that are working full-time. We make 10, 15, 20 requests a day, say, and if we put aside environmental issues, if we put aside that issue of economical use, how can we make sure that there's accountability for what appears in these systems and affects the entire planet? Today, when we talk about accountability, and that's the topic this morning, we need to understand that accountability means that we need to be able to unwrap all these causal effect dynamics to understand AI. And I've looked into the technical side of AI, and I think we're very far from where we need to be. I'll stop there, and I can come back on the detail afterwards.

Yes, thank you very much. Transparency is also at stake in this issue of accountability.

Good morning. Thank you. I'll go in Spanish. Permitidme. Allow me to begin. with a very simple reflection. When we talk about governance of AI, we need to look at regulation, innovation, and technological development. However, the true challenge of governance doesn't happen when we adopt laws or ethical principles, but it happens when a person considers an AI system has violated their human rights and their data privacy. It is at this moment when governance is no longer just a concept but then becomes a reality. Justice systems should be seen— not— women shouldn't be seen just as users of AI. These are essential institutions to convert human rights principles into true human rights to guarantee the existence of accountability when AI causes harm. International human rights law has a very solid foundation: human dignity, equality before the law, non-discrimination, due process, privacy and transparency, and right to effective remedy. And these need to be fully fleshed out in the area of AI. In this vein, the international community or international cooperation should reflect this as well. Through the Justice Action Coalition, governments, civil organizations, and international organizations and justice systems, we're all working together to ensure that AI governance is not only restricted to the designing of public policies, but rather it can be effective through justice systems which are based upon people. For the Dominican Republic, it is an honor to be part of this initiative as a member of its executive board and to co-chair with the World Bank the work on emerging technologies and AI in the area of justice. If we want to strengthen our justice systems, I am of the view that we have to focus on 4 priorities: to strengthen institutional capacities of lawyers and jurists, to look at transparency and traceability in the use of AI, to have human oversight that is effective, and to ensure that all people have effective mechanisms to access justice and to repair harm. Thank you.

Gracias. Dr. Livingstone.

Excellencies, Chair, and colleagues, thank you. So I'm speaking from the independent scientific panel, and our report treated human rights as a cross-cutting issue. So we recognize mounting evidence of human rights violations, and I have to say the evidence for the violations is currently much more compelling than the evidence for human rights benefits in many settings where AI is being used— in the home, in education, work, communities— even though the promise of AI remains substantial in specialist fields. So the science is clearly documenting harms to individuals, vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, as we've heard, and to society as a whole. And the report documents the threats to our information ecosystem as AI is being used to create and amplify persuasion and deceit, to spread disinformation, distrust, and dissent. And there are adverse impacts already being documented for individuals, also for collective health, for democratic participation, election integrity, and all of the harms especially focus on women, on children, on a range of disadvantaged groups. We documented threats to privacy and safety, and there is really much to be said about safety as personal data is taken, manipulated, abused, exploited by AI systems, exacerbated by bad actors. And we see those adverse impacts also clearly documented across a range of domains, including the right to freedom of expression, but in, in more private life, in emotional attachment, in mental health, even in the right to life. And thirdly, the panel has documented evidence of harms too in terms of inequality and injustice. As AI power is concentrated in a very few companies, a very few countries, a very few languages, we can see adverse impacts on cultures, languages, inclusion, education, discrimination of a range of kinds, as has already been mentioned in relation to AI decision-making. And all of these land unequally. So I think looking across the evidence that we found, um, from the panel, we highlighted 4 kinds of risk, um, which I would like to just note. So there are the direct risks which have been referred to and which is easiest to get the evidence. We also see the risks, um, of— because of a hugely uneven capacity globally. So AI deployment in any one region, effective as it might be, beneficial as it might be, exacerbates risks and of inequalities in many other parts of the world and to other populations. We identified also the opportunity costs. The failure to realize the AI benefits is also a risk to human rights. And then we documented a range of ways in which the development and deployment of AI without rights-based safeguards introduces its own kinds of risks. And I think those kind of unintended but really consequences we can anticipate are very evident. And I do want to say something about children, but will we— I have another round, or shall I mention now?

I would— you will get one more shot at the children. Okay, then, because I think the children has been highlighted both by the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General, and we have really abundant evidence there, so I'll come back to it. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Lucioni.

Thank you. I'm very honored to be here as a recent founder of a recent organization called Sustainable AI Group, and we're dedicated to measuring and reducing the environmental footprint of AI. And essentially, I do see it very— as a very key point in terms of human rights, transparency, accountability, and human oversight. And I think that often— I read an article about this recently— often AI is such a vague and hard-to-define term and hard to pin down. And I think that often debates are on different levels, from the technological to human rights. And one way to anchor this debate, for example, are data centers. And this is where I spend a lot of my, my time and energy, pun intended, studying. But essentially, it really brings concrete that while the benefits of AI can technically be global, right, anyone with a cell phone with, with mobile service, a laptop can connect to this cloud and profit from AI to some extent. But the impacts, the negative impacts that we see are very, very local. And so in terms of, in terms of water and energy and emissions, in terms of the health impacts that are getting more and more dire, and we're seeing it really impact the most marginalized populations already. And what's really difficult is that it's so hard to get transparency, even, for example, the organizations like the IEA, which I've worked with, struggle to get information because even the country, the member countries, don't have the information. And so transparency has been something that I've been fighting for, for several years now because it does seem to be a very fundamental human right that we should be getting, right? When we use AI, what does this cost? What is the data coming from? Where is the energy coming from? How can I make a choice? How can I as a user make a choice between tool A or tool B if I don't know what the cost is? And I think that, you know, maybe it's hard to to operationalize regulation right now because of the pushback, because maybe as a technology it's hard to start restricting it while potentially we haven't reached its full potential. But I think that transparency is really something that a lot of people, a lot of organizations, a lot of governments can get behind. Okay, before we start, for example, I created the AI Energy Score Project, essentially energy efficiency labels for AI models. And, you know, before we start saying, you know, you have an F so you can't deploy your system. How about we start quantifying and measuring these impacts so that people can make informed decisions when choosing one, one tool over another? And I think that this is really the stepping stone to so many other things that we can be doing and we should be doing when it comes to AI. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you for underlining the human rights dimensions of climate and the climate impact of AI. Finally, Executive Director Kakkar.

Thank you so much, and it's been— it's an absolute honor to be speaking here today. When we talk about the intersection of AI and human rights and international human rights law, you know, we have recognized the right to equality, privacy, freedom of speech and expression, economic, social, and cultural rights. And, you know, we've seen guiding principles, the UN guiding principles, being developed on how to operationalize these in various contexts. We've seen national laws imbibing these human rights, but all of these will have to be sort of reinterpreted and evolved in the context of AI. If you take the freedom of speech and expression, it's always encompassed the freedom of thought. But what does freedom of thought mean in the context of AI, which is threatening cognitive autonomy, which is raising fundamental questions of information reliability, which has aspects of microtargeting and manipulation. Similarly, think about the right to privacy. We live in a panopticon, which is, you know, where we are constantly surveilled by companies, by governments, but even bystanders. Uh, you know, there are cameras, there are, you know, wearables, there are AI glasses, the location of our phones. We also see, you know, a concentration of data centers and extraction of minerals predominantly in sites where there's already a lot of inequality in the Global South. And it raises fundamental questions of how do we measure the environmental impact of AI? How do we deal with the implications that economic and other value is being accrued in a location that's very, very far away from the communities that are most impacted? We have fundamental questions of labor justice, of the people around the world, but particularly the Global South. And, you know, another fundamental human rights question is how do we move away from a focus on individual rights to a broader focus on group and community rights and impacts? Justice systems to grapple with all of this will really have to be strengthened to not only identify harms— it's not always going to be obvious when a harm is being caused, there will be some harms that will only emerge after we have societal-level monitoring entering. They will have to grapple with the complexity of arriving at truth in, in, in a time of epistemic erosion and a true fragmentation of our reality. Justice systems will have to bridge accountability gaps of who is truly liable. They'll have to grapple with the transparency questions. How does the person who's affected prove harm and gather evidence without access to models and information around how they are being impacted. Justice systems will have to fundamentally grapple with enforcement gaps. They will need technical capacity and expertise. We will have to think about shifting of burden on perhaps companies to demonstrate that harm is not present in a given situation. They will need to rely on independent socio-technical experts. Experts, auditors. They will have to grapple with the biggest question, which is the transnational cross-border governance gap. Laws are national, companies are global, supply chains run across various countries. How do you access the information and, and the, uh, you know, hold people and companies liable, uh, in, in this sort of increasingly global context? So whether it's identifying harms, bridging accountability, enabling transparency, navigating transnational governance, all of this fails if we do not acknowledge the fundamental concentration of power in a handful of companies in a few jurisdictions. These companies frame the safeguards, control their operationalization, the information they share with various countries or with courts, with judicial systems. We need to enable the development of national AI ecosystems. We need public interest alternatives to our current technological models. We need to diffuse the power, because without this diffusion of power, we will not be able to safeguard human rights of the people of the world, but especially those of the Global South. Thank you.

I have been, I have been told we're running on time. So, I'm going to give each panelist one more short intervention. I would ask you to limit yourself to one of the 2 following topics. One is, how do we ensure accountability, especially in the age of agentic AI? Or focus on the impact of AI on children and their rights. And if you wish, on gender, age, or disability, or other intersectional identities. Again, I have to ask you to keep it very, very short. I've been told 30 seconds. Thank you. Executive Director Bahus.

I don't remember I was ever able to say anything useful in 30 seconds, but I'm gonna try. I think I wasted my 30 seconds right here. I just want to say that accountability and risk analysis should not be seen as reactionary, but as influencing every system that we are building when it comes to AI. I also think that the accountability of AI governance begins with 4 questions: who builds AI, who benefits from AI, who bears the risks, and who has a voice? For UN Women, we see this as the building blocks that when connected, then we become— we have a basis for a good foundation for accountability. And when we look at these building blocks, allow me to say, the data speaks for itself. When we look at who builds AI, women are largely underrepresented. When we look, women make up only 30% of AI workforce globally. From yesterday's independent scientific panel's report, we learn that 88% of leading AI researchers are male. So when we look at who benefits and who is at risk, we know that while AI offers a great promise of economic growth, women continue to face much higher job automation risks compared to their male counterparts. And when we look at who has a voice, gender equality remains largely invisible within AI governance. And I will tell you, one of— sorry, of the 138 countries assessed, only 24 reference gender in their national AI strategies, and just 18 include substantive gender-responsive provisions. So, to address these gaps, AI governance frameworks must embed accountability from the outset. This begins with mandatory— of course, we've spoken— human rights impacts assessments, before and after deployment, with gender equality treated as non-negotiable and not as optional. I think I will say finally, Ambassador, accountability requires participation also. Women and girls, feminist technologists, indigenous communities, labor organizations, disability advocates, and civil society must be meaningfully involved and empowered. Thank you very much,

Madame la Ministre.

Well, s'il faut trois secondes. Well, I speak French. That'll be quicker. I'm going to go for the agentic AI question and the network of agents question and the challenges in terms of accountability. I'd say that. The issue of accountability in agentic systems is probably the most significant legal challenge this decade because we have a network of AI agents that are autonomous, each individually, and there's no human that is at the origin of the final decision. So when we want to make an We don't know which of the agents is accountable and we don't know how to distribute this accountability amongst the different agents. When you have 3 people, A, B, and C, and each person does a little bit, the result can be bad, but you need to be able to find accountability at the level of each person. at the level of a particular moment. So there's an issue with detecting the moment where the mistake was made in these agentic systems, and we don't know how to respond to these systems which have billions of parameters, and it's extremely difficult to move back up the chain of accountability. So very briefly, I'd say if I take Idirati x.0, it's a platform in Morocco. We process millions of administrative transactions every day, 52 million. When you have 52 million, it's very difficult to find the exact cause when there's a problem. So what we need today is to find a new accountability paradigm because we need to find new methods to face up to these decision-making factories, if you will. So I believe that unfolding would be the key approach. Unfolding would allow us to develop a causal graph, a non-deterministic causal graph of agentic systems to identify each node which rights apply and understand where there is a lack of coverage. Because that's where harm can be caused. So to sum up, I think that we need to impose 3 obligations today in terms of accountability. First, structured documentation of the agent chains, which does what when, when these agents are deployed in public services. We need to appoint an identifiable human being in charge for all issues that are tied to rights, and there needs to be a right to redress in good time, in line with the speed of AI systems, so that humans can receive redress if necessary. Therefore, the functioning of the algorithm must never be autonomous in regards to rights and the law.

Thank you very much for having explained the challenge, and thank you for those suggestions.

Thank you very much. I'll just be quite brief. So the challenges of the judiciary— the true debate is not really asking us whether AI should be present in our courtrooms. The reality is it's already there. The true challenge is to ensure that its use is transparent, responsible, can be audited, and completely compatible with ethical judicial priorities, human rights, and the rule of law. No public institution can justify a decision by saying that that is what the system told us to do. The responsibility should lie with people. and with institutions. Technology should help the judge. It should never replace him or her. Thank you.

Gracias, and, and thank you for your brevity. Um, very much appreciated. Uh, Dr. Livingstone.

Um, thank you. Uh, thinking also of the panel's evidence on harms and specifically around children, um, just a very few, um, facts. Across 11 Global South countries, up to 1 child per classroom reported that AI was used to make sexually explicit deepfakes of them. Reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material to the US cyber tip line NCMEC are rising exponentially. Child sexual abuse material is documented in some training sets, and offenders can now fine-tune open models on child sexual exploitation. A national US survey found 1 in 3 children had discussed important and serious emotional matters of the AI companion. Stanford's risk assessment of AI companions found these products fail to meet basic safety standards, and they deliver sexual, violent, and harmful language. Tests of 32 AI models for child safety found consistent failures, even when tested under child-facing conditions. So, the problem is very real and urgent, and we are a long way from implementation. Child rights violations facilitated by AI are often not recognized in law, And nor is transparency, accountability, and remedy or redress available to children. So we're not going to solve this problem by restricting children if that is on the agenda. Think of the hopes being poured globally into AI tutors, AI mental health support, and think also of children's rights to expression, participation, education, and information in a digital age, all of which they are calling for actively, and their voices must also be heard, even if not quite in this room today. So it must be about building rights-respecting safeguards into AI datasets, models, AI procurement, and deployment. And I refer people back to Mr. Guterres's call for nations to adopt an AI Child Safety Pledge. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Dr. Lucioni.

Yes, thank you. I want to talk about agents and how essentially We're already in a little bit of a dire place when it comes to transparency, accountability, and human oversight, and I think agentic AI is making it really worse because it makes it— it amplifies the degrees of separation between a user and the underlying technology. Already as a scientist, I used to study AI models which you could probe and look at to some extent. Then these models became AI systems with filters, with all sorts of other parts to the machine. And now with AI agents, you have an even larger degree of— yeah, using, I guess, as— yeah, essentially more and more parts in the machine, and they become harder and harder. When something fails, you don't know where it's coming from, essentially. So I think that it's really important to keep imposing safeguards and standards as well. Actually, I have to run in like a few minutes. I'm giving a talk on a session, in a session about AI standards. So I think we should be having standards for safety, sustainability at each part of this machine, no matter how many there are, and no matter how easy it is to say, well, the agent made the decision. Thank you.

Thank you. Executive Director Keka.

Thank you. I want to sort of build on some of the points that Sonia has already made and sort of add to that to say that given that AI is getting so integrated in various fundamental aspects of our lives, um, you know, it has various implications for children's rights, safety, well-being, development, which means that from the get-go we need to be thinking about the design of systems that are being deployed, um, and we should not be reacting to the occurrence of harm to children. So every system, you know, pre-deployment through the design stage needs to be thought through. We need to have certification and post-deployment monitoring of harms and impacts, but we also need to fundamentally think about the business models of these AI platforms and the challenges of current approaches, which are very dependent on attention-maximizing design and advertising-based engagement, and what that means for the well-being of children. So I think we should, you know, very often the onus is on parents and children to, you know, figure out the load of identifying, assessing, and managing risks and harms that are arising. And I think we need to sort of replace the onus back on platforms, companies, also governments, parliamentarians, and regulators to set up systems that really truly work safely while allowing for, you know, children's autonomy. And growth and development. But the last point I want to sort of make is AI and child also raises a fundamental point of surveillance of children. How does a child who's constantly watched and monitored grow up as a sort of a contributing member of a democratic society? I think that's something for us to sort of fundamentally think about what this generation of children is going to grow up as and what we are setting ourselves up for a society going forward. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you to all our panelists for a very thought-provoking series of comments. Gracias, merci. I turn it back over to Peggy. Thank you for being here.

Thank you very much, Ambassador Labade, and the whole panel. I think we've all been challenged on a number of fronts to think deeply about some of these issues of transparency, accountability, and oversight and what they mean. I personally found the last segment— I'm very glad we gave them some time for that second round. I'm sorry we had to cut things short. I'm sure we could have listened to much, much more. But we're now going to move on to the section of the program where we will hear from audience interventions, which will be moderated by our co-chairs. So I'll welcome Linda Baño and Minister López Agüeda forward again. And these are the speakers who have pre-inscribed on the list. Unfortunately, of course, we won't be able to hear from everyone, but we're very grateful to all of you that are here for this So I'll hand over to the two of you. I think you're going to have some assistance in getting everything set, and we will move forward with this segment. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everyone, and thank you for your patience. We will now facilitate interventions for this segment. Statements will be delivered based on the speakers list established through inscription that was made available on the UN Global Dialogue on AI website. Please note that in the interest of promoting broad participation from stakeholders, we will proceed with one representative from member states and one representative from other stakeholders, and we will alternate. The speakers will be invited to intervene from the lectern on the stage. Speakers, if you can come forward and sit in the first 2 rows. it might be easier for you to reach the lectern quickly and speak. The e-delegate list is closed, and any changes that you wish to make would need to be communicated to the Secretariat, who is sitting just to the right of the podium. And my favorite part, a timer has been set. You will be able to see it on the screen, and you will also be able to see it on the lectern. We kindly encourage all speakers to respect the allotted time so that the largest possible number of speakers may be accommodated during this segment. As some of you may have learned yesterday, microphones will be automatically switched off once the allocated speaking time has expired. And so I would ask you to try to be aware of that. With that, I will turn it over to our distinguished co-chairs who will begin reading from the list. Thank you very much.

Okay, so now we move to the Minister for Artificial Intelligence from Ireland, Miss Niamh Smith, and then we move to Mr. Arash Ajikani, research professor from the Technical Research Center of Finland.

Distinguished colleagues and Minister, lovely to see you here, and guests, ladies and gentlemen, it's a privilege to be here with you today. And given the transformative effects AI has on societies, it is clear that we face a future of unprecedented opportunities and challenges. But we must not lose sight that it is the responsibility of all of us to ensure that technologies are developed to the benefit of humanity and not to its detriment. We firmly believe that the way we do this is to ensure that human rights are at the core of AI governance. This is reflected in the human-centric and rights-based approach emphasized in our own National Digital and AI Strategy. Global AI governance must align with international human rights frameworks promoting freedom of expression, privacy, access to information, and gender equality, while actively countering all forms of violence, including sexual and gender-based violence. Of course, AI and digital technologies have a significant impact on human rights in different ways, but I want to highlight today the necessity to protect the rights of women and children. While AI has the potential to advance women's and girls' rights, we see how the current lack of implementation of regulations has exacerbated gender-based harm. Ireland is concerned that without the necessary human rights safeguards and oversight, AI systems enable technology-facilitated gender-based violence. The deployment of AI online content moderation without human oversight can amplify disinformation, undermining the integrity of the information landscape, and this disproportionately affects women and girls. While we are particularly concerned about how AI can exacerbate discrimination against women and girls, discrimination through algorithmic bias and lack of representation in training data impacts the accuracy and fairness of AI systems. Furthermore, AI tools lack gender response lens. They can hinder women and girls' participation in public life, whether journalist, politician, human rights defenders, or an advocate for gender equality. Women and girls are particularly targeted by online disinformation campaigns. AI-amplified disinformation campaigns and hate speech undermine the rights of women and girls to exercise freedom of expression by forcing them to self-censor, close their digital accounts, or otherwise withdraw from participating in online spaces. This contributes to a broader chilling effect on their full, equal, and meaningful participation in society. Their digital participation is also hindered by significant disparities in the access of women and girls to have technology, contributing to the gender digital divide. The full, equal, safe, and meaningful participation of women and girls in all realms of society, including online space, is critical to achieving gender equality, sustainable development, peace, and democracy. This is everyone's responsibility. Go raibh míle maith agat, Dána.

Now it's Mr. Afra Ajikani, a research professor from the Technical Research Center of Finland. He's not, so we move to this one. So we move to Mr. Robert Baruch, Public Affairs, Europe and Multilateral Relations from Universal Music Group. Hello. Okay, there we go. Thank you. Okay, rock and roll.

Since the invention of the record and radio, artists like the first global superstar, Enrico Caruso, all the way to Taylor Swift, Blackpink, Ladipo, and John Legend, who are here, by the way, have always stood at the intersection of culture and technology. At Universal Music Group, our approach to music, and thus our approach to the intersection of music and AI, starts with one simple principle: put artists first. Protect their rights, advance their interests, and from that foundation create opportunities for creativity, innovation, and growth. This approach is firmly rooted in human rights. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 15 of the International Covenant— Covenant of— on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights recognize that creators are entitled to protection of the moral and material interests from their work. Those principles are just as relevant in the age of AI. Over the past year, we have put this into practice. We have established partnerships with companies including NVIDIA, ClayVision, Udio Stability AI, and Splice, announced a broad-based AI collaboration with Spotify, and advanced important AI protections through our agreement with TikTok. These partnerships demonstrate that the future of AI is built not by choosing between innovation and creators' rights, but by advancing both together. From the perspective of those who create, invest, and bring music to audiences around the world, responsible AI governance rests on 3 pillars. First, creators and artists must remain in control of how their work is used to develop AI systems. Agreements reached freely and voluntarily between creators, rights holders, and technology developers create trust, legal certainty, and sustainable innovation. Second, Transparency. Creators should know when and how their works have been used to develop AI models and how they will be used for outputs. Without transparency, there can be no accountability, no trust, and no meaningful collaboration. With transparency, artistic integrity can be protected and, where necessary, enforced. Third, human oversight. AI is an extraordinary creative tool, but it should amplify human creativity, not replace it. Music is profoundly human. Long before we wrote stories, we sang them. As Bono said, sang before we spoke. Music is more than data or patterns. It carries memory, identity, emotion, and lived experience. As Björn Ulvaeus said, music is testimony. AI offers tremendous opportunities. It can help more creators in more languages and more cultures participate in the global creative economy. It can preserve cultural heritage, unlock creativity, and deepen the relationship between artists and their fans if applied responsibly. AI can ignite, ignite, ignite a new renaissance of human creativity, preserving our cultural heritage, shaping culture through the power of artistry, and inspiring future generations. That is not merely AI for good. It is the—

Thank you. Thank you so much, Robert, from Universal Music Group. You say put artists first. And we sang before we spoke. Thank you for your sentiments. At this point, I would like to invite from South Africa His Excellency Monty Gungubele, Deputy Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies. You have the floor. If he's not here, okay, we will go to Slovenia, Her Excellency Anita Pipan. Forgive my African accent, we pronounce everything. Anita, the Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva.

Anita unfortunately couldn't make it, so I'll be presenting our address.

Excellent, thank you so much. The floor is yours.

So, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I'm Scientific Counsellor at our Permanent Representation, and I'll be delivering the address on behalf of the Republic of Slovenia. Thank you for your understanding, co-chairs. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr. Türk, has emphasized earlier that upholding and advancing human rights is fundamental to building trustworthy AI. In our view, in Slovenia's view, trust is not only an ethical objective but also a prerequisite for the broader adoption of AI. And this approach is reflected in our National AI Strategy 2030 adopted in March this year. The strategy clearly promotes a human-centric approach to AI grounded in human rights, democratic values, ethics, safety, transparency, and accountability. Its objective is not only to advance AI capabilities, but to ensure that AI is developed and used responsibly in the public interest. The strategy also recognises that building trust requires effective and practical implementation, and this entails ensuring responsible governance, legal certainty, appropriate support mechanisms, and sustained investment in AI literacy and skills. And as a small linguistic community, Slovenia places particular importance on protecting linguistic and cultural diversity. We believe that inclusive AI should reflect and preserve all languages and cultures, ensuring that no community is left behind. Looking ahead, we should: First, continue promoting a human rights-based and human-centric approach to AI, firmly grounded in democratic values and the rule of law. Second, promote inclusive AI by supporting linguistic and cultural diversity and reducing digital inequalities. Third, complement regulatory frameworks with practical implementation support, including capacity building, guidance, and AI literacy. And of course, strengthen international cooperation through the exchange of good practices, interoperable approaches, and capacity building to advance trustworthy AI globally. Thank you very much for attention.

Thank you, Slovenia. Especially on legal certainty. Thank you very much. At this juncture, we will go to International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. We have Zachary Lampell, Senior Legal Advisor and Coordinator, Digital Rights Program.

Thank you, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of ICNL, the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, it is an honor to speak to you today. Yesterday, we heard from our global leaders, including the Secretary-General and heads of state, about the AI we want and the AI we envision. A running theme throughout their interventions was that AI must be human-centered. AI must create value for humanity. AI must protect democratic principles, And AI must be trustworthy and anchored in the rule of law. Sadly, the envisioned AI is not the AI that we have today. The AI we have today restricts the freedom of expression and the freedom of association and violates the right to privacy by flooding and manipulating the information ecosystem, producing child sexual abuse materials at an unprecedented rate, and fueling mass surveillance, amongst other harms. So the question becomes, how do we achieve the AI we want? ICNL believes that the AI envisioned and articulated throughout this dialogue can be achieved via the following 3 actions. First, AI red lines— clear prohibitions or moratoria on AI systems and uses that pose unacceptable risks to human rights. This is not a radical proposition. Rather, it is explicitly stated in the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution, Seizing the Opportunities of Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Systems for Sustainable Development. Furthermore, UNESCO's recommendations on ethics on artificial intelligence already explicitly rule out the use of AI for social scoring and mass surveillance. We can and should implement red lines where AI cannot comply with human rights. And creates a market incentive to design and deploy safe and trustworthy AI. Third and finally is a right to remedy. Simply put, too often decisions are made via AI systems and those wronged have no avenue to challenge that decision. Laws and regulations must contain an accountable actor with decision-making workflows. These 3 actions are rooted in international law and the rule of law. The rule of law requires implementing binding legal frameworks equally without regard for wealth, power, or influence. We must start to enforce international law, including international human rights law, today. ICNL is working and will continue to work to implement these 3 action points through multilateral bodies like the Freedom Online Coalition and its Task Force on AI and Human Rights, OHCHR, UNESCO, UNGA, and other UN agencies to create and enforce rules for safe, trustworthy AI. ICNL also continues to support—

Thank you, Mr. Lampert, for your 3 ideas. And now we move to Alejandra de Véliz, Permanent Representative from Uruguay.

Buenos días. Very good morning, one and all. Thank you very much, co-chairs and facilitators. We'd like to especially thank the panelists for this morning. For Uruguay, undoubtedly the impact of AI in the protection of human rights is absolutely critical. The example given to us this morning by the High Commissioner. What do we do when there's a new drug that comes into the market? I think this really makes us truly think, and it was certainly a powerful message. The report from the scientific panel also addressed the concern of algorithmic bias. In the following minutes, Uruguay would like to focus on gender equality, for equality for women and young girls. Uruguay agrees that AI offers an opportunity to bridge gender bias, but in the design and deployment of AI systems should focus upon gender approaches to bridge the existing gender divide. We need improvements in accountability, normative frameworks, sustainability and funding, and systemic inclusion of specialized knowledge in the areas of gender in public and private sectors. Uruguay is fully committed to drive forward a digital transformation that includes the development and use of AI in an inclusive and gender-based approach. In this vein, it adheres to the Madrid Declaration. His Excellency the Minister referred to this on the 5th Ministerial Conference on the Feminist Foreign Policy. And looking at this, we'd like to highlight the recent Global Partnership for Human Rights. This initiative from the High Commission— Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights— is a broad multi-stakeholder platform and network which connects all of us, all our efforts, which has a cross-cutting focus on the impact of AI And which in our view is a very natural way in which we can address all of these topics with everyone involved. With that, I thank you.

Thank you very much, Alejandra. We move to Miss, Miss Murph Heacock from the Center for AI and Digital Policy. No. So we move to Ms. Paulina Ibarra. She's the Gerente General from Fundación Multitudes. Bad luck, no? I've been better in football, in World Championships. Now we move to Mr. Franco Giandana Gigiena, policy analyst from Access Now.

Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Happy to be here. Argentina is playing later. I come from Argentina, No, no problem with that. Excellencies, colleagues, co-chairs, thank you for this opportunity to contribute to this thematic breakout cluster 4. Access Now is a grassroots to global civil society organization dedicated to defending and extending the digital rights of people and communities at risk. I will focus my intervention on 4 main points. First and foremost, the objective of this global dialogue is to foster international cooperation on AI governance while ensuring that the perspectives of the global majority are reflected alongside those of leading AI powers. Human rights-centered AI requires the right respecting collection and processing of data alongside robust governance and oversight of automated systems. Model development and sharing practices must balance necessary safeguards with meaningful openness so that global majority countries can build their own technical capacity and overcome a historic dependence on externally held expertise. Second, AI tools are supercharging surveillance and suppression of protesters, journalists, human rights defenders, and other communities at risk. We therefore echo calls for the adoption of human rights-centered binding legal standards and global governance mechanisms to regulate digital surveillance technologies and AI, also addressing chilling effects. Third, we call for a halt to the development and use of AI tools that are facilitating violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, especially in context of conflict. Or war. Finally, the current geopolitical landscape presents an opportunity for global majority regions as well as middle powers to seek and foster collaboration and join resources in an unprecedented fashion. There is nothing magical about AI development. It is a governable technology, but we need alternatives to the dominant paradigm being pushed by a handful of companies who are prioritizing AI acceleration over all other concerns. Fundamentally, people around the world do not only need access, but most importantly, they need agency. We trust all those gathered here understand the urgency and the unique opportunity and responsibility we share in meeting this challenge. Gracias.

Excellent. Thank you very much to each of the best Argentina, the day Kenya plays football, it's over for all of you because of our athletes. Anyway, I'd like to invite at this point Poland, His Excellency Rafal Kłonaki, Director of Department for International Cooperation, Ministry of Digital Affairs. The floor is yours. Poland didn't qualify to the World Cup, so I wouldn't mention, but good luck to any who qualified.

Thank you, co-chairs, excellencies, distinguished delegates. It's a real privilege to address the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance on behalf of my country. For Poland, governing artificial intelligence is not just a technical challenge. It is a question of values. When we decide what an algorithm may do to a human being, we decide what we believe a person is worth. And no doubt, from the perspective of every government, each and every individual should be the key priority. But let us be honest about both sides of AI technology. Artificial intelligence is a great opportunity for health, for education, for science, and Poland intends to use it well. But opportunity and risk travel together, and they must be held in balance. We already see the warning signs. Deepfakes that pass off synthetic lies as truth, eroding the trust on which democracies depend. Weapons that edge closer to choosing by themselves, with no human hand, who lives and who dies. Systems that reduce a person to a prediction that they can neither understand nor contest. Some choices a machine must never make on its own. Poland knows from its own history what it costs when people lose control over the systems that decide their fate. So our answer is not to halt innovation, but to keep one factor constant at its core: the human being, the human factor, the H factor. However capable of our systems become, a person must keep the final word to understand the decision, to contest it, and where it matters most, to switch the systems off. This is non-negotiable, above all in high-risk systems where a single decision can cost a life, a livelihood, or a fundamental right. It means writing human control into our values our laws, our standards, and our institutions, not leaving it as a declaration. Poland therefore welcomes the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the first binding treaty to place AI within the order of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. We are turning these principles into practice at home. Poland's first comprehensive national digitalization strategy, Poland 2035, places the human being as its center And our national AI policy commits us to artificial intelligence that is human-centric and trustworthy. The human factor belongs to no single nation. It is the common ground on which a truly global governance of AI can be built. Let us hold ourselves to one measure of success: that after all our progress, the human being still stands at the center, understood, respected, and free. Thank you.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Poland, for talking about human-centric in a world that is full of AI agents. And so, at this point, I would like to invite Ms. Isabella Hendricks from Instituto Alana, who— she's the CEO. You have the floor.

Thank you, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, and colleagues. I am Executive Director of Instituto Alana, a Brazilian-based global organization that brings a Global South perspective and highlights that children are not a homogeneous group. We must recognize their intersectionalities and how indigenous children, girls, children with disabilities, and children of African descent, for example, have their rights disproportionately impacted as a result of the gaps in AI governance. Speaking from Brazil, I'm proud to note the recently approved milestone, the ECA Digital, a landmark framework for the protection of children's rights in the digital environment, which innovates by establishing a logic of prevention and proactive accountability, including administrative accountability and enforcement through the justice system. I also speak today on behalf of over 120 signatories of the Joint Statement on Children's Rights at the AI Dialogue, a global campaign of civil society organizations, academics, and child rights experts coordinated by Five Rights Foundation and united in one message: children's rights must be central to this dialogue. Children are among the earliest and most frequent users of new technology, yet they remain largely missing from national AI strategies and governance frameworks. As discussions continue, it will be important to ensure that children's rights are reflected as a cross-cutting consideration across AI governance. Children's rights, safety, and well-being must be built into these systems from the start, not added after harm has already occurred. Children's data, images, voices, and biometric information are being collected, commercially exploited, and used at scale. These harms fall hardest on children who are already in situations of inequality without access to other rights such as education and health. Innovation should not come at the cost of these risks. If there is potential harm, we need to prioritize caution. Children should interact with AI systems only if they are proven safe and designed to respect children's rights and considering their perspectives in decisions that affect them. Responsibility must sit with those who build and profit from this technology. AI holds real promise for children, but without strong governance, it can cause real harm. We are not asking you to choose between innovation and protection. We ask you to build both together, an AI future worth of every child's trust and safety. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Isabella, and thank you for highlighting that children's rights are not We have different children, immigrant children, disabled children, and we appreciate that. At this point, I think we'll take a break so that the Minister of Spain can continue to celebrate his win last night.

Thank you, co-chairs, for moderating that segment. And despite some of the absences, I think we were given a very broad picture perspective from both ministers, governments, and stakeholders, showing the breadth of the issues that we have to grapple with on the human rights side. We also wanted to be able to report back to you on the survey that we asked you to take on the way in. And theoretically, I'm going to have a slide up soon that will allow us to do that. Here we go. Thank you. Looks promising. So the first question was really asking everybody to think about how optimistic or pessimistic you are about how we're doing on the governance side, the topic of the dialogue today. And we don't actually have it there yet, but I'm going to tell you even before seeing— oh, here we go. So in reality, what we found is that a lot of people are uncertain about whether or not we're where we need to be. But there is a plurality of those of you who are quite concerned that we don't have the measures in place that will really help us move forward to address all of the challenges and opportunities that we've been hearing about in this session. So, that makes sense. But I guess it's important to then think, what are we worried about? And that was the next question. And what we found in terms of the results of the numbers of what concerns raised to the top for most people, it's not surprising that the top 2 human rights issues that we came across are those that we've been talking a lot about in this panel. And they go to accountability and rule of law and the impact of AI on children. And as you'll see, the other key issues that were raised most significantly in the survey were the issues around surveillance and the use of AI by law enforcement. And then also environmental sustainability. And we're grateful for the panelists' contribution on that earlier. Drilling down into that issue of accountability in the context specifically of agentic AI, we also asked who should be responsible for the actions of agentic AI. And overwhelmingly, the top 3 results are first that the companies that develop the AI model, and then secondly, states aren't off the hook, that there is also a responsibility there. And that the public authority that allowed the system has a responsibility. That, of course, is consistent with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, that the first pillar is the states are responsible for ensuring that the regulatory environment exists to ensure that companies don't do harm. So, that makes sense. And then the third is the users, the organizations that deploy it should be held accountable for agentic systems. So, we'll go back to the poll, the second half of the poll later. But the next segment of our discussion today will bring up our next panel, which I'm very happy to introduce. So for this panel, we have a wonderful moderator of Her Excellency Clara Chapez, the Ambassador for AI and Digital Affairs from France. So I welcome her to the stage now, and I welcome all of the panelists as well. And as before, I'll, I'll read off your names while you're helping to get us moving here on the second panel. So, for the— one of the first speakers on that panel will be Her Excellency Willemien Arends, the Minister for Digital Economy and Sovereignty of the Netherlands. Welcome, Minister. We also have Philippe Pollier, Assistant Secretary-General of the UN Human Rights— UN Office— Youth Office, sorry. Philippe, we, of course, partner with the Youth Office frequently, so I should get the title right. Good to see you, Felipe. And Ulises Guterres, the Special Representative for Emerging Technologies of Mexico. We also have Hwajin Park, Vice President of KT. Nigat Dad, the founder of the Digital Rights Foundation. Nice to see you, Nigat. And Alvita Atli, another member of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, who will bring us some of their findings as well. Thank you. So welcome to this panel and to the moderator, and I turn the floor over to you.

Thank you. Thank you, dear Peggy. Excellencies, dear co-chairs, thanks for all the work done in bringing us Here, I'm really thrilled to be on stage alongside this panel and all the amazing guests we have to share about those topics, which are so important to France. As some of you might know, we hosted the Action Summit just last year, and we are also hosting G7 presidency this year. And we've made all the discussion here a priority for the G7 presidency, in particular when it comes to. The intersection between AI and human rights, the responsibility that we have to draw for ourselves, in particular towards children. Building on the latest conversation, we'll try and dig deeper into the topic, focusing on the solutions that we see collectively could help us move forward. Good practices as AI becomes more powerful with the agentic AI coming up. What are the existing practices that are effective in terms of human rights? Due diligence, how to ensure that such diligence takes into account the impact on populations most at risk of harm and least likely to be included in AI governance discussions. I mentioned children, but we have a lot of other challenges ahead of us. Second, the need of tools and evidence. What technical tools, evidence are needed to understand the impacts before they are actually released? What mechanisms do we need to ensure compliance in practice? And 3, the specific topic of children. What are proven approaches that can enable affected populations, right holders, especially children, to improve their understanding of those tools? Because the potential of AI for kids is humongous, but definitely the harm that can happen to their rights. The decision-making structures that can effectively participate into the AI governance discussions needs to be addressed. How can we ensure that children are meaningfully engaged in the development of AI governance is something that I think we'll discuss together. To answer those questions, we have the honor to have a distinguished panel with me on stage. Her Excellency Wilmin Hertz, Minister for the Digital Economy and Sovereignty of Netherlands. Felipe Pollier, Assistant Secretary-General for UN Youth Office. Ulises Guterres, Special Representative for Emerging Technologies in Mexico, Wanjin Park, Vice President of KT, Nigadat, founder of Digital Rights Foundation, and Alvita Oatley from the AI panel. We are quite a few people on stage, so I'm gonna have to ask you to keep your intervention as sharp as possible. You have 3 minutes each, and I'll have to watch for the time. So I'll ask you first, Your Excellency, if you could give us your perspective on those topics.

Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador, and thank you for the opportunity to speak here to you today. I think we try to make it as concrete as possible, and I think that we have some examples in the Netherlands that I would like to share with you. For example, if we make it more tangible and to have some, some oversight and some control of what's going to happen, we have in the Netherlands the Algorithm Framework that translates legal requirements into practical guidelines also for public organizations. It provides an overview of the most relevant laws and regulations, including both the mandatory and the recommended measures to identify and mitigate bias and discrimination, including a fairness handbook, bias testing instruments, and risk profiling assessments in the framework. Other one of the instruments, the Fundamental Rights and Algorithm Impact Assessment, that helps to identify human rights risk in the use of AI systems and support organizations in taking appropriate mitigation measures. And we have the Algorithm Register that includes all the algorithms used by the Dutch government in light of transparency. And then maybe on the other topic, and how can we, we have some effective approaches when we think also about protecting children? Transparency is key in that light. And we speak a lot about AI literacy, not only for people working in the government, but also for young people and children. Ambassador, you were mentioning it already. And I think that one of the key messages that I would like to convene here today is that when we take young people into account, we make policy for children and young people. We really need to include them in the decision-making process. We do this by speaking to the UNICEF youth panels, for example. And we also want to make sure that we include parents as well without giving them the full responsibility for what their children do. We feel that platforms play a very important role and should take their responsibility. But we really want to include young people as well as their parents and educators in this issues. And one of the things that struck with me is when I spoke to a lot of young people, that they actually mentioned that some of the issues that they are facing today are too big for their educators in school or their parents, but feel too small for the police. So sometimes they're really looking for, for a tangible way to make a contribution as well. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Your Excellency. Thank you. I'm gonna turn to you. Philippe Pollier, Assistant Secretary-General of UN Youth Office, and in particular, I think, picking back on what was just said by the Minister, how do we bring the youth in this conversation?

Great. Thank you, Ambassador, and thank you, Minister, for making my job easier. I think it's great that we are here, delegates, colleagues, private sector, civil society, I see a few young people in the room, which I'm happy that you're also here. I think artificial intelligence, and it's definitely one of those technologies that is advancing at a speed which is extraordinary, you know, and some of the achievements that this technology has been able to do in just a few years have no precedent, no? So maybe my perspective here is that the question should not be only about what AI can do, but it's actually what AI can help us to build as a future. And the importance of not only benchmarking AI in terms of how faster are systems, how larger or more efficient are the model, but actually about how AI is contributing to our human well-being, to human dignity and definitely to grant and protect human rights. Because technology is not— it's about serving people and not the other way around. And AI definitely is helping and should be helping us to learn more, to connect more, to innovate, to solve problems, and expand at the end what its human agency And as Ambassador was saying, when we're talking about youth, this is not an abstract topic. Young people are the most active users of artificial intelligence. They're actually most of the innovators and the creators within some of these huge AI technology firms, but almost always they are not the decision makers, and they will live the longest of the consequences consequences of the decisions that we make together today. So I think maybe my key final message in this panel is really about the inclusion of young people in AI governance, not only within global spaces, but especially at the national level, because young people are those that first experience the impact of technology in their education, in their employment cycles, in their everyday digital life, because young people forge also their identities on the digital space. So young people are actually the ones that understand the most about which are the opportunities that AI can bring, but also they are the ones that will help us the most to identify which are those biases, those discriminations, those exclusions that are happening because of the use of technology. And just to be clear that if we don't create those meaningful spaces for young people to engage, young people will find their way and they will create their own spaces. And it has happened within the climate space, for example. So let's— I think when we are talking about AI governance, let's bring the topic of young and youth participation at the center in terms of how they can contribute. to the governance frameworks, not only globally, but especially within the national realities and the national strategies. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Your Excellency. I'm turning to Felipe— sorry, to Ulises Gutiérrez, Special Representative for Emerging Technologies in Mexico. Maybe adding to the conversation, we talked about global and national. How do you think about merging both?

Thank you very much, Chair. I'm a victim of AI. That's, that's not my photograph. My name is Ulises Canzola, but I would just like to say something quite disruptive, perhaps, given what we were discussing this morning. I'm always aware that we address the issue of AI as if we were in a context that was— nothing was changing. But unfortunately, this is not what happens. Not only do we have to address the challenge of the momentum of technological development, but also public policy is also always lagging behind technological development. But always something that I think is very important. There isn't, uh, alignment with technology. We don't fully understand politically what is happening on the impact of technological development, particularly when we're looking at AI. I'd just like to underscore 3 points. Firstly, given this rapid technological development In the international context, we see some relativism, that is to say, in terms of our values, and this is evident when we discuss issues of governance of such a powerful technology such as AI. I also spoke about this previously. It isn't what a human being can do with technology. The question is rather, what is the technology doing to human beings? And I think this is still something that we have to look at even more closely. Secondly, we are working against an international backdrop where we see a separation between legality and what is legitimate. Here we're discussing sort of preserving the rule of law, uphold democracy, and inclusion doesn't really help us, to be honest. But also, we have to be aware that the dynamic of technological development is working from the ground up because the disadvantage— because the ground is constantly moving, as we know. Things are changing. As Sigmund Freud once said, that we have a very changing landscape before us. Let me close by saying, we— not only do we have to be convinced about the regulation of AI, this is a constantly changing landscape, but rather we should talk about governance, but rather the adoption of a new social contract. not only in the international context but also in national context. But that is what I'd like to say for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Your Excellency. Thank you. Gracias. I'm now giving the floor to Won Jin Park, the Vice President of KT. Mr. Vice President.

Okay, first of all, uh, thank you. It's my honor to be here and participate in a very, um, such a valuable discussion. Um, while AI adoption accelerates, we are seeing vulnerable people exposed to harm at an equally, uh, rapid pace. So in terms of HRDD at KT, uh, we defined AI risk, including human rights, especially for children and the elderly. We evaluate our AI models and agents based on that, and we run an executive deployment safety board before release AI product. We publish the result in a technical report. But the problem comes when we interconnect multi-agents from different companies. Companies have their own definition of AI risk. Some agents may consider human rights more, but some may not. So— is it okay? It's okay. So, I think to ensure that HRDD considers the impact on the most valuable, we need to have common and well-designed standard. So the work like AI risk taxonomy from the BTEC project at OHRP is very important. I think we need to develop this work in a more concrete and practical way so that we can find a common baseline together with many stakeholders. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Vice President. I'm now giving the floor to Nigad Dutt, founder of Digital Rights Foundation.

Thank you, Your Excellency, to the co-chairs, and to OHCHR for convening this cluster. I'll start with an honest assessment and contextualizing first panel and all also, um, speakers who have spoken so far. Um, Your Excellency, human rights due diligence as most AI companies practice it today does not really meet the standard of UN guiding principles on business and human rights. It happens after co-design decisions are made. It happens where regulations compels it, and it happens without the participation of the people actually affected. What we have in most cases is not due diligence. It's, uh, really a documentation. Uh, 3 things are important to acknowledge here. First, human rights due diligence is applied unevenly across markets. Companies conduct meaningful assessments where the law requires them to do, primarily in the EU, I would say. Then they deploy the same system in the majority world A lot of us call it Global South, with really no equivalent process. And I would say this is a structural choice, not a capacity gap. The result is a 2-tier rights regime determined by geography, where the depth of your risk assessment depends not on the risk you face, but on the jurisdiction you happen to live in. Second, the evidence of harm already exists. It is simply not consulted. There are so many digital rights organizations around the world, so many feminist digital rights organizations. The one that I run, Digital Rights Foundation, we help a cyber harassment helpline for the last 10 years, and we documented more than 23,000 cases of technology-facilitated abuse disproportionately against women, girls, and young people. Non-consensual synthetic imagery, automated moderation that fails in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, recommendation system that amplify gendered harassment. And let me tell you, when women withdraw from digital spaces, that is not only an individual harm, it is a collective harm to the public discourse and democratic participation. This is why technology-facilitated gender-based violence cannot be treated as a niche safety issue. Any human rights due diligence framework that does not explicitly address tech-facilitated gender-based violence has written half the population out of its protection. Yet organizations holding this evidence are engaged after deployment for remediation, not before for prevention. That sequencing is core failure. And third, as AI becomes more agentic, a one-time assessment at launch is structurally inadequate. Harms emerge in deployment, in interaction, in iteration. Due diligence has to be continuous across the lifecycle and capable of learning. So really, 3 concrete recommendations. One, gender and child rights impact assessment must be mandatory, conducted before deployment with affected communities participating, not merely documented. Second, Human rights due diligence obligations must apply uniformly across all markets where a system is deployed. A risk assessment that covers Brussels but not Pakistan, Kenya, or Brazil is not due diligence. And 3, assessments must be repeated whenever capabilities materially change, including increases in agentic function. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for those great solutions and for asking us to move in that direction. I'm now moving to Alvita Oatley from the AI panel.

All right, Your Excellencies, panelists, ladies and gentlemen, it's an honor to be here, and I'd like to offer a scientific perspective that I think addresses all 3 guiding questions today. So, as I reflect on yesterday's discussion and the guiding questions, I realize that there are 2 related but distinct problems, scientific challenges that we also brought up in our report. And that is evidence gap and evaluation mismatch. And I'm going to talk about evaluation mismatch first. And what I mean by that is, are we asking the right questions? And similarly, are we asking the same questions? Yes. questions. In engineering, when we— we naturally ask, can we make something faster? Can we make it more accurate? Can we make it more capable? And we've achieved remarkable things because of that. But these are not the same questions that society is asking. These are not the same questions that we're discussing today. A parent doesn't wake up and ask if the model scored 94% on The recent benchmark? No, they ask, can my child use this and can it decide when not to trust it? A physician, a doctor doesn't ask when they're using the model if it's the latest model. They ask if they can rely on it, especially when their patients' lives are at stake. The conversations in this room are not asking whether or not the AI is more capable than it was last year. We're asking whether human rights are protected, whether institutions remain accountable, whether society is better off because of it. And none of these questions are wrong. They're just simply different questions. The challenge is that when we're evaluating success, we evaluate these things differently based on the questions. And so what science has really taught us is if we can improve it, then we can improve what we can measure. And we can measure speed easily, we can measure accuracy easily, we can measure whether or not a system is more capable than it was. And so if society is deciding that success is about protecting human rights, fostering appropriate calibrated trust, preserving accountability, or supporting better human decisions, then the outcomes must match what we're evaluating. And so, I guess one of the questions and one of the things that we should be thinking about in this discussion is, do we know what we should be optimizing for? Do we know the evidence? Do we know what we— what questions we should be asking? And can we coordinate with scientists so that we're asking the same questions? The second thing that I want to talk about is evidence gap. And we mentioned this in the report as well. Do we, do we have the evidence to know whether or not we are achieving what we are optimizing for? So today we have a lot of evidence about how, how well AI models perform, but we have very little evidence about how AI is affecting people's decision-making. We know very little about how AIs, whether or not and how well AIs help teachers teach. We do highlight some of these anecdotal evidence in our report, but evidence is very limited because AI is very new. We know very little about how and how well AI affects clinical decisions, and we know little about how AI helps children learn. We know little about how AI affects public servants and how they make— how it affects their work. And so I guess what I'm trying to say here is that we don't have enough evidence, and that is almost why we're here, and that's okay. But answering these questions require longitudinal studies, it requires partnership with organizations, it requires interdisciplinary collaborations, it requires careful work with protected and underserved communities. This evidence is growing, but it is still evolving. So, what— essentially, what I want to leave you here with is just a different way of thinking about the relationship between society and science. Society has to decide what success looks like, and science has to determine how to measure it. And together, we have to build the evidence that tells us whether we're actually achieving it. So, have we agreed on what success looks like? Yes. And do we have the evidence to know whether we're achieving it? Because good decisions under uncertainty doesn't come from eliminating uncertainty. They come from making our values explicit, our evidence rigorous, and our uncertainty understood. Thanks. Thank you. Thank

you. So, thank you for this meaningful conversation. I think what we agree on collectively is that the speed at which the technology is developing in such a fast-moving environment, fragmented geopolitical world, we actually need to define what success means for us humans, um, depending on the values we want to push forward, because that is only our decision, not the technology's decision. And based on that, we'll be able to evaluate better what are the frameworks that we want to see before the deployment of the models that can guarantee human rights. But to do that, we do need participation from all the communities, in particular children, that they cannot be, you know, taken out of those discussions. And we also need to carefully address the local and global intersection so that everything we define works for everyone, not just a few markets. And I'll finish and wrap up with what you said. I think this is structural choices, not capacity. And if we don't do that, it will probably mean that either some communities will withdraw from digital spaces or they will create their own without control, without values, which is probably worse. We have only a few minutes left, so based on that, I'm going to ask each of you to say the one thing that you think we should do collectively after this gathering here in Geneva. Starting with you, Your Excellency Minister. Thank

you so much, Ambassador. I think that we should share our good experiences and also try to learn from each other in, in the room. The Netherlands aims for the optimal use of AI and to safeguard the public values. And we do this, among others, by using the EU framework of the AI Act. And that also includes— I'm very happy that we could have done that— includes a prohibition of sexual deepfakes that was actually added later to the the process. So, we conduct a risk-based approach based on human rights, transparency, risk managers. I love the addition of the evidence and scientific research. I think that's something that we should include, and we're very open to share our experience, but also to learn from you here in the room. Thank you. Felipe

Poulier. Thank you,

Ambassador. And maybe as a final point, I would like to bring one of the key issues that constantly across regions young people raise when we are discussing about AI and technologies, which is the human dimension and the human impact. Young people definitely value technology. They use it, they innovate with it, they drive change in their communities through it, but what young people and citizens in general value most is belonging. is trust, is meaningful human relationships. So I would say that one of those critical areas where we need to emphasize, where we bring the scientific capacity, the value, but also the responsibility of those driving the innovations behind, the private sector, is what is the impact of these technologies in the well-being and the mental health of our communities. For that, again, I will emphasize that it's not about writing or defining these solutions without the communities, especially it's how we work not only for youth but with youth. That's my message. Thank you. Thank you

so much. Ulises Contreras Gutiérrez. Thank you

very much, Your Excellency. Just a few comments coming back to your question. I think we have to really underscore the question of values during this morning's discussion. We said that AI is not only a question of technology but is absolutely a question of values, of which I completely agree with as well. Secondly, I also think it is paramount that in the multilateral system we continue to bolster education Raising awareness, particularly of vulnerable groups, children, persons with disabilities, and the impact this technology has on human beings. Currently, I don't feel that we have a standard upon which we can educate people. Thirdly, also to underscore Technology as a tool, as an enabling tool for rights, but also technology as a right itself. I acknowledge that there is a right involved with this, and I think this is what we really need to address when we address this topic. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Mr. Park. Thank you,

Ambassador. I want to mention about children. You know, today's children are AI native, so they use AI naturally in search, recommendation, and learning in daily lives. So I think it's important for them to accept it with critical thinking. That's why I believe the education for young people is really needed. When school programs for education and discussion are connected with NGOs and relative committees, children can voice how AI affects them in a balanced way. So those voices can flow into governance discussions. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Mrs. Nikadat. Yeah, Ambassador,

I believe 2 panels this morning, including ours, have given us a clear architecture: due diligence before deployment, independent oversight, and participation by those most affected. I just want to mention very concretely one, one issue, which is the evidence problem. It's a— it's the evidence problem is a resourcing problem. Civil society organizations or digital rights organizations in the majority world are the earlier sensors of AI-related harm. We have documented synthetic intimate imagery targeting women years before it entered global policy conversations. But this documentation is unfunded, precarious, and treated as anecdote rather than evidence. If this dialogue wants an early warning system for AI harms, I would like to tell the folks who are here that it already exists. It needs to be resourced and connected to decision-making, including the scientific panel, because scientific consensus takes time that affected communities— and scientific consensus takes time that affected communities really do not have. Thank you. Thank you so much.

A final word from Alvita Oatley. Thank you. So immediately,

2 things come to mind. Oftentimes when we talk about AI, we talk about it like it's an adversarial relationship. And I feel like that could be like a flawed perspective. And we need to realize that there's a lot of cooperation that could happen between the scientific world and society to make sure that we shape AI the way we want to shape it. But when we also talk about children, one of the things that also comes to mind is that there is also a methodological challenge related to studying children. So children is considered a part of protective— a protective category of the population. So children, pregnant women, people in prison, there are limitations on what we can study and how we can study it. And I think that's one of the reasons why we see lack of evidence on the impact of AI on children. So that is a perspective that we don't really talk about a lot, but it also means that a lot of times we are developing things without having children involved. So I guess what I'm saying is that, yes, we have ethical safeguards, but— and we don't need weaker ones, but that is something that we should also bring into the consideration that we're talking about protected categories, and protected categories in regards to also research, and we need to think about how do we navigate this space when we're talking about it. Thank you. Thank you so much to each and

one of you. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a good rest of the day. Thank you, Ambassador. Thank

you, panel. I think we're getting a real taste of some of the issues here, but what I really appreciated here is that we've also got some very concrete ideas about what needs to come out of the dialogue. So I hope you're all taking that back. In particular, for those of you that want to look more deeply at the children's rights area— oh, I'm sorry, I'm supposed to say, please, can we have the co-chairs back on stage for the next segment of the audience interventions? So welcoming co-chairs Banyo and— Thank you. And Lopez back on stage. Lopez Segueda. So, I wanted to mention that we do have with ITU a discussion on Thursday at 3:30 in which we'll be presenting a survey that we did called Me and AI of 1,000 children in 49 countries, sort of asking them what they think about this debate. That's one of the things we are told we needed more of. And one of the things they were saying to us is that they want AI to be shaped with us, not just for us. And they want it to respect their rights. And they don't just want to be shielded from it. So that's another place where we can continue the conversation. But with that, I'll turn it back over to the co-chairs for the next session of the audience interventions. Thank you. Okay. After this brilliant panel,

now we move to the Ambassador to the United Nations, Angel Banjov from Bulgaria. No? Okay, so we move to the next government, this one? No. This one. Okay, so the Secretary of Digital Policy, Social Communication Secretariat, Presidency of the Republic of Brazil, João Brandt, from Brazil. Okay, merci, obrigado. Hello, good morning

everyone. Thank you very much, Chair. Some quick notes on behalf of the Brazilian government. Firstly, we've been prioritizing children and adolescents protection with the approval of the statute, the Digital Statute for Protection of Children and Adolescents Online, where platforms must adopt child protection measures from the design phase. The architecture of the platforms must limit features that can lead to excessive usage, like infinite scrolling. And companies are now required to implement accurate age verification systems, parental supervision tools, transparency obligations, and dedicated reporting channels for violating involving minors. Target advertising based on children's personal data is also prohibited. Those obligations closely relate to the responsible management of AI, since resources, features, and systems used by platforms employ artificial intelligence in their design, and content mode available in platforms by third parties might also employ AI, such as deepfakes. In addition to the Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents, Brazil released last month a decree to address violence against girls and women. In online spaces, establishing proactive responsibilities for platforms and AI companies, including the prohibition of creating synthetic intimate images based on real third parties. These lead to my second point, my second note, which is related to liability. We think Brazil considers that private companies should have more liability over third-party content. And this was a decision of our Supreme Court and now implemented and supervised by the executive branch with shared liability based on the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. And I would highlight 2 issues. Firstly, the due diligence process that has to prevent and mitigate risks related to serious offenses and rights violations, and the idea that they are co-responsible— they have shared responsibility for paid-for content. So in this case, they have to remediate harms they contribute to. Third quick note, we should take a broad perception of human rights when discussing AI, and I would highlight information integrity as one of the main issues we should be looking for, and taking information integrity as part of Article 19 of the Covenant and in a broad perception of access to information in its collective or social dimension. So the idea that we have— we need an information ecosystem that can provide consistent, accurate, and reliable information, and we should be looking for that. And finally, a quick note on the idea that the civil and political rights are also underpinned by economic arrangements, and the way AI is now supporting and affecting the economic arrangement and sustainability of journalism is something that should be on our concern. Thank you very much. Thank you, and thank you for introducing

this point of view on journalism. It's really important, misinformation also. And now we move to Ms. Anna Osterling, UN representative from the Global Forum for Media Development. Thank you. Thank you, Thank you. My name is Anna

Åsling, and I represent the Global Forum for Media Development, a network supporting over 200 media organizations worldwide. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, the million-dollar question today is, who controls our reality? In our everyday life, do we choose to make decisions based on fabricated or synthetic content, boosting profits and serving the political interests of a handful of mighty corporations based in a few countries? Or do we seek out independent reporting and evidence from public interest journalism? I've been engaging with the Global Dialogue since it was a mere idea on paper. I've heard much talk about information integrity and saving our democracies. Journalism, the institution designed to hold power to account with facts, seems to be largely missing in this dialogue. As my colleague Courtney Raj from the Center for Media and Digital Governance at Open Markets has said, in an information ecosystem, journalism is a keystone species. It stabilizes trust, anchors verification, structures accountability, and enables other institutions to function. Remove it and the information ecosystem doesn't adapt it collapses. This is about the concentration of power that has allowed big tech to lay claim to all of humanity's information and creativity, what we typically call content. AI systems are trained on journalistic content which is scraped without consent, without compensation, without credit. This is about AI infrastructure which is increasingly concentrated with a few hyperscalers and digital platforms, reinforcing existing inequalities and undermining journalism's business models and public trust. The solution: journalism is critical infrastructure. This is not just about reading your Sunday paper. Every democracy, every market, every security architecture relies on trustworthy information. This requires a multi-layered governance approach. We need one public digital infrastructure, including cloud services, that are accessible, affordable, non-discriminatory, and human rights compliant by design, driven by communities including media in the public interest. GFMD is providing space for the development of the journalistic stack. 2, industrial policies that ensure public interest AI, not just for the developers but most importantly for those using AI in the public interest, including media. And finally, AI governance must require all human rights are embedded across a full life cycle of all AI technologies. And AI governance must also support economic sustainability of independent journalism. Thank you. Excellent. Um, thank you so much, Anna, from Global

Forum for Media Development. On highlighting on who's missing in this room, I'd like to mention Freedom Mwangi is an AI worker who was supposed to be here but was unable to get a visa. And it's useful to say who's missing and how to involve them the next time. Thank you also for highlighting on DPI, on public DPI. We need digital public infrastructure so that we do not have dependencies on big tech. And at this point, I would like to invite Republic of Korea, His Excellency Ji-hoon Cha, Permanent Representative. Forgive me if I butchered your name. Excellent. A round of applause. He has a long walk to do. Thank you, Madam Co-Chair. Distinguished Excellencies

and distinguished participants, the Republic of Korea thanks the co-chairs for convening this conversation on AI and human rights. No one can truly benefit from AI while living in fear of harms such as deepfakes, disinformation, discrimination, and surveillance. And these dangers all hardest on the most vulnerable, those least able to push back, including children. Without our proper and timely attention, this problem will only deepen as AI advances. The Republic of Korea enacted the AI Basic Act this year, a comprehensive legal framework on AI. Under this AI Basic Act, the operators of high-impact AI systems have an obligation to assess the potential impact of AI systems on fundamental human rights. At the same time, given the complexity and novelty of this issue, these efforts would be well complemented by a balanced mix of regulation and voluntary measures, and by including various stakeholders in the discussion. Protection of human rights in AI must also be universal. In this vein, the Republic of Korea has endeavored to lead the adoption of Human Rights Council Resolution 59/11 on New and Emerging Digital Technologies and Human Rights. This resolution highlights the importance of promoting everyone's rights to enjoy the benefit of new and emerging digital technology. The Republic of Korea considers access to AI not as a privilege to be earned, but as a basic right to be enjoyed. As the scientific panel reports suggest, the distance between our respective endeavors is noted. As countries deepen their readiness for AI, so does their approach to how to govern it. And globally, these efforts remain fragmented, That is why Republic of Korea declared our vision for establishing the Global AI Hub together with 9 participating AI and related organizations to contribute to strengthening of global AI capacity. In conclusion, we must keep sight of what all of this is for. The promise that humanity sees in AI is not in how powerful technology advances. It is in how— Excellent. Thank you so much, Your Excellency. At this point,

it is my honor to have a voice from Africa, Research ICT Africa, Ms. Priya Chetty, the Executive Director of of RIA. Praise in the room. Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, Research ICT Africa,

a digital policy think tank working across the African continent and in solidarity with global majority partners, welcomes the opportunity to make this submission. We engage today in a spirit that is both constructive and urgent, because the stakes for the majority world could not be higher. We submit this input grounded in the Research ICT Africa Just AI Framework, which reframes global AI governance by centering justice as the core quality that AI systems must embody in the public interest. A growing global community of Just AI scholars and practitioners hold that prevailing governance models anchored in notions of ethical, or responsible AI remain structurally inadequate. As endorsed in various conversations this week, such frameworks are largely self-regulatory, driven by dominant actors, and calibrated to high-income countries, disregard sovereignty or agency, and reinforce vastly different socioeconomic and institutional realities. Such frameworks deepen existing inequalities, extracting value from individuals, communities, and nations without reciprocal benefit, input, or control. For children, these effects are both current and with long-term implications for the future realities. JustAI offers the global dialogue a normative framework to correct this trajectory. The focus: active intervention and specific allocation of resources to guide societal-level shifts, materially bringing the development and prosperity of local populations Uh, interview, and the planetary and sustainability impacts of AI interview. Building on the framework and the commitment in paragraph 55 of the Global Digital Compact to inclusive multi-stakeholder participation, and drawing on the foundational language of Resolution 71, we propose the following priorities: establish a common normative foundation through just AI. That moves beyond aspirational ethics to economic policy and legislative normative frameworks rooted in international human rights law and actively informing economic and social justice for the global majority. Establish a globally recognized understanding that the governance of AI is inseparable from the governance of data. The separation of data governance and AI governance in international forums obscures the foundational data justice that must inform all AI systems. Data justice is crucially informed by a right of access to data in substantive and procedural forms. For equitable AI that accords with first and second generation rights, we must democratize AI resources and capabilities so that all nations, particularly those in the global majority, and specifically small and medium enterprises shift from being passive consumers of AI systems to becoming co-creators of AI that reflect their developmental priorities, democratic values. Thank you very much. Now we move to Mark Kasser. He's a permanent observer

of IDLO to the UN in Geneva. Mark? Yeah, okay. Thank you, Chair. As the only global intergovernmental organization exclusively

devoted to promoting the rule of law, the International Development Law Organization— excuse me— has extensive experience supporting countries to harness digital innovation to expand access to justice, strengthen governance, and improve public service delivery. Digital technologies can make justice services more accessible, streamline court processes, and bring institutions closer to the people they serve. Yet rapid adoption of AI and digital systems is often outpacing the legal, regulatory, and institutional frameworks needed to ensure that these very technologies protect and promote people's rights. Without adequate safeguards, the use of AI systems in decision-making may reinforce existing biases, produce discriminatory outcomes, and fail to account for essential contextual nuances. These are risks that can make justice unattainable. The challenge is therefore not technological. It is one of governance and, as we heard this morning, values. In this regard, IDLO offers 3 recommendations. First, human rights and the rule of law must underpin the development and deployment of AI digital techno— excuse me, digital technologies, notably in the justice sector. AI systems must be designed in a way that expands access, serves people's needs, and prevents new forms of exclusion and inequality. Second, fit-for-purpose legal and regulatory frameworks must accompany innovation. Effective regulation, transparency, accountability, and human oversight are not obstacles to innovation. They're the foundations of trustworthy and sustainable innovation. As countries modernize their justice systems and public institutions, clear rules and responsibilities are essential to ensure that AI strengthens rather than undermines public confidence. Third, we must invest in institutional capacity. This includes strengthening public digital infrastructure for justice delivery, enhancing AI literacy among legal and justice professionals, and supporting judicial services in a way that manages the risks of AI. These efforts must aim to enhance efficiency and access to justice, particularly for those who are most vulnerable or marginalized. We collectively have a responsibility to ensure that human rights science, accountability, transparency, and meaningful human oversight remain at the heart of AI governance. IDEO looks forward to supporting governments and other stakeholders to anchor these important values in AI governance. Thank you. Thank you very much. And now we move to Mr. Ramanjit Singh Chima, Global Program Director

from the Association for Progressive Communications. Hello, distinguished guests. I'm speaking on behalf of Mr. Rahman, the Program Manager for the Association for Progressive Communication. My name is Rebecca Rektimbo, and I'm the Connectivity Technical Projects Coordinator for LOCNET, a collaboration initiative of the Association for Progressive Communication and Rhizomatica. APC is a membership organization working mostly within the Global South. When we talk

about inclusive AI, we often focus on biases, governance, datasets, and representation. These conversations are essential, but I would like us to begin with a different question: who has the connectivity to participate in AI in the first place? Before communities can contribute data, build local AI solutions, influence policy, or benefit innovation, they need meaningful, affordable, trusted, and locally relevant connectivity. Community-centered connectivity is more than providing internet access. It is about communities owning, managing, and governing the infrastructure that connects them. It creates a space for local knowledge, local languages, and community priorities to thrive, while ensuring that people have real agency over their digital lives. This matters because connectivity is not just a technical issue. It is a question of equity, power, and justice. As the Gender in Digital Coalition Feminist Guiding Principles of Global AI Governance remind us, meaningful AI governance requires community participation, data sovereignty, diverse expertise, and investment in community-led digital infrastructure. Not simply mere powerful AI systems. It calls for recognizing lived experiences and community knowledge as expertise and ensuring those most affected have influence over AI governance. Community-centered connectivity makes these principles possible. It shifts power closer to communities and enables women, Indigenous people, rural communities, and speakers of underrepresented languages to become creators, innovators, researchers, and decision-makers, not simply consumers of technology. As government researchers and international organizations and the private sector invest billions in AI, we must invest intentionally in community infrastructures that make equitable AI possible. I would like to leave you with one thought: communities are not the last mile of connectivity, or they are not the last mile of AI. They are actually the first mile. So let's think of communities when we think and restructure governance of AI. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for highlighting communities. Zimbabwe's national

AI strategy is focused on Ubuntu. It's not solitary. We are together. I am because you are. At this point, I'd like to invite Tech Global Institute, Ms. Shumaila Husseini Shahani, policy and advocacy lead. You have the floor. Hi, and thank you for the opportunity to speak here. I speak on behalf of Tech Global Institute.

We are a policy lab with a mission to reduce equity and accountability gaps between technology platforms, governments, and the communities in the global majority. The principles that we have so extensively spoken about today here only protect human rights if they run the full length of AI value chain, from the data workers who label training data to the person denied welfare or wrongly flagged by a system they cannot contest. Today, the harms that concentrate— the harms concentrate where the power to challenge them is the weakest. We therefore propose 5 concrete commitments. First, safety claims must be accompanied by the conditions under which systems were tested, known limitations and failure rates disaggregated by language, gender, disability, region, skin tone, and more. Disclosure of training data provenance must be standard. We cannot hold a system accountable if we cannot see where it fails. Second, a decade of voluntary commitments has shown that we have not— it has not delivered. We need public accountability frameworks and corporate liability that follow the multi-actor chains through which AI is built and deployed, with accessible remedy for affected people wherever they live. Third, global majority countries largely import models trained elsewhere and deploy them in high-stakes settings without the means to evaluate them first. We call for publicly financed, regionally hosted capacity to evaluate AI systems before they are deployed, and often benchmarks— open benchmarks built with and for under-resourced languages, so oversight is not outsourced to the same few actors it is meant to oversee. Fourth, transparency and oversight must extend to algorithmic management. Data and platform workers, a workforce in which women carry disproportionate harms, need existing labor protections extended to them, including across borders. Fifth, indigenous and traditional knowledge is being absorbed into training data without consent, recognition, or return. Community-led data stewardship must therefore be recognized as part of human oversight. Lastly, compatibility between our approaches globally do not require uniformity. We can have a common floor of rights safeguards, which includes disclosure, contestability, and remedy for every person affected, but with genuine pluralism above that floor. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I think resonated— your sentiments resonated and made

me think about the diaspora, especially asylum seekers who left their countries for human rights violations, and how is AI pacifying those issues. So thank you. At this point, I'd like to invite Ms. Esther Egobamien-Mshelia from the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Excellent. A round of applause as she comes on stage. Thank you. A round of applause. It's been established that hungry people are angry people, so let's keep it up. Excellencies and distinguished colleagues, In the context of this global dialogue, one message

is clear: there can be no truly human rights-based AI governance without the full implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, CEDAW. AI, as we hear, is already— and know is already influencing decisions about every sector and every sphere of life, including public administration. And access to information. Technologies used are not neutral. When developed using biased and non-representative data or deployed without adequate safeguards, they often reproduce and amplify the structural inequalities that women and girls continue to face. CEDAW provides an essential framework for addressing these risks. It requires states not only to prohibit discrimination but to achieve substantive equality by tackling structural and regulatory barriers, stereotypes, and unequal power relations. It also recognizes that discrimination is often compounded by factors such as race, disability, age, migration status, and poverty, and that tailored and proactive action is necessary to curb these intersectional discriminations. Today's discussion themes are at the heart of the CEDAW Convention. Transparency is necessary to identify discriminatory impacts, address gender wash, and provide the right ecosystem for effective redress. Accountability ensures that states and private actors can be held responsible when AI undermines women's rights and better prevent automated decision-making from entrenching or reinventing discrimination. CEDAW tools, including its General Recommendation No. 40, also remind us that women must participate fully and equally in the design, governance, and oversight of AI systems. AI cannot be truly inclusive if half the world's population, their perspectives and data about them, is underrepresented or outrightly excluded. We must also ensure that progress is measured. Gender-responsive indicators, monitoring, and surveillance are critical to demonstrating whether women are participating and benefiting equally, and are also constructively benefiting from digital transformation, are protected from harms such as algorithmic discrimination, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and manipulative consumer exploitation. Measuring these realities is an important part of ensuring accountability for the commitments and obligations states have already undertaken under CEDAW. CEDAW and its Optional Protocol already provides a clear— Sorry, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. Now we have an important voice. is Elizabeth Tan from the UN High Commission

for Refugees. She's the Director-General. Thank you, Chair. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, UNHCR speaks from its international protection

and statelessness mandate and from the experience of refugees asylum seekers, internally displaced, and stateless people. International human rights law already gives us a framework to assess AI-related harms. The challenge is how to put it into practice. Accountability remains uneven, and regulation has not kept pace. For forcibly displaced and stateless people, barriers are especially high: documentation, language, digital access, insecure status, and fear of approaching authorities. AI governance must therefore be practical, inclusive, and accessible to those most affected. This is particularly important in high-stakes areas such as asylum and border management. If AI-supported tools assess risk, verify identity, translate interviews, or support case triage, an error can affect access to territory, documentation, or access to asylum procedures. Yet the person concerned may not know how the decision was reached or how to challenge it. Human oversight must be real, informed, and able to change outcomes. We're also seeing how AI-generated disinformation and online hate can quickly become protection risks. In Libya, violent hate speech and dangerous misinformation, including AI-generated content, incited hostility and abuse of refugees and affected the safety of UNHCR and humanitarian workers supporting displaced people and Libyan host communities. The Rohingya, they too continue to face dehumanizing narratives online, even in exile. This kind of hate can fuel abuse, exclusion, violence, and fear. And can deepen divisions between displaced and host communities. These examples point to the need for practical safeguards that work in real humanitarian contexts. For UNHCR, 3 safeguards are essential. First, human rights due diligence across the AI lifecycle, from design to deployment and monitoring. Second, bias testing, clear explanations of how decisions are reached, and accessible ways to complain or seek correction. Sorry, you're out of time. And now we have— we move to Mr. Sopio Kilatse. from the Committees on the Rights of the

Child. So, Miss— yeah, doesn't say anything, didn't know. Thank you, Chair. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, dear colleagues, let me begin today with children.

Children benefit from AI without doubt, but they are really very much exposed to all sorts of violations of children's rights, maybe the most affected from all vulnerable groups. Numbers of child sexual abuse, mental health issues, all sorts of violence, privacy violations, and many, many other violations of their rights are— the numbers are skyrocketing. And children are not simply future citizens. First of all, they are rights holders of today. And their rights do not disappear when they enter the digital world. That's why the United Nations entities came together to develop the Joint Statement on AI and the Rights of the Child, launched in 2026, recently co-led by ITU, the CRC, and UNICEF, and which unified 13 UN agencies as co-signatories and over 60 different organizations across the globe. And most importantly, the children from all 5 regions of the United Nations themselves helped to shape it. They told us what gives them hope, what worries them, and what they expect from us. We listened and we reflected. I also would like to warmly welcome the joint statement ahead of the Global Dialogue, which was recently issued, supported by over 120 experts. and organizations across the globe. Due to the fact that the children are not developed fully yet, depending on their age, maturity, and their evolving capacities, they need special care, and we are those who are responsible for them. The question is whether there is a will, a will from states the companies, and international organizations to design, to develop, and to govern AI that respects children's rights. History will not judge us by how intelligent our AI or machines are, but it will judge us by something far more important, namely if we use this extraordinary moment to protect those who had the smallest voice but the greatest stake in the future. I'm sure if there is the will, then we can shape AI in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The future of artificial intelligence is a choice, and the future of childhood is our responsibility. Thank you, thank you so much, Sophia, for speaking on behalf of the children. And now to our final speaker, we do have from the Institute for Global Negotiation, we do have Jérôme Bellion-Jourdan,

I believe, who is a senior fellow and joining us today. The floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much, co-chairs, and to the Joint Secretariat for this opportunity. I'm speaking today on behalf

of the Institute for Global Negotiation. I'm also one of the vice chairs of the AI for Good Impact Initiative Steering Committee. I would like to offer some reflections on the work that we're doing at Global Negotiation Support, an initiative to support chairs, co-chairs of negotiation processes in the UN, and you may have seen a piece that we published in PassBlue for recommendations to the next Secretary-General. If I may, this is not a statement. I was a diplomat myself, you know, used to delivering statements, but just a few reflections from what we heard since yesterday from UNSG Guterres and his call for more governance. And I think everybody in the room would say, yes, we need more governance, but the question is how to get there. And that's where, if we look at negotiation— I mean, artificial intelligence, by the way, is an amazing tool in support of multilateral negotiations, so let's not forget that. But if we want to use it properly, we need also to see how negotiation can be used and leveraged in support of the steps towards global governance of AI. We've heard repeatedly since yesterday and in many other fora that geopolitics, competing interests, are an impediment to work towards global governance of AI, and I would argue that if we leverage the power of negotiation, it would help us with all the negotiation tools and techniques to navigate the power politics, to navigate the power asymmetry, and this is what multilateral negotiation is about. And that would allow us to get to formats that allow us to forge common ground. But this has to be engineered, and that's where, you know, for the work that we're doing we see the need to have— to invest in process design, process management, innovative formats of negotiations. It will not be enough to lock in 193 states in a room and the stakeholders not far from a room or at the table and get to agreement. What is needed is to shift from positional bargaining, red lines, to integrative negotiation, from win-lose that we see too often on the global stage, to win-win formats of negotiations where we can reconcile the many aspects related to AI. We see AI for innovation and opportunities, but how do we reconcile this with the impact on environment, with the risks when it comes to human rights and other safety risks? So that's where negotiation can be leveraged, and we stand ready to support all states and stakeholders moving forward. Thank you very much. Excellent. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I think my final comments will be, one is, who finances human rights? We are at

a juncture where we need the money to ensure that human rights ideally works in the age of AI. And then also, number 2, is to point you again to the Africa AI Governance Index by the Lawyers Hub, which I represent, to see what AI workers across the African continent are talking about and are impacted by, you know, training these models, the mental health toll on them, and how do we continue to speak for them even when they're not in the room. And therefore, we must look at algorithmic openness around visa processes. It is time that we talked about transparency for the algorithms that already determine whether people travel or not. Because we are seeing a lot of human rights violations. And so I want to ask the Global North to reconsider the kind of algorithms that we outsource to determine whether people travel here or not. There's a great report by an organization based in Geneva— I forget their name— but they said this, that 51% of AI governance conversations this year happened in Geneva. And that means that the rest of the world were ideally locked out. out because they could not access visas to this place. So I want to urge us to reconsider what that means. Thank you very much. Okay, so I would also like to thank the United Nations and our coaches and all the participants for this debate.

I think we all in the room are fully aware of the importance of this debate. Last General Assembly of the United Nations, last September, we decided to create this debate and to create also a scientific panel. We've seen the first things of this scientific panel and this is like the first world meeting discussing on something that it is not the last technology. It is not a question only of engineers. It is a question also of philosophers because, as you all know in this hall, we are discussing about democracy. We are discussing about human rights, our privacy, our energy, our peace in the world, about everything. So as we know that this changes everything, I know that— I think that we all know that But it is not about doing something or not. It is that we are late. We are late. So I hope after this important meeting in Geneva, we will keep on moving to build a humanistic AI, because it is about defending ourselves, about getting the best cases and using AI for Thank you very much. Thank you very much, co-chairs, for those interventions and for moderating that segment of the audience interventions.

We've heard a lot of perspectives and some real calls for urgency in terms of how we address the issues that have been brought brought up today. The co-chairs will, of course, be bringing all this together and reporting on the outcomes of this dialogue in the dialogue of dialogues that happens later in the week. We don't— can never have too many dialogues. But we did want to close just briefly, if we can, with the slides for the last 3 questions that we asked all of you, because I think they actually do summarize some of the key issues that were brought up. We'd asked people people, you know, what you're looking for, what's going to be most impactful to prevent harms. And these are exactly some of the things that came through the conversations. The need for child rights and gender impact assessments, the importance of human rights due diligence as well, and then of course this idea that we can't just let this function on its own. We need independent audits, certifications, and oversight built in. And then turning to the next question, we'd asked people what were their priorities for um, AI governance in the next 2 years. And as you'll see, and as we heard from a number of the panelists and interventions, people are looking for clear legal obligations and red lines. The real question is, how do we get there, right? And what can this governance dialogue do to, to help us make those red lines clear? But I think it takes leadership by some of those present who are willing to put down their red lines and, and say that we either as a country alone or a group of countries or a group of NGOs or whoever, saying what those red lines are for them and how we can make sure they're being more enforced. Secondly, again, the independent audits and testing coming through. We need that oversight. Stronger access to remedy, appeal, and justice. This is one of the things we keep hearing in our office, this issue of who is accountable and how do we hold those accountable to be able to to make sure that the systems that are in place are delivering. We've heard, of course, very concrete examples of where they aren't delivering for people today. And finally, of course, the need for a stronger human oversight of AI as it becomes more agentic. And this is, of course, incredibly important, both in terms of agentic AI, as, as we've heard talked about, but also in an area that we've been working around, autonomous weapons systems. systems. And the final slide was about what can be done to make AI governance more inclusive. And I think we heard a very compelling statement from Linda Banyo, our co-chair, on one of the things that we— these dialogues themselves need to have everybody at the table. And that includes capacity building and technical governance issues. People think that that's a particular need as well. Ensuring affected communities are represented. Yeah. And of course, looking and using the democratic decision-making processes that are here. I think this, just to conclude, pulls us back to where the High Commissioner started us off. He talked a bit about what it means, what power means in this framing, and the need for us to really think about how we put checks on power and are they working for us today? Are they doing what we need them to do? And for me, one of the key things is that point of how do we hear the voices of all those that are affected? We heard real calls for children's voices to be part of the conversation as well. So, if we can get that participation and representation piece right, then there will be the push for people to ensure that AI delivers for them and that their governments put in place those checks both on their own uses of AI but also, of course, on those that have the corporate power. And that, of course, applies across contexts, and one of the other powerful things we heard today as well is about the concentration of this power in a particular group of countries and companies, and how do we actually, as a global community, address that need? And that does mean giving greater voice and greater attention to the concerns and issues that we've heard from the global majority today. So, with that, I'd like to thank all of you for all of your participation today. Of course, most importantly, to our co-chairs and our panelists and moderators who have really made this such a compelling and interesting discussion. And I hope you'll all take some, at least one or two key points from this room that you'll bring forward in your ongoing discussions both here and at AI for Good and the WISIS Forum. And thank you again all for participating. If everyone could indulge me in making their way from the room as quickly as possible. I know it's nice to stay and chat, but we have to turn over this room for our, for our next event. Thank you so much. Thank you.