Dear Co-Chairs,
H.E. Ms Egriselda López, Permanent Representative of El Salvador to the United Nations, Co-Chair of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance
H.E. Mr Rein Tammsaar, Permanent Representative of Estonia to the United Nations, Co-Chair of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance
We, the undersigned members of the Global Coalition for Tech Justice (GCTJ) — a network of organizations and experts across 55 countries, spanning advocacy groups, research institutions, academic bodies, and independent media — welcome the establishment of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance and submit this statement as a contribution to its first session, to be held in Geneva on 6–7 July 2026.
Established by UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/79/325 and rooted in the commitments of the Global Digital Compact (A/RES/79/1), the Dialogue represents a significant achievement: for the first time, all 193 UN Member States have a formal seat in a dedicated global UN process on the governance of artificial intelligence. The GCTJ recognises this as a process worth contributing to, and it is precisely that commitment that motivates this statement.
The GCTJ brings knowledge, evidence, and governance experience from diverse regions and communities with much at stake in how this Dialogue unfolds. Genuine representation of these diverse regions and communities solidifies and strengthens these multilateral processes.
The Dialogue’s design as a multistakeholder process is one of its defining strengths. Inclusive governance is essential to building legitimate and effective AI governance frameworks and adequate digital public infrastructure that will take into account the specific challenges, issues, and experiences of different communities and regions. Civil society organizations, community-centered tech collectives, research institutions, indigenous groups and historically marginalized groups across the Global Majority bring to this process forms of expertise and accountability that states and intergovernmental bodies alone cannot supply. Giving them decision-making power in this process is the way to ensure meaningful participation and representation and to guarantee solid and inclusive governance frameworks.
We write to put specific, actionable recommendations before Member States and the Co-Chairs: on participation and process, on human rights as a governance foundation, and on the environmental stakes the agenda must not leave behind. How this Dialogue is designed will determine what it can produce.
1. Human Rights as Foundation: From Principles to Practice
The Global Dialogue has an opportunity to establish a clear and durable normative anchor. We urge that international human rights law be the primary framework for evaluating and measuring all AI governance proposals.
Principles of transparency, equity, accountability, non-discrimination, privacy, and the right to remedy are the shared language between AI governance and the broader international human rights system. The framework should also include governance safeguards related to the quality of data, data extraction, information integrity, community governance of data, rectification and deletion of data, and the use of datasets derived from historically marginalized communities. These principles and safeguards, alongside critical resolutions and recommendations such as: the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution on safe and trustworthy AI, the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, adopted by 193 Member States in 2021, and the High-level Advisory Body report, Governing AI for Humanity (2024), ground this framework in human rights, peace, diversity and sustainability, ensuring a grounding and legal force. The Dialogue can make significant ground by building directly on these instruments, affirming that these principles apply to AI systems and the actors that develop and deploy them. It can also encourage member states and relevant bodies to develop assessment frameworks and accountability mechanisms that transform this affirmation into operational practice.
The Dialogue should close the gap between invoking these principles and enforcing them. This means developing concrete guidance on how human rights apply to AI systems across different deployment contexts; establishing clear lines of accountability for developers, deployers, and states; and creating accessible remedy mechanisms for those harmed. Principles gain their weight through implementation, and implementation requires institutional will and enforceable standards.
Civil society across our regions has developed rights-based AI assessment tools, documenting harms, and building evidence from the ground up. This accumulated body of work represents a governance contribution that deepens and enriches institutional deliberation. The Dialogue would be strengthened by creating structured pathways for this evidence to inform its discussions and for affected communities to move from being described in reports to shaping the recommendations that emerge from them.
We call on the private sector, as the fastest deployers of AI, under the Business and Human Rights Guiding Principles (UNGP), to contribute to this body of evidence to further inform policy discussions and development, preemptively reducing potential harms to communities and the environment.
We also encourage the Dialogue to embed feminist and intersectional perspectives from the outset. Those whose lives are most directly shaped by AI systems— including women, racialized communities, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities— bring a precision to governance questions that broader frameworks often miss. Their experiences, at the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities, are the most demanding standard against which rigorous, inclusive, and enforceable governance can be measured.
An effective governance architecture should further recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities, as well as the disproportionate impacts of data and AI systems on racialised and historically marginalised communities— including documented cases of racial and class bias in public security algorithms creating cycles of automated criminalisation. This includes respecting the right to free, prior and informed consent in the collection and use of data related to Indigenous communities, knowledge systems, languages, and territories, as well as supporting governance approaches that protect collective rights, cultural integrity, and community agency over how data and AI systems are developed and deployed.
The Dialogue should also recognize labour rights as a core dimension of AI governance. Across the Global Majority, AI systems rely on extensive forms of often invisible labour, including data annotation, content moderation, and platform-based work performed under precarious and often abusive conditions and with limited accountability. AI governance frameworks should address the labour conditions embedded across the AI supply chain and the consequences deriving from its use. This includes transparency and accountability in algorithmic management systems, protections for workers subject to automated decision-making, and access to remedy where AI systems affect wages, working conditions, or economic opportunity.
2. Expanding the Agenda: Environmental Sustainability as a Governance Priority
We encourage the Dialogue to recognize environmental and climate sustainability as a cross-cutting dimension of AI governance — one of particular urgency for many of our members’ regions, and one that current frameworks address with insufficient consistency.
AI infrastructure is physical: a network of data centres, cables, and supply chains with concrete resource demands energy, water, land, and minerals. Several regions are already suffering due to the rapid expansion of this infrastructure amid existing climate stress and growing regulatory pressure. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement provide the normative compass here: AI governance that accelerates energy consumption, water stress, or carbon emissions in vulnerable regions runs counter to the commitments member states have already made.
We suggest that the Dialogue establish active coordination with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) processes, the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), to ensure that AI and sustainable governance develop coherently. Binding disclosure requirements for the environmental footprint of AI systems would be a meaningful and achievable step, one that the Dialogue is well-positioned to advance as a concrete early deliverable that signals the seriousness of this commitment. Likewise, coordination with the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI should extend to its environmental assessments, ensuring that the annual reports it presents to the Dialogue reflect the full ecological dimension of AI’s impacts.
The Dialogue should also promote governance mechanisms that actively create space for smaller-scale, distributed, and locally-governed AI systems— cooperative, open-source, and community-driven models that consume fewer resources and distribute both benefits and accountability more equitably. The current AI ecosystem is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporations that control computational infrastructure, datasets, and platform distribution channels. A governance framework that recognises the full diversity of needs and contexts makes room for alternatives to the extractivist logic that currently dominates.
3. A Dialogue Worth Building: On Process and Legitimacy
The Global Dialogue should establish meaningful international cooperation on AI governance by creating the conditions for a plurality of governance approaches to coexist and inform one another, rooted in different legal traditions, development contexts, and social values. The Dialogue’s role is to build bridges between these approaches without flattening their differences or privileging any single framework as the default.
AI governance frameworks earn broad-based trust, quality data, and compliance when they are built on the full range of knowledge required for global governance. Meaningful multistakeholder participation should therefore be understood not as a consultative exercise, but as a procedural condition for legitimate and effective global AI governance. The expertise that communities across every region of the world bring to AI deployment in their contexts, to local regulatory innovation, and to the human rights dimensions of specific technological applications is governance-relevant expertise that strengthens any framework it informs.
Linguistic inclusion should be understood as an access measure and a governance principle. AI systems and governance frameworks fail to account for minority languages and diverse knowledge systems risk reproducing structural inequalities in both technological development and global policymaking. Multilingual participation and language justice should therefore be embedded into the Dialogue’s architecture from the outset.
The use of facial recognition technologies in public spaces and at borders represents an existential threat to the right to privacy, freedom of movement, and the freedom of peaceful assembly. Civil society organizations have called for a complete ban on the use of these technologies for mass surveillance, emphasizing that they are often used to suppress legitimate protests and monitor vulnerable communities.
We, therefore, suggest that the Dialogue prioritise participation mechanisms that distribute deliberative weight more evenly: regional pre-dialogues functioning as genuine agenda-setting spaces; structured contributions from national and sub-national regulatory bodies across the Global Majority; and south-south knowledge exchange channels that allow governance innovations developed across different contexts to shape the global conversation directly. Centering south-south knowledge flows recognises that some of the most creative AI governance responses are emerging precisely where resources are most constrained.
The Dialogue should also create structured community testimony mechanisms through which affected communities can directly present evidence, lived experience, and governance concerns in their own languages, with opportunities for substantive engagement from Member States and other stakeholders.
To strengthen transparency and public accountability, the Dialogue should also adopt accessible, multilingual, and publicly available forms of “living documentation” that allow communities and stakeholders outside the room to follow, respond to, and engage with deliberations in real time.
Practical measures that would strengthen this include: guaranteed multilingual access from the outset; dedicated resources to sustain the engagement of smaller organizations carrying significant local expertise alongside limited institutional capacity; and the establishment of protected, confidential participation channels for those operating in restricted civic space environments, recognizing that silence in these contexts is evidence of suppression, and that governance without those voices is governance with a structural blind spot.
The Dialogue should also address AI capacity gaps in all their dimensions — technical, institutional, and participatory. This means sustaining locally-driven regulatory capacity, research infrastructure, and civil society expertise, enabling Global Majority communities to evaluate, contest, and govern AI systems on their own terms. Capacity-building efforts under discussion within the UN system, including the innovative financing options proposed by the Secretary-General, should be shaped with this breadth of purpose in mind — covering technical, institutional, and participatory dimensions, and reaching the communities where the governance gap is most acute.
4. Building for the Long Term
The first Global Dialogue on AI Governance arrives at a moment when the governance of artificial intelligence is still open — when choices made in multilateral spaces can still shape trajectories rather than merely describe them. It has the opportunity to set a precedent that will outlast, demonstrating that meaningful multistakeholder engagement, including from civil society and communities across the Global Majority, produces more effective governance. That precedent, once established, becomes the standard against which every subsequent session is measured. The GCTJ and its members stand ready to contribute to that process and to support a Dialogue equal to the moment.
The Dialogue also inherits a responsibility that extends beyond Geneva. The frameworks taking shape now will govern technologies still emerging, in contexts still forming, affecting communities whose relationships with multilateral processes are themselves still being defined. That is a long arc — and it calls for a process architecture designed for learning, adaptation, and genuine accountability over time. A single session produces a starting point. What turns a starting point into a foundation is the quality of the process built around it.
Trust is what makes that possible, and trust is built through consistency, between what a process commits to and what it delivers, between the participation it invites and the weight it gives to what is heard. The groundwork laid in this first session will shape what the second session can build on. That groundwork is strongest when laid together through meaningful multistakeholder participation that brings the full range of knowledge, experience, and legitimacy needed for global AI governance to endure.
Signatures:
- CFF-Ghana
- Digital Rights Frontlines (DRF)
- Center for Media Research – Nepal (CMR-Nepal)
- Skyline International for Human Rights (SIHR)
- Raymond Amumpaire
- Centre for Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Governance in Africa (CAIEGA)
- Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET)
- Fundación Datalat, Ecuador
- Ipandetec – Centroamérica
- Observatorio ciudadano Al-Dato, Ecuador
- LOVE-Storm.de – united against online hate – Germany
- HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement
- DIY (DUKINGIRE ISI YACU)
- Paradigm Initiative (PIN)
- TEDIC – Paraguay
- AfroLeadership
- The Legal Resources Centre-South Africa ( LRC)
- Tech & Media Convergency (TMC)
- Internet Governance Tanzania Working Group (IGTWG)
- Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD)
- Samir Kassir Foundation (SKF)
- Council for Responsible Social Media-Kenya
- Luk Digital Defenders-kenya
- Conectas Direitos Humanos
- FALA – impact studio
- REDE NACIONAL DE COMBATE À DESINFORMAÇÃO-RNCD -BRASIL
- INSM for Digital Rights Foundation – Iraq
- Beam Reports (Sudan)
- Aláfia Lab
- Speak Up
- SMEX
- 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media