United Nations

Unpacking the Global Digital Compact

At over 80 years of age, the United Nations, led by the ninth Secretary-General António Guterres, is looking firmly ahead into the digital future. A major milestone was achieved at the landmark Summit of the Future in New York in September 2024, where Member States officially adopted the "Pact for the Future." While the pact itself was primarily a reaffirmation of multilateralism, it also contained a crucial annexed document: The Global Digital Compact (GDC).

In the spirit of recommitting to international cooperation, the GDC was designed to dramatically scale up global digital collaboration. Today, in 2026, as the international community navigates the early, complex phases of its implementation, this article unpacks the raison d'être of the Compact, analyzes how human rights are integrated, and critically assesses its real-world impact and challenges from a human rights perspective.

Raison d’être of the Global Digital Compact

The digital world continues to face numerous challenges that cause deep divides across gender, region, age groups, and income. The initial GDC policy brief by the Secretary-General framed these divides in relation to five different aspects of the digital space, with accessibility being one of the most glaring.

At the time of the GDC's inception, a staggering 2.6 billion people – about 32% of the world's population – remained entirely without internet access, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). This accessibility divide was further highlighted by the fact that only 21 percent of women in low-income countries used the internet, and African users paid more than three times the global average for mobile data. While progress has been made, bridging this physical connectivity gap remains an uphill battle.

Data collection also holds immense social and commercial value, yet only a handful of actors profit from it – big time – which leads to vast financial inequality. The fundamental problem is that the generated wealth of these actors, mainly dominant states and private tech conglomerates, does not naturally trickle down and fails to lead to shared, global prosperity.

Finally, there is an industry brain drain and a critical governance gap, which remains a highly urgent issue. Emerging technologies, particularly generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), have historically lacked robust regulation and basic guardrails due to their rapid evolution. One major structural challenge is that leading experts in these fields prefer to work in the private sector innovating these technologies, rather than spending their time debating regulatory frameworks with policymakers.

As a core pillar of the "Pact for the Future," the GDC was adopted to eliminate these divides and pave the way toward a globally unified governance structure for the digital space. The GDC frameworks aim to establish common standards for digital public infrastructure and services, building multistakeholder partnerships to ensure equality of opportunity. It emphasizes the historic lack of interoperable data and standardized reporting, advocating for a streamlined approach to internet governance. Ultimately, the GDC's foundational argument is to increase global equality of opportunity in the digital space so that, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we "leave no one behind."

Safeguarding Human Rights Online

The adopted GDC is anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It seeks to connect the remaining offline populations to the internet and safeguard the human rights of every user. For example, the Giga initiative by the ITU and UNICEF, championed in the GDC, actively works to connect all schools globally to the internet. The GDC also outlines commitments to connect hospitals worldwide to the web, and investing in resilient and sustainable digital infrastructure. Among other issues, it specifically addresses critical human rights areas such as privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to education, and the rights and protection of children online.

There is a profound, ongoing need for action against the misuse of technologies. For instance, algorithms implemented in AI models are not at all free from bias. While bias in AI models is often due to biased training data, the design of the algorithms, their objectives, and the way they process information can introduce or amplify discrimination. Even fictional datasets contain bias because human intelligence – inherently biased – was implemented at some point in their creation.

It remains a heavily debated and controversial topic to apply AI models in high-stakes decision-making processes like crime prevention, autonomous weapon systems, hiring, border control, health data processing, and digital surveillance without human oversight and accountability. The consequences of failure, bias, and data leaks in these systems constitute serious, and sometimes fatal, human rights violations. The historical governance gap has allowed these violations to occur due to a lack of understanding, accountability, and transparency around emerging technologies.

The final text of the GDC commits to installing safeguards that prevent these kinds of violations through human rights due diligence and the establishment of "effective oversight and remedy mechanisms." It also calls on digital technology companies and developers to apply impact assessments throughout a technology's lifecycle. Tech companies are expected to "respect human rights online, be accountable for and take measures to mitigate and prevent abuses, and to provide access to effective remedy," as proclaimed in the landmark agreement.

In terms of children's rights, the commitment is to strengthen legal and policy frameworks to protect children in the digital space while supporting national digital education initiatives to increase digital literacy among younger generations. For workers impacted by rapid digitalization and automation, the GDC commits states to "develop vocational, upskilling and reskilling training." While safeguarding human rights in the digital space is paramount, the GDC's practical execution faces significant structural hurdles.

A critical approach to the GDC

There is another side to the laudable goal of integrating the Global South into this newly envisioned global digital governance system. Civil society groups, including the World Wide Web Foundation and the CyberPeace Institute, have consistently pointed out systemic issues with the GDC's design.

As with any UN compact, negotiations over the years altered the text. Successive revisions of the GDC caused controversy among stakeholders because the final agreed-upon text became increasingly vague in its formulations to secure broad diplomatic consensus. Critics argue that the objectives formulated in the compact are not sufficiently grounded in international human rights law. Civil society has continuously condemned the lack of mainstreaming existing human rights law into the GDC's core commitments – such as the absence of explicit references to the principles of legality, legitimacy, necessity, and proportionality concerning state mass surveillance.

Another major issue is that the role of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was scaled back during negotiations. The Digital Human Rights Advisory Service of the OHCHR, which was originally envisioned to dynamically help states apply international human rights law to digital technologies, was ultimately reduced in the final text to being available merely "upon request." This risks sidelining the extensive, multi-stakeholder work that the OHCHR had already built over years of consultations.

Furthermore, while a multistakeholder approach is supposed to be the underlying principle of internet governance, the GDC was negotiated almost exclusively by states. This in itself represents a contradiction that continues to frustrate civil society. In paragraph 65 of the GDC, all stakeholders are asked to "endorse the Compact and take active part in its implementation and follow-up." However, meaningful consultations have been sparse, and with the center of digital governance discussions shifting primarily to UN headquarters in New York, access for civil society actors has faced centralization and bureaucratic barriers. The internet, emerging technologies, and digital spaces were built on the principles of open-source collaboration and decentralization. Managing the GDC's implementation is proving difficult, especially as influential figures like Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, continue to advocate for an open approach.

‘The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way - not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures’

– Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

Apart from these structural critiques, it is vital to remember that the GDC represents a non-binding commitment by member states to reach objectives, unlike other legally binding transnational documents. In the sphere of AI, for example, the Council of Europe's (CoE) Framework Convention on AI became the world's first binding treaty on AI back in May 2024.

Numerous parallel attempts to govern and regulate AI exist outside the UN's GDC framework. The G7, through their "Hiroshima AI Process" launched in 2023, created a set of principles applying directly to developers, including public reporting of advanced AI capabilities. The OECD AI Principles, adopted in 2019 and adhered to by 47 countries, are based on nearly identical values to the GDC. Additionally, the European Union's pioneering AI Act, which entered into force on August 1, 2024, is now in its active enforcement phases in 2026. In short, there is intense competition in internet, AI, and data governance among international organizations.

The Path Forward

The primary challenge for the GDC remains translating high-level international consensus into real, everyday protection for internet users. Early on, the cracks in state consensus were visible when several member states broke the silence procedure during GDC consultations.

Furthermore, the deep-seated disagreements surrounding the controversial "UN Convention on Cybercrime" – originally proposed by Russia and heavily criticized by civil society for opening the door to human rights abuses under the guise of security ­– revealed just how divided the international community is.

While Member States ultimately adopted both the GDC and the Cybercrime Convention, the years following the 2024 Summit of the Future have proven that finding a true balance between security, sovereignty, and human rights is incredibly difficult. With the GDC officially adopted and its implementation structures in motion, the current struggle in 2026 is no longer about drafting words on paper, but rather find consensus on the issue of AI governance.