MAP-AI Open Letter: Centering Human Rights in AI Governance

October 2, 2026  |  Confluence Blog, News, Policy

A coalition of 80 civil society organizations, academics, technologists, and experts have endorsed Centering Human Rights in AI Governance, an open letter published by the Multistakeholder Approaches to Participation in AI Governance (MAP-AI) Project, a joint initiative of the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi (CCG) and the Global Network Initiative (GNI).

The letter calls on governments, companies, and the United Nations to build AI governance and international cooperation grounded in international human rights law (IHRL), built on lessons learned and existing institutions, and focused on addressing today’s lived realities alongside tomorrow’s technological frontier.

The letter welcomes growing attention to the risks posed by AI, including concerns raised by AI company leaders and employees. It stresses that these concerns should reinforce, rather than displace, harms that academics, civil society, journalists, and technologists have documented for years, including discriminatory and biased outputs, the exploitation of data workers, the environmental consequences of infrastructure build-out, enhanced surveillance, and military uses of AI that contravene International Humanitarian Law.

Read the full open letter here.

Key recommendations

• Put human rights first. Governments should use IHRL as the basis for international cooperation and their own AI rules, ensuring these are developed through open processes, are well justified and narrowly tailored, and that enforcement is subject to due process, oversight, transparency, and accountability. Leading AI companies should commit to, or deepen their implementation of, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct, and the GNI Principles.
• Don’t let urgency stand in the way of inclusivity. AI laws and regulations should be pursued through open, democratic processes, with non-company stakeholders deeply involved to provide independent expertise, ensure accountability, and guard against both regulatory capture and inappropriate government action.
• Take an ecosystem approach. Rather than a comprehensive treaty and a single global regulator, stakeholders should develop multiple, intersecting, and coherent initiatives. The UN should leverage its International Independent Scientific Panel and Global Dialogue on AI Governance to build consensus on a baseline set of issues grounded in IHRL and to coordinate work across relevant processes. The state-led series of AI Summits, with the Geneva AI Summit next in line, should support this agenda by mobilizing resources and holding actors accountable to their commitments.

The letter builds on momentum from earlier this year, when the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi and the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva brought a wider range of governments and stakeholders into the conversation and recognized the importance of shared standards and norms.

About MAP-AI

The Multistakeholder Approaches to Participation in AI Governance (MAP-AI) Project aims to advance a bottom-up, substantive, pragmatic, rights-based approach to AI governance. The project, which launched ahead of the India AI Impact Summit, is a joint initiative between the Centre for Communication Governance at the National Law University Delhi (CCG) and the Global Network Initiative (GNI).