At Day 2 of the United Nations Global AI Governance Dialogue, Dr Pria Chetty delivered an oral submission to the Thematic Co-Chairs of Cluster 4: Respecting, protecting and promoting human rights: transparency, accountability and human oversight.
“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 the 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 reinforces vastly different socio-economic 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 their future realities.
Just AI 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 needs of local populations associated with AI; and planetary and sustainability impacts of AI into view.
Building on the Just AI 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 70/1,
We propose the following priorities for the Dialogue inter-sessional processes:
- 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 recognised 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 form.
- For equitable AI that accords with first and second generation rights, we must democratise 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 become co-creators of AI that reflects their development priorities, democratic values, and lived ecological and AI experiences.
- Finally, and most concretely: we call on this first session to inform a Global AI Governance Roadmap that is sequenced, measurable, and multistakeholder-endorsed. Given the absence of binding commitments from recent government-led summits, this Roadmap is a critical opportunity for the UN system to anchor accountability. It should set out commitments with agreed timelines, building on the GDC framework, and be subject to annual review at subsequent sessions.
We look forward to, and remain committed to contributing to the work of the Dialogue.
Thank you.”
This speech was originally delivered on 7 July 2026. Watch the live presentation here.
