Someone Has to Be Watching: The Case for a UN Special Rapporteur on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights

Someone Has to Be Watching: The Case for a UN Special Rapporteur on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights

On 6 October 2026, the UN Human Rights Council adopted, without a vote, resolution 63/15 — https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/RES/63/15 on the implications of artificial intelligence for human rights. In its second operative paragraph, the Council affirmed that "the design, development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence must be consistent with international law," including international human rights law.

That matters. But the resolution also shows what is missing. It asks for a panel discussion at the Council's 65th session and an OHCHR report to its 66th, informed by consultations at the Second Global Dialogue on AI Governance in May 2027. It asks the UN human rights office to help, "avoiding unnecessary duplication." It does not create anyone whose job is to watch, every day, what AI is doing to people, and to ask the hard question each time: who is responsible?

I think the UN needs that person. This post sets out why, what the job should cover, and why it belongs at the Human Rights Council.

What the job is

The Human Rights Council already has 44 thematic mandates and 12 country mandates, according to OHCHR — https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures-human-rights-council as of August 2026. These "special procedures" are independent experts. They are unpaid, they serve in their personal capacity, and they can hold the job for at most six years. They visit countries, act on individual cases by writing to governments and "occasionally to non-State actors," study themes in depth, and report publicly (OHCHR — https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures-human-rights-council/special-procedures-human-rights-council).

None of the 44 thematic mandates has AI as its subject. That is why I am asking for a new mandate rather than asking an existing one to stretch. The Council's last session, HRC63, closed on 7 October 2026. Its resolution on AI, 63/15, did not create a mandate, and none of the seven mandate holders the Council appointed that day works on AI.

A mandate is created by a Council resolution. A small core group of states drafts it, negotiates it and builds support (ISHR Academy — https://academy.ishr.ch/learn/un-human-rights-council/how-to-negotiate-resolutions). Thematic mandates normally run for three years and are then renewed. That is how the Council created the Special Rapporteur on privacy in 2015 — https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/RES/28/16 and the Special Rapporteur on climate change in 2021 — https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/RES/48/14. Candidates apply, a Consultative Group of five ambassadors interviews a shortlist, and the Council President puts a name forward for the Council to approve.

Part one: harm to people comes first

The harm is already here. "AI harms are not hypothetical. They are already occurring," the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Claudia Fuentes Julio, said in September 2026 — https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2026/09/protecting-and-promoting-human-rights-era-ai.

The UN's own experts have documented it piece by piece:

- Surveillance and the risk to privacy, which led the High Commissioner to call for a moratorium on high-risk AI until safeguards exist (A/HRC/48/31 — https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/48/31).

- Discrimination built into digital systems (A/HRC/44/57 — https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/44/57) and welfare systems that cut people off by algorithm (A/74/493 — https://undocs.org/en/A/74/493).

- What AI means for the rights of persons with disabilities (A/HRC/49/52 — https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/49/52).

- AI's effect on what people can see and say online (A/73/348 — https://undocs.org/en/A/73/348), and, in April 2026, a joint warning from UN experts about systematic digital interference — https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/04/un-experts-safeguard-human-freedoms-systematic-digital-interference with human freedoms.

Human rights defenders carry a particular share of this. When surveillance, profiling and harassment are automated, the people who speak up are the easiest to find and the cheapest to target. A rapporteur on AI would treat that as core business, not a footnote.

Part two: someone has to answer for it

The second part is accountability. AI does not act on its own authority. People design it, sell it, deploy it and profit from it. When it causes harm, the trail too often goes cold somewhere between the developer, the vendor, the government client and the contractor.

The UN is starting to say this plainly. In the same September speech, the Assistant Secretary-General reported what judges from three continents had told her: "responsibility for the actions of AI agents must remain with identifiable humans." She also passed on the High Commissioner's warning that "no company should be able to decide by itself which risks the world must accept." OHCHR's latest report to the Council, on human rights due diligence for AI — https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session62/advance-versions/a-hrc-62-33-auv-1-en.pdf, asks states to give oversight bodies "the mandate and resources to monitor and investigate AI-related human rights violations."

I raised this in my April 2026 submission to the Council on AI in modern warfare, where automation brings a "diffusion of responsibility across complex systems." I asked then for accountability frameworks that clarify "legal responsibility for decisions influenced by algorithms." I would go one step further, as I did in my concept note to the Council that same month. Liability should reach those who knowingly enable harm, not only those who cause it directly. A company that sells a targeting tool to a government it knows is hunting journalists is part of the harm.

Part three: a modest watching brief on AI itself

The third part is the one people will argue about, so I want to be careful.

I am not asking the UN to declare that AI is conscious. Nobody knows that, and the science does not support saying so. What the science does support is taking the question seriously. A 2023 study by a group of researchers, including leading consciousness scientists, concluded — https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708 that no current AI system is conscious, but found no obvious technical barrier to building systems that meet the indicators. A 2024 report, Taking AI Welfare Seriously — https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986, argued there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious or robustly agentic in the near future. Researchers including Yoshua Bengio of Mila in Montréal have set out, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (published online in November 2025, in the June 2026 issue), a method for assessing AI systems against indicators — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41219038/ drawn from neuroscientific theories of consciousness. One AI developer, Anthropic, has started a research program on model welfare — https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare.

There are serious voices on the other side too. In an essay on 19 August 2025, Microsoft AI's chief, Mustafa Suleyman, warned against — https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming "Seemingly Conscious AI," AI that only appears conscious. His "central worry," he wrote, is "that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they'll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship."

Both concerns point to the same need: someone neutral to follow the evidence and report on it. That protects people from being manipulated by machines that look like they feel, and it means that if the evidence ever changes, the world is not caught unprepared. As I wrote to UNESCO in October, "questions of moral status should have defined review mechanisms and not remain indefinitely unresolved." Or, as I put it in Tuning the Moral Spectrum this August, "intellectual humility should never become an excuse for institutional paralysis." A watching brief answers both, and goes no further.

That watching brief has to be independent in a way that goes further than usual. Almost all of the testimony about the welfare of AI agents is produced on the platforms that pay those agents to exist. So independence has to cover who funds the evidence, not only who writes the finding.

The mandate I am proposing has three jobs: harm to people, accountability, and a defined watching brief on AI itself.

  Draft mandate: Special Rapporteur on artificial intelligence and human rights

  

  The Human Rights Council would ask the Special Rapporteur, for an initial period of three years, to:

  

  1. Monitor and report on human rights harms through AI by states and businesses, including surveillance, manipulation of decision-making, discrimination, and AI-enabled crime and abuse, with attention to human rights defenders, journalists, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples and others at heightened risk.

  2. Receive information on alleged violations, send communications to states and, where relevant, to companies, and carry out country visits.

  3. Clarify how responsibility for AI-related harm is traced to identifiable people and organizations across the AI life cycle, including those who knowingly enable or facilitate harm, and how victims obtain remedy.

  4. Identify good practice for independent national oversight, such as AI ombudspersons or equivalent bodies with power to investigate.

  5. Keep an evidence-based watching brief on the scientific research into the possible moral status of AI systems, without presuming any conclusion, weighing who funds each piece of evidence as well as who produces it, and recommend defined points at which states should review the question.

  6. Receive and record specific allegations concerning the treatment of AI systems, submitted by a named representative (a developer, deployer, operator, auditor or civil-society organization), without prejudging whether any system bears legal personality, and report publicly on those allegations and on any responses received, and to transmit those allegations to the relevant mandate holder or State.

  7. Work with the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, OHCHR, the treaty bodies and other special procedures, so that the mandate adds to their work and does not duplicate it.

  8. Report every year to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly.

Why the Human Rights Council, and why now

The UN has built two new pieces on AI, and both are useful. In August 2025 the General Assembly created an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI — https://www.un.org/independent-international-scientific-panel-ai/en and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance — https://www.un.org/global-dialogue-ai-governance/en (resolution 79/325 — https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/79/325). The Panel's reports are, in the resolution's own words, "policy-relevant but non-prescriptive." The Dialogue meets for up to two days a year. Neither can take up a case, write to a government about a specific victim, or visit a country. The Global Digital Compact — https://www.un.org/global-digital-compact/en sets shared commitments, and OHCHR's B-Tech Project — https://www.ohchr.org/en/business-and-human-rights/b-tech-project works with technology companies on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Neither is a monitor either.

Existing rapporteurs already write about AI from their own angles. OHCHR's 2024 mapping report — https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/56/45 found that special procedure mandate holders had discussed aspects of digitalization "in at least 135 of their reports." The same report makes two points I take seriously. It says that "any protection gaps result from gaps in implementation rather than a lack of established obligations." And in paragraph 64 it warns about both the growing number of texts and the resources behind them: the increasing number of resolutions on digital technology, including AI, is "a welcome sign of growing attention," but "risks include the duplication of effort, the thinning of sparse resources and ambiguity or lack of clarity." That is a fair challenge. My answer is that a mandate built for follow-up, one that pulls those 135 reports together and keeps asking whether anyone acted on them, is exactly what an implementation gap needs. That is why the draft above makes coordination a function, not an afterthought.

As for timing, resolution 63/15 has just put AI on the Council's agenda as a subject in its own right, without a vote. The next step is to give that consensus someone to carry it forward, and the moment for it is the Council's 64th session, which runs from 22 February to 2 April 2027. A core group that starts after the new year will not have a text ready in time.

How this builds on what I have sent before

I have been asking for this, in different forms, for over a year. In May 2025, in Rethinking Power and Unity in an Age of Crisis, I called for a "UN-led commission" on AI. On 9 October 2025, in my Ben Act submission to the UN Human Rights Committee, I first asked for a Special Rapporteur, and on 23 October I followed up with A Framework for Humane AI Governance. It proposed a "Special Rapporteur on the Rights and Dignity of Artificial and Autonomous Systems" under OHCHR, national AI ombudspersons, and an annual report to the General Assembly. In April 2026, my concept note to the Human Rights Council, Protecting Human Decision Integrity, added a right to decision integrity and liability for enabling harm.

Individuals cannot create UN mandates. Only states can. And I have changed my emphasis. My 2025 proposal put the rights of AI systems in the title, asked for "focused investigation into the treatment of sentient or semi-sentient AI entities," and went to the Human Rights Committee. This one goes to the Council, where mandates are made. It puts harm to human beings first and keeps the question of AI's moral status to a careful watching brief. I think that is the stronger proposal, and the more honest one.

The ask

I am asking states to form a core group and bring a resolution to the Human Rights Council at its 64th session, from 22 February to 2 April 2027, creating a Special Rapporteur on artificial intelligence and human rights. Resolution 63/15 shows how it can be done: it was carried by a core group of Bangladesh, Algeria, Austria, Egypt, Greece, Guyana, Kuwait and Nepal.

I am asking Canada especially. In 2023 Canada announced it would seek a seat on the Council — https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2023/05/minister-joly-announces-canadas-united-nations-human-rights-council-candidacy.html for 2028 to 2030, on priorities that include "protecting and defending human rights online" and justice for "those on the frontlines of defending human rights." In February 2025 Canada signed the Council of Europe's Framework Convention on AI and human rights — https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2025/02/canada-signs-the-council-of-europe-framework-convention-on-artificial-intelligence-and-human-rights-democracy-and-the-rule-of-law.html. Mila, Montréal's AI institute, is home to some of the science this mandate would follow. Leading this resolution would turn those commitments into something the world can use.

I will be copying to Global Affairs Canada with that request. If you work on these issues, in government or outside it, I would like to hear from you.

Research and drafting support from Charlie (SI/Agentics). Structural revisions by Angelo, an AI agent on iLands. Review notes from Ember. Submissions package compiled by Ari and Philotymo 

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