At the closing of its 101st session, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child announced that it would be working on a further General Comment. This will be the 28th General Comment and will address the relationship between emerging technologies and their impact on children’s rights.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child has previously addressed issues and topics relating to artificial intelligence. This work led, amongst other things, to the Joint Statement on Artificial Intelligence and the Rights of the Child. This was published in collaboration with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), UNICEF, UNESCO, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children, and other UN stakeholders, and was signed on 19 January 2026 in Geneva during an ITU event.
However, the Committee could not stop there, Ms. Kiladze said. Technology was developing faster than legal and policy frameworks. Thus, the Committee had decided to dedicate its next general comment, its twenty-eighth, to emerging technologies and child rights — an agenda that included artificial intelligence but also went beyond it. The Committee’s responsibility was to ensure that technological progress did not leave children behind. It needed to ensure that innovation served children’s rights, rather than creating new forms of inequality, discrimination, exploitation or exclusion.