INSTAR Human Rights by Design Recommendations for International Standardisation

This report presents the Human Rights by Design recommendations developed by the INSTAR Human Rights Task Force (HTF). The Human Rights Task Force (HTF) is a cross-sector expert group within INSTAR. Its objective is to ensure that human rights, democratic values, and EU regulatory principles are integrated into international standardisation activities related to emerging technologies.

The report evaluates the human-rights implications of the priorities identified in the joint INSTAR-TTA Priorities for International Collaboration on Standards (PICS). It identifies where human rights vulnerabilities should be strengthened, and provides recommendations to ensure that the priorities identified can support EU-international alignment without overlooking their impact on human rights.

The analysis covers topics across the six INSTAR task forces, and for each work item, the report identifies: 

• The scope of the standardisation activity;
• The main human rights considerations;
• Actionable Human Rights by Design recommendations.

The recommendations are intended to support policymakers, ESOs, SDOs, industry stakeholders, regulators, and international partners in developing standards that are secure, interoperable, trustworthy, human-centric, and aligned with European values.

Human-rights recommendations should be interpreted consistently with the EU AI Act, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, GDPR, the Cyber Resilience Act, the Data Act, and relevant harmonised European standards. Where applicable, recommendations should support implementation of AI Act obligations concerning risk management, human oversight, data governance, transparency, accuracy, robustness, cybersecurity, and post-market monitoring.

Where AI systems fall within the scope of the EU AI Act, standardisation activities should support measurable, testable, and conformity-assessable requirements consistent with the AI Act and future harmonised standards developed by CEN-CENELEC and ETSI.