A/HRC/44/57 I. Introduction 1. Emerging digital technologies have fundamentally altered the way we live our lives, and as such their human rights impact has been the subject of important analyses by the special procedures of the Human Rights Council.1 Existing reports address how these technologies affect a broad spectrum of human rights, including the rights to freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and the human rights of those subject to extreme poverty. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has contributed analysis of emerging digital technologies and the right to privacy.2 In the present report, the Special Rapporteur aims to advance analogously robust analysis at the intersection of emerging digital technologies and racial equality and nondiscrimination principles under international human rights law. 2. The scope of the report is racism, intolerance, discrimination and other forms of harmful exclusion and differentiation on the basis of race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin, in keeping with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This includes discrimination against indigenous peoples. In the present report, the Special Rapporteur urges an equality-based approach to human rights governance of emerging digital technologies. This requires moving beyond “colour-blind” or “race neutral” strategies.3 A colour-blind analysis of legal, social, economic and political conditions commits to an even-handedness that entails avoiding explicit racial or ethnic analysis in favour of treating all individuals and groups the same, even if these individuals and groups are differently situated, including because of historical structures of intentional discrimination. What is required in the context of emerging digital technologies is careful attention to their racialized and ethnic impact, from government officials, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations, and the private sector. In the present report, the Special Rapporteur highlights intersectional forms of discrimination, including on the basis of gender and religion, and calls attention to the ongoing failure of States and other stakeholders to track and address compounded forms of discrimination at the intersections among race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, sexual orientation and related grounds. 3. The Special Rapporteur only briefly addresses the racially discriminatory impacts of emerging digital technologies on migrants, refugees and other non-citizens, because these groups will be the focus of a separate report of the Special Rapporteur to the General Assembly. 4. A key finding in the report is that emerging digital technologies exacerbate and compound existing inequities, many of which exist along racial, ethnic and national origin grounds. The examples highlighted in the report raise concerns about different forms of racial discrimination in the design and use of emerging digital technologies. In some cases, this discrimination is direct, and explicitly motivated by intolerance or prejudice. In other cases, discrimination results from disparate impacts on groups according to their race, ethnicity or national origin, even when an explicit intent to discriminate is absent. And in yet other cases, direct and indirect forms of discrimination exist in combination, and can have such a significant holistic or systemic effect as to subject groups to racially discriminatory structures that pervade access to and enjoyment of human rights in all areas of their lives. 5. In the context of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, for example, early reports have shown the disparate effects of the pandemic on marginalized racial and ethnic groups, including because of the exclusion of these groups from the benefits of emerging digital technologies, or because emerging digital technologies are deployed in ways that put these groups at greater risk of human rights violations. Notwithstanding widespread perceptions of emerging digital technologies as neutral and objective in their operation, race and ethnicity shape access to and enjoyment of human rights in all of the fields in which these technologies are now pervasive. States have obligations to prevent, combat and 1 2 3 2 See www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/SP/List_SP_Reports_NewTech.pdf. See A/HRC/39/29. See https://qz.com/1585645/color-blindness-is-a-bad-approach-to-solving-bias-in-algorithms.