The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
On Wednesday, 7 January, the Trump administration announced the withdrawal of the United States from 66 organizations, half of which are linked to the UN. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the oldest agency in the UN system, is not affected. Nevertheless, the administration had already set the tone during the ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference, held last November in Baku, signaling a clear recalibration of its engagement within the UN system.
In a plenary statement, the U.S. delegation announced its disengagement from several ad hoc groups, arguing that negotiations had drifted from the ITU’s core mandate into ideological or politicized territory. It called for a “back to basics” approach, limiting the ITU’s work to telecommunications and ICT development, and rejected references it viewed as infringing on national sovereignty, including the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
By contrast, the current executive order suggests a broader realignment in which major U.S. technology companies are increasingly treated as instruments of national power, with diminished expectations regarding their responsibility to respect international human rights norms.
The delegation also opposed broad references to climate change, diversity, equity and inclusion, and gender, unless directly tied to the ITU’s technical mandate. While affirming support for equality and non-discrimination, it advocated narrowly defined language and warned that mandate expansion weakened the Union’s effectiveness, particularly in light of financial constraints.
Taken together, this intervention in Baku can be read as an early indicator of the broader withdrawal announced in January: not an abrupt disengagement from technical multilateralism, but a deliberate effort to narrow institutional mandates, curb normative spillover, and reassert a functional and transactional conception of international cooperation. The implications for the ITU, for UN specialized agencies, and for the future of technical standard-setting in an increasingly politicized global environment are significant.
The Freedom Online Coalition, a partnership of governments working to advance Internet freedom, is among the entities affected by the administration’s decision. Yet as recently as October 2024, during the ITU World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly in New Delhi, the Coalition reaffirmed that technical standards for digital technologies should be developed through open, inclusive, multistakeholder processes and grounded in international human rights law, so that digital technologies promote rather than undermine human rights throughout their lifecycle.
This position stands in sharp contrast with earlier U.S. leadership. At the Coalition’s inaugural conference in 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized that a free and open Internet was not only an expression of democratic values, but a shared global interest. Acknowledging that access to the Internet’s benefits was uneven, she argued that governments had a responsibility to demonstrate why openness ultimately served everyone’s long-term social and economic interests.
What is at stake is not only the future of specific UN bodies or technical forums, but the broader question of whether digital governance will remain anchored in shared norms or a piece of puzzle in transactional geological reality.
By contrast, the current executive order suggests a broader realignment in which major U.S. technology companies are increasingly treated as instruments of national power, with diminished expectations regarding their responsibility to respect international human rights norms. Recent precedents, including restrictions on digital services affecting an International Criminal Court judge and entry bans imposed on a European official involved in regulating digital markets, illustrate how technological leverage is now being deployed in service of geopolitical objectives.
With regard to emerging technologies and technical standards discussed at the ITU, this shift has paradoxically brought European countries closer together. Under the Biden administration, European governments sought U.S. support to integrate human rights considerations into technical standard-setting, largely without success. Today, recognizing that consensus is unlikely, they are moving forward collectively to operationalize human rights within ITU processes through concrete governance tools that remain firmly within the organization’s mandate and budgetary constraints.
What is at stake is not only the future of specific UN bodies or technical forums, but the broader question of whether digital governance will remain anchored in shared norms or a piece of puzzle in transactional geological reality. As the United States redefines its engagement, other actors, particularly European states, are increasingly positioning human rights not as ideological add-ons, but as practical safeguards for resilient, trustworthy technologies. This approach is reflected in the Seoul Statement adopted by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and ITU at the 2025 AI Standards Summit, which reaffirmed that international standards bodies have a decisive role to play in aligning emerging technologies with international human rights norms. Human rights are not an ideology; they constitute a legal framework agreed by the international community in 1948. In this evolving landscape, technical standard-setting may be one of the last arenas where multilateral cooperation on human rights can still be translated into concrete, operational outcomes.
