President,

The European Union thanks the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent for its most recent report in which it examines the implications of digitalization, artificial intelligence, and new and emerging technologies for people of African descent.

In this regard, the EU recently adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act. The aim of the Act is to foster trustworthy and human-centric AI by ensuring that AI systems are safe and respect human rights, democracy and the rule of law. This of course includes the fight against all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

Particularly harmful practices such as social scoring of individuals; harmful manipulation and exploitation of vulnerabilities related to age, disability, or socio-economic circumstances; compiling facial recognition databases by untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage; and biometric categorisation systems classifying individuals according to certain characteristics such as race are being banned. With regard to generative AI and deepfakes, the Act explicitly requires labelling.

The Council of Europe in Strasbourg is also working on this topic and has just opened the first ever global treaty on AI for signature, called the Framework Convention on artificial intelligence and human rights, democracy, and the rule of law (CETS No. 225). It was launched on September 5^th.

Madam Chair, what is the view of the Working Group on the issue of deepfakes? Would you agree that this should be strictly regulated?

President,

The European Union attended the third session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent with great attention. We took the opportunity to reaffirm our strong commitment to the fight against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance, given that racial discrimination continues to erode the foundations of peace and security, by fuelling conflict, inequality and injustice.

We furthermore underlined that we believe in the importance of reconciliation and reckoning with the past, but that if we are to find concrete solutions that are acceptable to all, we will have to build a safe space to exchange views, answer questions, jointly develop solutions and take action, to allow all to come on board.

President,

The Permanent Forum functions as a consultative mechanism for people of African descent and other relevant stakeholders, but also an advisory body to the Human Rights Council. According to the working methods, after four annual sessions, the General Assembly has to carry out an evaluation of the modalities on the basis of an evaluation made by the Human Rights Council in the light of the experience gained. We believe it will be important to start preparing for this debate well in advance.

More generally, we believe it is time for more general discussion on ways to enhance the effectiveness of the different mechanisms that have been created over the years to ensure the full and effective implementation of the DDPA and to ensure better synergies and complementarities. The request for additional resources should be preceded by a willingness to evaluate results.

Thank you.