Derechos Digitales-led Latin American civil-society contribution to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 192nd-session regional hearing on artificial intelligence and human rights (2025)

On the morning of 7 March 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) convened the fifth regional thematic hearing on artificial intelligence and human rights in its standing series, virtually under the 192nd Period of Sessions — the principal Inter-American human-rights body venue at which Latin American civil society can lodge a coordinated regional position on a substantive question of human-rights protection. The hearing was anchored on a joint technical contribution drafted by Derechos Digitales and joined by seventeen Latin American civil-society organisations, and on twelve named participating organisations who registered to speak at the 90-minute hearing window. The campaign's substantive carry-through into the Inter-American human-rights system was decisive on its own terms: the Commission converted the hearing from a one-off venue into a standing request that civil society submit multistakeholder recommendations on artificial intelligence and human rights — the procedural lever through which the coalition's substantive Latin American position continues to feed Inter-American jurisprudence, the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression's parallel joint communiqué with the UN, and member-state-level advocacy across the region. This is the corpus's first campaign anchored in the Inter-American human-rights system and the first Latin American civil-society campaign on artificial intelligence specifically.

The coalition

The campaign was coordinated in drafting by Derechos Digitales, the Santiago-headquartered regional non-profit (in corpus) whose AI-and-human-rights programme had by early 2025 become the most developed Latin American civil-society research-and-advocacy line on the topic, and joined by sixteen further Latin American organisations as co-signatories of the joint technical contribution submitted to the Commission ahead of the hearing. The seventeen-organisation roster (per TEDIC's coalition account) operated as the working Latin American civil-society coalition vehicle at the hearing, but the registered speakers at the 90-minute session were a twelve-organisation subset of named participants — recorded by Fundación Vía Libre's English-language post — as Article 19 Mexico and Central America Office, the Human Rights Centre at the Faculty of Law of the Universidad de Chile, the Centro de Estudios en Derecho, Tecnología y Sociedad (CEDETyS), the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) (Argentina), Democracia en Red (Argentina), Derechos Digitales (the coalition's coordinator), Fundación Vía Libre (Argentina), the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), the Observatorio de Derecho Informático Argentino (ODIA), the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS, Brazil), the Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D, Mexico), and the Red Feminista de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial Nodo Latinoamérica (the F<A+I>r Latin American Hub). TEDIC (Paraguay) registered as an observer and contributed the EmpleaPY case-study evidence anchoring the Paraguayan portion of the substantive submission.

The coalition shape — a regional convening role held by Derechos Digitales coordinating a multi-country roster of national civil-society organisations and one academic legal centre, with thematic anchoring on the Al Sur consortium's pre-existing AI working group and on the Red Feminista de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial Latin American Hub's feminist-AI track — is the working Latin American digital-rights field's coalition template for Inter-American advocacy. The same nucleus operates across multiple Inter-American and UN files: Derechos Digitales and Coding Rights (Brazil, queued for full corpus draft) anchor the Al Sur consortium's AI line, the F<A+I>r Latin American Hub anchors the feminist-AI register that runs through Derechos Digitales' own 2022 guide Towards a feminist framework for AI development, and the Argentine cluster (CELS, Democracia en Red, Vía Libre, ODIA) supplies the predictive-policing and surveillance-technology empirical record that the hearing's intervention drew on.

The hearing

The hearing was held virtually on Zoom with real-time Spanish-English-Portuguese interpretation, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Washington DC time on 7 March 2025, and broadcast live on the Commission's social channels. The Commission identified it on its own record (Hearing 3807) as the fifth in its regional thematic-hearing series on artificial intelligence and human rights — the standing IACHR vehicle through which the Commission's commissioners and rapporteurs receive coordinated regional positions on a substantive human-rights question. Commissioners Stuardo Ralón (chair of the hearing), Carlos Bernal, and Gloria de Mees presided alongside Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression Pedro Vaca, whose office's mandate on AI and freedom of expression made the hearing structurally adjacent to the Rapporteur's parallel UN Joint Communiqué track.

The session's structural format follows the Commission's regional thematic-hearing template: short opening statements from each named registered organisation across the 90-minute window, commissioner questions, and a procedural closing remark naming the Commission's intended follow-up. The format gave each of the twelve named participating organisations approximately four to five minutes of speaking time, which the coalition's drafting had been calibrated to: the joint technical contribution carried the substantive evidence-base and the formal recommendations in writing, while the speaking interventions anchored particular threads of that evidence-base in named state-deployment cases and in the substantive register the coalition wanted on the public record.

The joint contribution and substantive register

The campaign's substantive register — recorded in the joint technical contribution PDF submitted in Spanish to the Commission, in TEDIC's English-language account of the coalition's coordinating frame, and in the published intervention summaries from Fundación Vía Libre, Article 19, and R3D — organises around three connected threads.

The first is the data-colonialism / extractivism frame: the asymmetry between the Global North-headquartered AI industry, which captures most of the value generated by AI development and deployment, and the Global South publics, whose lives are increasingly shaped by AI systems they have neither democratic say in nor effective accountability mechanisms against. The frame is anchored on a substantive register Latin American civil society has developed over a decade of work in the Al Sur consortium, the LAVITS (Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology and Society) convening circuit, and Coding Rights's feminist-decolonial public communications, and is recorded in msg-data-colonialism (queued in the messages slice) as the corpus's principal Global-South critique register. The joint contribution argues that without an explicit Inter-American human-rights-system frame on this asymmetry, the Commission's AI-and-human-rights work will reproduce US and European framings into Spanish and Portuguese, missing the structural shape of the question for Latin American publics.

The second is grounded empirical evidence on state and corporate AI deployments across the region. The joint contribution drew on the named cases: the Paraguayan Ministry of Labour's EmpleaPY employment platform (an Inter-American Development Bank-supported automated job-allocation tool deployed without prior data-protection impact analysis in a country lacking specific data-protection legislation, anchored on TEDIC's investigation); the Mexican deployment of facial-recognition technologies in public space (R3D's principal case and the substantive ground of R3D's intervention demanding the prohibition of AI in video surveillance); the Argentine predictive-policing and protest-identification cases (the substantive ground of Fundación Vía Libre's intervention on the use of surveillance technologies based on predictive algorithms by state actors and the criminalisation of dissent); the Chilean Ministry of Social Development and Family's Sistema Alerta Niñez predictive-risk algorithm for child-rights violations (recorded in detail in Derechos Digitales's IA e inclusión: Sistema Alerta Niñez); and parallel cases in Colombia (justice administration), Brazil (job allocation), and Uruguay (public-health management), each recorded in Derechos Digitales's Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina (in corpus). Derechos Digitales' broader 2024 regional chapter on AI and human rights — Inteligencia artificial, derechos humanos y justicia social, published in March 2025 in time for the hearing — was distributed to commissioners as part of the coalition's intervention package and supplied the regional evidence-base across the named cases.

The third is the substantive recommendation track to the Inter-American human-rights system. The joint contribution argues that ethical guidelines on AI, while necessary, are insufficient on their own; that state obligations under inter-American standards require regulatory frameworks anchored in human rights at all stages of AI development and deployment; that algorithmic opacity and discriminatory biases against vulnerable populations are incompatible with the rights to equality and non-discrimination the inter-American system protects; that meaningful participation, transparency, and accountability mechanisms are preconditions for any human-rights-compatible AI deployment; and that human-rights impact assessments must be conducted before AI is deployed in public services, with the assessment evidence made public and contestable. The recommendation framing is calibrated to the Inter-American system's own working vocabulary on state obligations, and is the register the Commission's subsequent multistakeholder-recommendations track has continued to draw on.

The Commission's response

The Commission's procedural response, named in the hearing's closing remarks and recorded on TEDIC's coalition account, was to convert the hearing from a one-off venue into a sustained Inter-American process by requesting that civil society submit multistakeholder recommendations on artificial intelligence and human rights. The request is itself politically meaningful in the Inter-American civil-society register: regional thematic hearings under the IACHR's 192nd Period of Sessions are politically expensive — they require sustained multi-country coalition mobilisation across a region with no shared legislature, formal procedural compliance with the Commission's hearing-application regime, and continuous coordination across organisations operating in Spanish, Portuguese, and English — and the substantive demand they package is in practice rarely answered by the Commission with a sustained follow-up track. The Commission's request that civil society return with multistakeholder recommendations converted the campaign's investment in the hearing into a continuing Inter-American process that subsequent civil-society advocacy continues to feed.

The most legible follow-up artefact on the public record is the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression's joint communiqué with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression on artificial intelligence and freedom of expression (OAS Press Release 089/2025). The joint communiqué — issued by RELE Rapporteur Pedro Vaca and his UN counterpart — recognises the substantive concerns the coalition's contribution had named, frames the design, development, and deployment of AI as work that must be firmly anchored in international human-rights law and in national legislation aligned with it, and supplies the bridging artefact through which the Inter-American AI-and-human-rights register travels onto the UN Human Rights Council record. The two Rapporteurs' joint communiqué is the campaign's clearest piece of evidence that the Commission's AI-and-human-rights register has been moved by the coalition's intervention.

Travel onto adjacent records

The campaign's substantive register travels onto adjacent records in three directions in the corpus. First, the coalition's working Latin American civil-society field is anchored by the Al Sur consortium's eleven-organisation membership (ADC, CELE, Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, Karisma, Hiperderecho, IDEC, IPANDETEC, InternetLab, R3D, TEDIC), several of whom — Derechos Digitales, Coding Rights, R3D, TEDIC — were directly involved in the hearing's coalition. The Al Sur consortium's pre-existing AI working group supplied much of the coordination infrastructure on which the seventeen-organisation joint contribution was drafted, and the consortium's Charles Stewart Mott Foundation grant (made with Derechos Digitales as fiscal sponsor) underwrote the regional advocacy capacity the coalition deployed at the hearing.

Second, the campaign's funding context is anchored on Ford Foundation support for Derechos Digitales through the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience — a Ford-Foundation-anchored Global-South digital-resilience network of which Derechos Digitales is one of seven inaugural member organisations, alongside Co-Creation Hub (Nigeria), CIPESA (Uganda), Fundación Acceso (Costa Rica), NUPEF Institute (Brazil), SMEX (Lebanon), and SocialTIC (Mexico). The network's $15 million seed-funding commitment — announced at the Internet Governance Forum 2023 — supplied the institutional underwriting Derechos Digitales drew on for its 2024–2025 AI-and-human-rights coalition work. The funding shape — Global-North foundation support for Global-South digital-resilience infrastructure with a regional anchor organisation acting as fiscal sponsor — is itself an instance of the substantive Global North–Global South asymmetry the coalition's contribution names, and the coalition's working position is that the Ford-Foundation-funded Global-South network is the form of cross-hemispheric civil-society infrastructure that can address the asymmetry without reproducing it.

Third, the campaign's named civil-society voices anchor the cross-references onto adjacent corpus entities. Derechos Digitales Co-Executive Director Jamila Venturini (in corpus, Brazilian journalist-activist) is one of the named public voices through whose interventions the coalition's substantive register travels onto the wider regional and global record. The corpus's broader Latin American digital-rights field — anchored on Derechos Digitales and Coding Rights, with pub-decisiones-automatizadas-america-latina as the comparative-research backbone — extends through this hearing into the formal record of the Inter-American human-rights system.

Tactics and posture

Over the drafting cycle preceding the hearing and through the standing follow-up track since, the campaign has settled into a recognisable repertoire that Latin American civil-society advocacy in Inter-American fora has continued to draw on. A regional drafting coordinator (Derechos Digitales) ran the joint contribution's substantive editing across the seventeen-organisation roster, drawing on the Al Sur consortium's pre-existing AI working group infrastructure and the F<A+I>r Latin American Hub's feminist-AI track. National civil-society organisations carried the empirical evidence from their domestic-state AI-deployment monitoring into the joint contribution (TEDIC on EmpleaPY in Paraguay, R3D on facial-recognition deployment in Mexico, Vía Libre and CELS on predictive-policing and surveillance technologies in Argentina, Derechos Digitales on the Chilean Sistema Alerta Niñez and the regional comparative cases). The twelve-organisation registered-speaker subset spread the speaking time across the four to five-minute window each registered organisation was allocated, with the joint technical contribution carrying the substantive register in writing for the Commission's continuing reference. A parallel public-facing communications strategy — TEDIC's English-language coalition account, Article 19's and R3D's Spanish-language posts, Fundación Vía Libre's bilingual write-up, and Derechos Digitales's LinkedIn and social-media communications — translated the substantive Latin American position into a working public-record artefact in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. And the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression's parallel UN-RELE Joint Communiqué track converted the hearing's substantive register into a UN-and-Inter-American-system bridging artefact within a few weeks of the hearing itself.

Significance for the broader AI-good movement

The campaign matters to the wider make-AI-good movement on five connected counts. First, it is the corpus's first campaign anchored in the Inter-American human-rights system and the first Latin American civil-society campaign on artificial intelligence specifically — closing two entity-type gaps in the corpus's campaigns slice at once. Until this entry the corpus had Brussels-institutional coalition coordination on the EU AI Act, Stop Killer Robots multilateral UN advocacy on autonomous weapons, Big Brother Watch's UK national coalition on live facial recognition, and EDRi's pan-European Reclaim Your Face Citizens' Initiative, but no Inter-American or Latin American campaign of any kind, and no campaign anchored on a regional human-rights body outside the EU institutional setting.

Second, the campaign supplied the substantive Latin American civil-society vocabulary — the data-colonialism and Global North–Global South asymmetry register, the predictive-policing and AI-in-video-surveillance prohibition framing, the state-AI-deployment human-rights impact-assessment recommendation track — that subsequent regional and national advocacy across the region continues to draw on. The register is recorded as the corpus's principal Latin American AI message in msg-data-colonialism (queued in the messages slice) and operates as the field's working Spanish- and Portuguese-language alternative to the dominant US and European framings.

Third, the campaign's organising form — a regional drafting coordinator (Derechos Digitales) coordinating a multi-country roster of national civil-society organisations and one feminist-AI thematic network, drawing on the Al Sur consortium's pre-existing infrastructure and the Ford-Foundation-anchored Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience for institutional underwriting — is the working template that subsequent Latin American civil-society campaigning on AI and platform regulation has continued to draw on. The same nucleus of organisations now operates across the Inter-American Commission, the OAS Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, the UN Human Rights Council, and UNESCO's AI Ethics processes.

Fourth, the campaign's conversion of a 90-minute regional hearing into a sustained multistakeholder-recommendations track demonstrates the political logic of the Inter-American thematic-hearing vehicle: hearings are politically catalytic rather than procedurally decisive in their own right, and the substantive carry-through depends on the Commission's standing follow-up request and on the coalition's investment in feeding it. The Reclaim Your Face campaign's own post-mortem on the limits of the European Citizens' Initiative mechanism is the closest structural analogue in the corpus, and the two campaigns together supply a paired procedural-toolkit reference for civil-society campaigning on EU and Inter-American institutional vehicles respectively.

Fifth, the campaign's substantive register and the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression's parallel UN-RELE joint communiqué supply the bridging artefact through which the Inter-American AI-and-human-rights position travels onto the wider international civil-society record. The bridging shape — a regional civil-society coalition contribution to a regional human-rights body, paired with the regional Special Rapporteur's parallel coordination with the UN Special Rapporteur on the same substantive question — is the working architecture the field uses on AI-and-human-rights advocacy across regional human-rights systems globally, and the corpus's Inter-American instance is its principal Latin American case.

Cross-references on the Latin American AI-and-human-rights register run in three directions in the corpus. Derechos Digitales and Coding Rights anchor the regional organisational coalition; pub-decisiones-automatizadas-america-latina anchors the comparative-research evidence-base; and voice-jamila-venturini anchors the named public-voice register through which the substantive position travels. The corpus's broader regional-human-rights-system register sits adjacent to the Stop Killer Robots autonomous-weapons treaty campaign (multilateral UN-system advocacy on a different substantive question) and the Big Brother Watch UK Stop Live Facial Recognition coalition (single-jurisdiction national advocacy on a substantively adjacent question), illustrating how the civil-society coalition machinery operates across substantive questions and regional institutional venues.