The Unforgivable Silence of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on AI: The General Comment No. 27

By Javier Surasky

On 6 November 2025, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) adopted its General Comment No. 27 (2025), “on economic, social and cultural rights and the environmental dimension of sustainable development.” It is a highly relevant document, but one with an unacceptable gap.

The Comment can be seen as a normative step forward, as it addresses the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment in an interconnected manner within the framework of human rights. But that progress is accompanied by a structural deficiency: the document completely omits the role of digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI).

When governance of AI for Good or AI for Sustainable Development (AI for SD) is discussed, the centrality of human rights norms in the design of regulation or institutions for these new technologies is consistently emphasized. How can we move in that direction if the human rights field itself does not provide the necessary reception?

Although digital technologies hold a central position in environmental governance and the global economy, they also pose new human rights challenges ranging from privacy protection to questions of identity. Yet, their absence from the Comment is almost total. This reinforces an unjustifiable conceptual vacuum that undermines the drafters' effort to provide a holistic view of environmental crises.

AI consumes massive amounts of energy and water, drives demand that fuels highly polluting mining chains, contributes to climate governance decisions, and has its models and algorithms applied to the study of climate phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to analyze. AI also affects States' capacity to plan for, mitigate, and adapt to the effects of climate change. Additionally, electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest-growing sources of pollution worldwide.

The General Comment discusses unsustainable economic models, the impacts of private companies on human rights and the environment, and structural inequalities.
Faced with all this, we must ask: how can we explain the CESCR’s silence on digital technologies and AI?

Issues such as the manufacture of digital hardware—which depends on extractivism that has sparked political and armed conflicts over natural resources —and a dangerous geopolitical competition between the United States and China for access to lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements were overlooked, while unsustainable production and consumption models were criticized.

Nor does the Comment address algorithmic risks that threaten the enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights. Automated decision-making already influences the distribution of climate assistance, the assessment of environmental hazards, the surveillance of territories inhabited by Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders, and the prioritization of mitigation measures.

These algorithms, like all others, are subject to biases that erase knowledge and entire communities—often those who have historically been “guardians of the Earth”—and thus reinforce epistemologies of environmental inequality.

The General Comment outlines no State obligations regarding any of these elements: it does not require digital or algorithmic impact assessments, nor does it recognize that contemporary climate governance relies on a digital infrastructure lacking global regulation—one that leaves the hands of powerful transnational corporations free to “drive” the development of AI under logics that rarely prioritize human rights.

The Comment’s silence is even more striking given that AI and big data are already integral to climate scenario modelling, forest management, biodiversity monitoring, disaster prediction, and many other matters closely related to those addressed in the document. By failing to acknowledge the structural role of digital technologies in these processes, the CESCR ends up viewing environmental governance through the lens of the past, disregarding the accelerated digitalization that frames all current ecological and human rights issues. Paradoxically, the CESCR—whose role is to interpret the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in light of contemporary challenges—turns a blind eye to what is arguably the most transformative vector of sustainable development and the most pressing form of environmental inequality today.

To make matters worse, this omission is out of step with recent trends across various UN bodies and processes that have begun to explicitly integrate the technological dimension: the Pact for the Future, the UN Global Initiative on AI Governance, and reports of the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment.

The consequences of this gap are far-reaching: it creates a landscape in which emerging risks to economic, social, and cultural rights remain unaddressed; leaves States without guidance on regulating the behavior of technologically powerful actors in human rights and environmental matters; and introduces inconsistency within the UN system itself. Equally serious, it weakens those advocating for AI development grounded in respect for human rights. Why should AI actors pay attention to human rights if the system’s leading bodies do not pay attention to AI?

In the wake of General Comment No. 27, it has become imperative for the CESCR to produce—from an interpretative note to a new General Comment—guidance that integrates the environmental footprint of digitalization, the responsibility of technology companies, environmental algorithmic justice and limits on digital surveillance of environmental defenders in vulnerable territories, while also ensuring that algorithms involved in environmental decision-making are auditable, transparent and subject to public oversight.

General Comment No. 27 is, in many ways, a solid document capable of driving new environmental progress. But on digital technologies, it falls short of standards already introduced at the regional level.

The Inter-American human rights system, for example, has addressed the issue in cases such as Lhaka Honhat v. Argentina (2020) and Berta Cáceres (2021), and in 2025 the Inter-American Court issued its Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 on “Climate Emergency and Human Rights.”

The European system has the most precedents. A notable example is the recent Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland judgment of 9 April 2024, where the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held that Switzerland’s failure to act on climate change violated the rights to private and family life and to access to justice. A few years earlier, in 2020, the Council of Europe had already adopted its Recommendation on AI and Human Rights, which establishes that AI used in environmental contexts must be subject to human rights impact assessments.

There can be no just, rights-based environmental transition if the role of AI in producing, reproducing, and deepening environmental inequalities is ignored. Failing to consider these elements is a strategic error that weakens international human rights law’s capacity to confront an increasingly digitalized environmental landscape.

The CESCR must quickly understand that, without firm safeguards, AI could turn the economic, social, and cultural rights of all into algorithmic privileges for a few—a catalyst for human rights violations and planet devastation at the same time.