Global South civil society coalition issues joint statement demanding AI governance floor at UN Dialogue

The policy group CIPESA, which works on information and communications technology in East and Southern Africa, has published a joint statement. Its authors are the Global Digital Justice Forum (GDJF), plus the Global South Alliance (GSA), and CIPESA is a member of both. The statement, dated July 2026, was issued ahead of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and CIPESA says it matches concerns it has raised in its own research and policy work; that work includes a review of AI governance trends in 14 African countries.

The statement argues that a handful of US and Chinese corporations dominate AI systems and control more than 90% of global AI data center capacity. It says the costs of this arrangement fall mainly on the Global South, through low-valued labor used to train models and through minerals, land, energy and water. The two groups describe the emerging AI order as lacking legitimacy.

GDJF and GSA urge the Global Dialogue to commit to five points. These are to end what they call AI extractivism and adopt a precautionary approach; to apply the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities in international AI cooperation; and to address corporate impunity, including a global moratorium on systems that endanger human rights, naming spyware, social scoring, AI-driven autonomous weapons and remote biometric recognition, and prompt adoption of the UN treaty on corporate accountability that is under proposal. They also call for a data governance framework that recognizes development sovereignty and protects collective privacy, and for a global public compute facility, described as a possible CERN for AI, that would serve researchers in developing countries.

It ends by saying the present course fails the majority. CIPESA also links to the April 2026 submissions each group made to official consultations.