Soheil Human Contributes to Advancing Children’s Rights from Principles to Practice Worldwide as ISO/TC 356 Member

We are happy to announce that Dr. Soheil Human has been appointed Austria's (ASI) Delegate to the newly established ISO Committee 356 on Children's Rights Management. He is also a member of Committee 265 "Governance and Compliance", the Austrian national mirror committee for ISO/TC 356. His appointment places him in an important position within a new international standardization effort that seeks to translate children's rights into more concrete governance, management, and implementation frameworks.

The establishment of ISO/TC 356 is highly significant. It reflects growing international recognition that children's rights require not only legal and ethical commitment, but also operational structures, shared vocabularies, and implementable standards. In practice, questions of protection, provision, participation, accountability, and child-centred governance increasingly arise across institutions, services, and socio-technical systems. A committee devoted specifically to Children's Rights Management therefore marks an important step toward making children's rights more actionable across organizational and policy settings.

It is especially important that Soheil Human is part of this process. His work brings together children's rights and children's needs - a combination that is essential whenever rights are interpreted, assessed, or implemented in real-world settings. A child-centred approach cannot rely on abstract rights language alone. It must also ask what children need for protection, development, participation, and flourishing, how these needs can be recognized, and how they can be represented responsibly where direct articulation is limited. This is crucial in situations in which infants and younger children cannot easily voice their needs directly, and equally important when institutions must distinguish between immediate preferences, deeper needs, and long-term developmental considerations.

This perspective matters profoundly in work on the child's best interests and on neglect. Best-interests reasoning is often invoked as a guiding principle, yet in practice it can remain underspecified unless institutions are able to connect it to scientifically informed and developmentally sensitive understandings of children's needs. Neglect, similarly, is not only a matter of visible harm; it can also involve chronic under-satisfaction, misrecognition, or institutional invisibility of what a child needs to develop and flourish. A standardization process that aims to shape the management of children's rights benefits enormously from expertise that can move between normative principles and concrete questions of assessment, evidence, representation, and accountability.

This is particularly timely in digital and digitally mediated contexts. Children's lives are increasingly shaped by platforms, data infrastructures, algorithmic systems, and digital services. At the same time, digital tools are becoming more present in assessments, communication processes, and institutional decision settings that affect children. For that reason, children's rights today cannot be addressed adequately without considering digital environments and digitally mediated assessments. Soheil Human's work is especially relevant here because it addresses both children's rights in digital contexts and the bounded use of digital tools in other child-related settings. This includes questions of digital protection, child digital needs, age-appropriate participation, best-interest reasoning, and the risks of neglect or developmental under-satisfaction when digital systems shape how children's situations are interpreted.

Dr. Human’s profile is distinguished by a rare and highly relevant interdisciplinary background. It spans cognitive science and information systems, while also engaging broader epistemological perspectives and the sociology of science and technology. This combination enables him to work not only on technological systems and governance arrangements, but also on the deeper questions of knowledge, interpretation, representation, and responsibility that arise when institutions claim to act for children. It is precisely this kind of interdisciplinary range that is needed in an international committee operating at the intersection of children's rights, governance, standardization, and digital transformation.

Across his academic and research work, Soheil Human has developed a strong agenda around human- and child-centred digital transformation, needs-aware AI, digital protection, and rights-sensitive socio-technical design. His work exemplifies how children's rights can be taken seriously not only as legal or ethical commitments, but also as matters of design, governance, assessment, and implementation. This makes his role in ISO/TC 356 especially important at a moment when emerging international standards must be capable of addressing both children's rights and children's needs - including in environments where care, communication, risk evaluation, and institutional judgment are increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures.

We warmly congratulate Dr. Human on this appointment. His participation in ISO/TC 356 creates an important opportunity to help shape international standards in a way that is interdisciplinary, scientifically grounded, and attentive to the realities of children's lives. We are especially pleased to see this contribution positioned where it is most urgently needed: at the intersection of children’s rights, children’s needs, digital environments, digitally mediated assessments, best interests, neglect, and the everyday institutional and lived realities that shape children’s lives.

Finally, this development also reflects the broader trajectory and impact of our institute’s work. It demonstrates how sustained, interdisciplinary basic research can extend beyond academic contexts to contribute meaningfully at the level of international standardization and global governance. The appointment underscores the capacity to translate foundational research into frameworks that shape policy, institutional practice, and real-world outcomes for children across diverse settings.