Summary

  • The Council of Europe's CDNET committee adopted two HUDERIA components on 23 October: a stakeholder engagement process and recommendations on roles and responsibilities through an AI project's life.
  • Its meeting drew 170 participants. The two components divide an old governance problem into two jobs: hear the people a system may affect, then make the people running it answer for decisions.

An empty chair can be as informative as a full conference room. The Council of Europe's CDNET plenary notice says 170 people attended in person or online in Strasbourg from 21 to 23 October. The committee adopted two additions to its HUDERIA model: the Stakeholder Engagement Process and Recommendations on Roles and Responsibilities in the AI Project Lifecycle. One asks whose experience reaches the risk assessment. The other asks whose hand stays on the wheel after the meeting ends.

The split is practical. A public agency testing an AI service can fill a room with officials, vendors and specialists while missing the people who will have to live with a wrong output. The existing HUDERIA methodology starts by mapping an AI system's context and possible effects on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Its engagement stage brings in potentially affected individuals identified by that analysis, with the form of involvement tailored to the risks. Those accounts help expose a harm that a project team might never see from its own desk.

Input, though, does not sign a decision. The new roles-and-responsibilities component addresses the other end of the chain: an AI project passes through design, deployment and review, with choices made at more than one point. The Council's short announcement names the component but does not yet publish its detailed assignments. The public test will be whether the finished guidance lets a project record who heard a concern, who decided what to do, and who checks whether that choice works after deployment. A guest at the consultation should not be left holding the risk register for the institution that invited them.

This is a committee decision within a defined mandate. The CDNET institutional page distinguishes government-designated representatives, observers, civil society and other participants; it describes the committee's intergovernmental work and its advice to the Committee of Ministers. The 170-person attendance figure describes the room, not the number of people who exercised adoption authority. The Committee of Ministers' terms of reference made both components priority deliverables for the end of 2026. Procurement guidance, interoperability clauses and an AI trends study remain on the workbench, according to the plenary notice.

HUDERIA guidance is designed for adaptation by public and private actors. The two adopted components give that flexibility a useful tension: participation should reveal the right facts, and an identified operator must carry those facts into a decision. The empty chair matters because someone may be missing. The signed decision matters because someone must own the answer.

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