Summary

  • Europe's proposed revision of ITU Resolution 179 adds explicit protection for personally identifiable information when child online-protection statistics are produced and compared.
  • It also asks the ITU to consider children's rights through public consultations in its child-protection work and invites states to take children's views into account in digital-rights policy.

There are two easy ways to mishandle a child-safety survey: ignore what young people say, or keep enough detail to work out who said it. Europe's contribution to the 2026 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference addresses both risks in addendum 33, a proposed revision of Resolution 179 on child online protection. The draft brings children's rights considerations into public consultations on ITU activities and asks governments to hear children when developing policies that affect their rights online.

The 2022 version of Resolution 179 already had a youth channel. It asked Member States to improve the number of young people responding to the Council Working Group on Child Online Protection's consultations. It also called for sex- and age-disaggregated statistics that could guide policy and allow country comparisons. Europe's draft keeps those functions and adds a plain condition to the statistical method and national data request: personally identifiable information must be protected. The older text sought more comparable evidence; the revision puts an explicit boundary around the identities behind it.

The participation clause is more than a call for a larger survey sample. The Secretary-General and the three Bureaux would consider relevant children's rights through public consultations when developing or carrying out ITU child online-protection activities. Member States are invited to ensure children's views enter policies about their digital rights. The result is a testable chain: young people speak, a policy paper records what was heard, and its next version explains the decision.

Delegates will decide the revision at the 2026 conference. The draft does not prescribe a database design or a single retention period. Those operational choices will surface in the methodology that ITU-D circulates and in national statistical practice. A useful child-safety indicator should reveal a pattern to policymakers without turning a child into a searchable record.

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