Council of EuropeAI regulation

Regulation Status

• As a treaty-making body the Council of Europe produces a binding international AI convention and supporting guidance for states to ratify and implement, rather than directly regulating at national level.
• The Council of Europe is a standard-setting and human-rights body, not a national regulator; it adopted the Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law (CETS No. 225) in May 2024, the first international legally binding treaty on AI, opened for signature in September 2024.
• Signatories have grown to 18, including Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Uruguay (the first Latin American signatory) and Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the European Commission has proposed concluding the Convention for the EU through its AI Act.
• The Council has issued accompanying non-binding tools, including the HUDERIA methodology (2024) and HUDERIA Model (2026), policy guidelines on AI and algorithm-driven discrimination (2026), and revised draft guidelines on privacy and data protection for LLM-based systems (2026).