human rights for the digital era.
Digital technologies, and AI in particular, are advancing at extraordinary speed. Yet the legal and policy frameworks needed to guide these transformations are developing far more slowly. The Center’s research and initiatives help bridge that gap, steering technology toward global rights and justice.
COMPASS: Commons on Machines, Policy,
Automation, and Society.
COMPASS is an initiative dedicated to bridging the growing gap between rapidly advancing AI and the legal, ethical, and policy frameworks needed to govern it.
The name captures our purpose. A compass does not offer a finished map; it provides orientation. In a moment of profound uncertainty about where powerful technologies are taking us, COMPASS offers rigorous, collaborative guidance to help individuals, institutions, and societies navigate the terrain ahead.
COMPASS brings together an interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners spanning law, the social sciences, technology, the natural sciences, design, journalism, and civic leadership. Critically, we are committed to a model of inclusion that goes beyond established expert circles. The perspectives of grassroots organizations, Global South actors, and communities worldwide are central to it.
COMPASS treats AI and digital automation as what they are: powerful tools built by human beings that must serve human and planetary well-being. Our work spans the full range of technology’s societal effects — legal and economic, but also cultural, ecological, and existential — and translates interdisciplinary insight into actionable policy guidance, frameworks, and public resources available to all.
advancing the global debate on the human rights implications of technology.
The Digital Welfare State and Human Rights Project was launched in 2019 to investigate how the introduction of new technologies into social protection systems around the world were being used to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target, and punish — rather than to advance human rights. Through research and knowledge-sharing, and through convening human rights organizations with technical experts, the Center advanced a global debate on the human rights implications of “digital welfare states.”
Through this interview and blog series, the Center has built a repository of dozens of case studies at the intersection of digital government and human rights, featuring video recordings, summary blogs, transcripts, and many additional reading materials.
This initiative seeks to understand and address the impacts of digital ID and other forms of “digital public infrastructure” on poor and marginalized groups, through research, action, and network-building.
This initiative brings cutting-edge research by the Center and its partners into policy and decision-making spheres, including the United Nations, the World Bank Group, national governments, and standards-setting bodies.
Launched in 2023, this initiative explores the significant environmental costs that are being obscured and ignored as governments embrace digital transformation.
Through research, events, policy work, and a community of practice, we draw attention to the implications of governments’ deployment of Artificial Intelligence.
From 2017 to 2020, the Global Justice Clinic partnered with the Robert L. Bernstein Institute for Human Rights and Technology Law and Policy Clinic and with Amnesty International to launch this groundbreaking research to investigate legal accountability measures to address the state surveillance of human rights defenders.
