The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice’s “Transformer States” series explores the digital transformation of the State and its impacts on the lives and rights of individuals, through in-depth interviews with practitioners and academics working on digital government and through blog posts by practitioners and scholars.
As governments around the world implement “digital transformation” strategies, this series of interviews and blog posts draws attention to varied and indicative cases of the problems which can arise when governments’ digitalization efforts follow certain logics and move in certain directions.The series is guided by a set of central questions. What are the promises of digital transformation? What political ideals and motives are propelling these developments and who is involved in driving and producing these digital transformations? What human rights concerns have already emerged and are to be expected? And, what can and should be the response of the human rights movement, but also of governments, legislators, courts, and wider civil society, to ensure that digital government lives up to its promises and protects and fulfills the human rights of all?
Each episode in our series of conversations features an in-depth interview with a practitioner or academic who is undertaking cutting-edge research or advocacy on the digital transformation of government. We examine case studies as varied as: the exclusionary effects of digital ID in Kenya, “digital-by-default” welfare benefits in the United Kingdom, and the Social Credit system in China.
A curated series of blog posts accompanies these interviews, written by practitioners and scholars alike. These blogs explore critical issues arising from digital government transformations around the world, covering topics such as the monitoring of disability benefit recipients’ social media accounts in the United States and the Bolsa Família system in Brazil.
The aim of this series is not only to allow participants to become better acquainted with topics at the intersection of digital government and human rights, but also to create an accessible, open-access repository of information and resources. You can therefore find below the recorded conversations, event summaries accompanied by transcripts and additional reading materials, and the blog series. We hope that the materials on this webpage can serve as a hub for information and exchange.
Please contact Victoria Adelmant if you have any questions about the series or if you are interested in publishing a blog.
The first conversation in our Transformer States series explored Universal Credit, the UK’s digitalized benefits program through which claims for financial support are made online, calculations are automated, among other digital innovations. Through this conversation, we aim to better understand the functioning of Universal Credit, its underlying design philosophy, its promises, its implementation issues and what this means for the future of digital welfare.
In the second Transformer States conversation author and activist Nanjala Nyabola discussed the recent digital transformation of government identification in Kenya through its Huduma Namba digital ID system. While digital ID systems promise to include those who previously remained ‘unseen’ by the state, along with a range of other purported benefits, what has been the impact on individuals and groups who have long been marginalized and discriminated against in Kenya?
Read a recap of of our conversation about digital ID in Kenya.
In the third Transformer States conversation, Dr. Eve Vincent, anthropologist and senior lecturer at Macquarie University, discussed a series of trials by the Australian government of delivering welfare benefits through a Cashless Debit Card which “quarantines” a significant part of a recipient’s benefit income on an electronic card. These trials have been mostly targeted at areas with a high proportion of indigenous residents, and explicitly intend to curb alcohol, gambling and tobacco use, as well as other forms of behavior which are perceived as important causes of poverty and abuse.
Read a recap of our conversation about the debit card trials in Australia.
This conversation explored one of the largest and earliest foundational digital ID systems in the world, Aadhaar in India. With over 1.2 billion people enrolled, and with the ID linked to an increasingly wide range of services, we examined this scheme that is held up by proponents of digital ID as an example for other countries to follow. We explored the government justifications for building this system, including what has been termed by some as the ‘welfare façade’, the (false) promise of inclusivity and welfare enhancement, and contrast such promises with evidence of severe exclusion and hardship imposed on marginalized groups. Central to the conversation will be the vision of Aadhaar as generating data to be exploited as a ‘public good’ in India and how this relates to the promise of inclusivity. How have the private sector, as well as the World Bank and the wider United Nations system, contributed to this model of data exploitation?
Read a recap of our conversation about the digital ID in Aadhaar, India.
This conversation discussed Uganda’s ongoing program of digital government transformation which has been lauded a success story, with the World Bank finding that its biometric digital ID system rollout puts Uganda “in a different league of countries.” But on-the-ground qualitative research has shown that the Ugandan digital ID system, like those in many other countries, is deeply exclusionary: it is estimated that up to one-third of Uganda’s adult population is not included. The digital ID has raised barriers to accessing social protection and healthcare for older persons and pregnant women and, had the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights and others not litigated against the government’s plan to require authentication of the digital ID for access to the COVID-19 vaccine, significant proportions of the Ugandan population would also have been excluded from vaccines. Meanwhile, the digitalization of government in Uganda is consistently serving to exclude in other spheres, from social protection payments during the pandemic to the digitalization of education. How are socioeconomic rights NGOs responding to these trends? What challenges do such NGOs face in adapting to a new context of rights violations as governments embrace digitalization wholesale? And what is the role of human rights research and advocacy as against exclusion from digital government initiatives?
Read a recap of our conversation about adapting to digital governments.
In recent years, the European Union has been rapidly introducing new technologies into its border management processes, especially as it attempts to monitor and control movement before asylum-seekers and migrants reach its physical borders. New technologies are central to the EU’s efforts to surveil and control migration far beyond its physical borders. This includes the use of drone surveillance to facilitate interceptions and pushbacks of boats; computerized border guard avatars monitoring ‘micro-gestures’ to flag ‘high-risk’ passengers; and biometric scanning at the borders as well as in partner countries to identify and prevent certain individuals from traveling in the first place. This conversation will examine the human rights implications of the EU’s use of AI and other new technologies to shift its border control operations ever-further away from its territory and to screen for risk through prediction. What is the impact of these technologies on those seeking to move to the EU and their rights, and how might we enforce and invoke human rights when violations are geographically ‘outsourced’ in this way? As the EU is taking steps to regulate the use of AI within its borders, how might the important process of regulating the EU and its member states’ use of new technologies directed outside its borders be approached?
In April 2020, the Colombian government announced an unconditional cash transfer program to provide income to families who were deemed vulnerable to economic shocks caused by the pandemic. A mere 2 weeks after the scheme was launched, 3 million families were notified by SMS that they had been selected as eligible and received the funds directly into their bank accounts. Rather than having those in need apply themselves, the government independently chose eligible beneficiaries. The government did this by combining as much data as possible about its citizens, building a new master database from 34 public and private databases, including from private credit bureaus. This data had been collected for completely different purposes and, in some cases, without the knowledge of the included individuals. The master database was used to predict ‘income-generating capacity,’ using a secret algorithm, and thereby automatically determine who would be deserving of additional financial support during the pandemic. The Colombian approach poses a range of questions that are relevant far beyond its borders. Did it work? Who ultimately decided who was eligible, and might such decisions be democratically controlled? Is this a move away from a neoliberal model of ‘targeting’ social benefits, or its continuation in different form? What model of ‘datafied’ government is Colombia building within its welfare system, and how will it affect the human rights of the most marginalized?
Read a recap of our conversation about new approaches to social policy using algorithms.
Named the world’s “leading smart city,” Singapore has come to represent a future in which sensors, cameras, and other technologies are ubiquitous in mediating daily life. As excitement around smart cities grows around the world, this conversation will examine the treatment of low-income populations in Singapore to explore the dark side of these purported urban utopias. We will explore how, time and again, technologies are primarily deployed and tested first on populations living in poverty, at the margins of sanitized visions of the smart city. While reports of the surveillance of migrant workers by police robots in Singapore garnered international attention in 2020, this conversation will show that this is the tip of the iceberg. We will map how smart city infrastructure helps lay the foundations for an ever-growing constellation of data-collection technologies.
Read a recap about our conversations on the impacts of technology in the “smart city.”
The Chilean government, like many others, has deployed predictive modelling software to assess children’s risk of facing harm or abuse. The Childhood Alert System, an ‘early warning system’ based on algorithmic predictions, assigns ‘risk scores’ to children and adolescents. But, like many others, this system consistently and disproportionately focuses on low-income families and is deemed merely an exercise in ‘poverty profiling.’ This conversation will look at the implications of this system especially on children’s rights in Chile. We will examine how algorithmic risk prediction, far from being a neutral exercise, can stigmatize and criminalize families in poverty, exacerbate harmful interventions in children’s lives, and invisibilize other risks. We will ask, what does it mean to introduce predictive analytics into child welfare decisions, and what stories are these risk scores really telling?
Read our recap about the risks and impact of the algorithmic predictions in Chile.
A Dutch court ruled in 2020 that an algorithmic system for detecting fraud in the welfare system called ‘SyRI’ violated human rights and had to be stopped. The law allowed a potentially open-ended number of public authorities to share data and run this through a risk prediction model to flag individuals as potential fraudsters. This system had mainly been targeted at low-income neighborhoods where a significant part of the population has a migrant background. But this system was not the only one of its kind in the Netherlands. In January 2021, the Dutch government stepped down following the Child Benefit Scandal, which involved the algorithmic risk-profiling of beneficiaries on the basis of nationality. In this conversation, we will examine the origins, similarities and consequences of the SyRI litigation and Child Benefit Scandal. We will explore how such systems persist despite court rulings and political backlash, and form the mere tip of the iceberg of algorithmic government in the Netherlands.
Speakers: -Tamilla Abdul-Aliyeva, Senior Policy Advisor on Technology and Human Rights, Amnesty International
-Tijmen Wisman, Chairman of Platform Burgerrechten (Civil Rights Platform) Netherlands
Sweden is transitioning to cashlessness faster than any other country in the world. Many shops and restaurants declare themselves ‘cash-free zones,’ bus tickets often have to be bought via an app, and over half of bank branches no longer accept cash deposits. This rapid transition is causing serious exclusion across Swedish society, locking certain groups out of the economy and precluding them from accessing services. At the same time, banks are the main providers of the digital ID that people must use to access online government services in Sweden. In this conversation, we ask: what does the world’s most cashless society tell us about the human rights implications of cashlessness, from exclusion to increased private control over payments markets? And, as the Swedish government attempts to put brakes on these rapid developments through seeking to legally guarantee access to cash, we ask: what is the role of government within the transition to cashlessness?
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