TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Advancing Accountability

Throughout our lines of work, we aim to bring our research and that of our partners and peers to the attention of governments, international organizations, and human rights accountability mechanisms. Our starting point is that a better understanding of the human rights implications of digital government should inform the policies and decision-making of governments and international organizations. 

  • We seek out varied avenues and fora at different scales of governance, to bring human rights concerns surrounding digitalization into specific policy and decision-making spheres.
  • We center a comparative, international perspective grounded in human rights, focusing especially on the rights of the most marginalized. 
  • We seek especially to highlight important parallels between the human rights implications of digital government across varied contexts all around the world.
  • We translate human rights concerns into recommendations for technical bodies, including technical standard-setting bodies, to make equity and rights considerations legible to the communities who are designing digital technologies.

Our work on the digital state and human rights originated in pioneering work undertaken during Philip Alston‘s mandate as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Since then, we have engaged UN human rights accountability mechanisms, several other international organizations, national government bodies, and national courts, to bring comparative evidence and expertise on digitalization and human rights to bear in many different policy fora.