human rights for the digital era.
Digital technologies have and will continue to transform the world we live in, raising the risk of serious harm and rights abuses through their many potential applications. At the Center, we focus especially on the deployment of technologies by governments, given that the “sharpening” of state power through new technologies has been a crucial site for the exacerbation of inequalities and marginalization.
How do we ensure that new technologies are used to safeguard human rights rather than to violate them? As governments deploy digitalized approaches to governance, how do we ensure that no one is excluded? What kinds of digital infrastructures can enable a more equitable and inclusive future?
The Center launched the Digital Welfare State and Human Rights Project 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, we have been advancing a global debate on the human rights implications of “digital welfare states.” But, though large-scale government digitalization initiatives are consistently tested first in welfare programs, governments everywhere are now embracing “digital transformation” across all areas of government. The Center is exploring the implications of these “transformations” across several strands of work.
ongoing projects
Project
‘Transformer States’: Webinar Series & Information Hub on Digital Government
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.
Project
Everyone Counts Initiative: Digital ID & Exclusion
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.
Project
Advancing Accountability
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.
Project
The Hidden Environmental Costs of Government Digital Transformation
Launched in 2023, this initiative explores the significant environmental costs that are being obscured and ignored as governments embrace digital transformation.
Project
Artificial Intelligence in the Digital State
Through research, events, policy work, and a community of practice, we draw attention to the implications of governments’ deployment of Artificial Intelligence.
technologies to safeguard human rights
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 a groundbreaking research to investigate legal accountability measures to address the state surveillance of human rights defenders.
