Advancing digital rights in Europe
What we do
DFF funds three types of activities: litigation, pre-litigation, and post-litigation. We accept grant applications through regular calls for applications, which are announced on our grants page.
DFF facilitates events and develops resources to support organisations and individuals in pursuing litigation to advance digital rights.
Our Grantmaking Case Studies
BSWC are carrying out research looking at how the deplatforming and digital exclusion of Sex Workers—especially those who are Black, migrant, trans, and disabled—constitutes a violation of fundamental rights under...
TGEU will support efforts across multiple European countries to advance the rights of marginalised trans communities and their rights to recognition of private life in the EU – for many...
Reversing.works will identify the most effective legal strategy to litigate data protection violations affecting platform workers engaged through intermediaries in Germany’s food delivery sector. The research will strengthen litigation by:·...
Foxglove, with the Independent Publishers Alliance, is pushing UK and European competition regulators to intervene and stop Google from using AI tools to scrape the work of independent news reporters...
SLAPP Watch Coalition are involved in litigation to challenge blocking orders on a Kurdish-language news portal. The are aiming for a Constitutional Court or European Court of Human Rights ruling...
Urgence Homophobie is preparing strategic litigation to challenge systematic violations of trans refugees’ digital identity rights in France. According to Urgence Homophobie, in a context of full administrative digitalisation creating...
Coalition Margins are preparing a strategic legal response to the growing use of anonymous Facebook pages to orchestrate gender-based violence, hate speech, and coordinated attacks on civic activists in North...
Mousse are challenging the use of online forms requiring people to indicate whether they consider themselves to be ‘Mr’ or ‘Ms’, which allow public and private bodies to collect data...
Partners Serbia will implement a litigation and advocacy project that puts Serbia, and the Western Balkans, on a rights-centred path toward the EU Digital Single Market (DSM). In June 2024...
According to Human Rights Monitoring Institute (HRMI), in Lithuania in 2019, telecommunications companies were legally required to collect and store users’ personal communications data. This included information about who sent...
Our Community work
DFF develops resources, organises convenings, meetings and workshops that help to improve the strategic litigation skills of the community of organisations and individuals working on digital rights.
Our aim is to increase awareness of the potential of the EU Charter of fundamental rights in the defence and protection of digital rights, to conduct capacity building, and to strengthen the knowledge and ability of different stakeholders in enforcing digital rights using strategic litigation.
Resources
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News
From our blog
One year of community-led grant decision making – how it’s going so far
Illustration by Berenice Alvarez and Laura Lopez Throughout 2025 we piloted a new review and decision-making process for our grants with a group representing the wider digital rights community (the Peer Group). This new process seeks to move decision making
Generative AI and Gender-Based Violence in Europe: Trends, Risks and Regulatory Gaps
On March 5th 2026, the European Commission presented its new Gender Equality Strategy 2026-2030, acknowledging that AI-driven manipulation and online harassment are contributing to a rise in gender-based violence. The Commission notes the escalating spread of non-consensual intimate images as well
Launch of DFF’s Digital Democracy Hub: Human Rights Defenders Strategise For Strategic Litigation
For two days in February, human rights activists, journalists, legal experts, and litigators from Europe, Africa and the Americas defied the freezing temperatures of Berlin and were brought together by the Digital Freedom Fund (DFF) to reflect, brainstorm, and strategize on the