Digital Freedom Fund – Winter 2025/2026 update on new grants
Digital Freedom Fund – Winter 2025/2026 update on new grants
In November 2025, we decided on our latest group of grant recipients, approving 13 grants worth EUR 370,000 supporting litigation to advance digital rights in Europe.
We’ve passed another major milestone: EUR 5 million!
That is EUR 5 million spread across nearly 150 grants to 90 groups since 2018.
This also represented the first time that all decisions were made by an external group representing the wider community rather than DFF. The use of this Community Peer Group is part of a pilot we are carrying out to transform our application review and grant decision-making process. We will soon share more reflections and updates about the next steps. For now you can check out this blog from earlier in 2025 co-written with members of the peer group reflecting on how the first phase of the pilot went.
The 13 latest grants were selected from a total of 73 applications, our most popular call for applications yet. This beat the previous highest amount of 59 applications earlier in 2025, and more than doubled our pre-2024 record of 34 applications.
The 73 applications were spread across 27 different countries. Germany and the UK had the most applications with eight applications each jurisdiction, followed by the Netherlands and North Macedonia with six applications each. Turkey and France had five applications, followed by Italy with four, then Austria and Poland with three each.
The 13 latest grants support litigation activities across 9 countries including France, Germany, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Turkey and the UK, alongside one multi-country project and another involving the European Commission. The largest grant amount this round was EUR 49,000 and the smallest grant amount was EUR 10,000.
New DFF Grants
The eight new grants supporting litigation are as follows.
- Association Accept is tackling online hate speech in Romania used against the LGBTQI+ community during elections.
- Association Mousse are building on a recent positive CJEU ruling to push for change in France about the required use of gender binary options on online forms, which allow public and private bodies to collect data relating to people’s gender identity.
- Foxglove are submitting complaints to UK and European competition regulators to intervene and stop Google from using AI tools to scrape the work of independent news reporters.
- Hungarian Helsinki Committee is seeking to stop the unlawful use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement.
- Challenging the sharing of sensitive information related to social security between government authorities.
- Partners Serbia are taking litigation against a Big Tech company for abuse of user data for AI training.
- SLAPP Watch Coalition is challenging the blocking of a Kurdish-language news outlet in Turkey.
- TGEU – Trans Europe and Central Asia are taking series of cases across Europe using data protection law to advance gender identity recognition.
The five new grants supporting pre-litigation activities are as follows.
- Black Sex Worker Collective – Berlin is preparing for legal action against digital discrimination and systemic deplatforming of Sex Workers by digital platforms.
- Coalition Sexual and Health Rights of Marginalized Communities – MARGINS, Skopje are preparing a strategic legal response to the growing use of anonymous Facebook pages to orchestrate gender-based violence.
- Reversing.works are building a case against the unlawful data practices of a food delivery platform.
- Urgence Homophobie are preparing to challenge systematic violations of trans refugees’ digital identity rights in France.
- Institute for Reporters` Freedom and Safety is preparating for litigation challenging government surveillance of journalists.
Not all organisations can be publicised at this stage. As more of the projects are made public and progress we will share more information about the groups involved and outcomes of the litigation through our case study page.
32 of the 73 applications received were for litigation track support and 41 for pre-litigation research support. The trend of new applicants continued with 29 of the 73 applications from first-time applicants, and 51 applications from groups yet to receive funding from DFF. Ultimately, eight of the 13 grants this round went to organisations receiving DFF funding for the first time, taking the total number of organisations or individuals we have supported up to 89.
Analysis of first-time applicants and grantees
| Year | First-time applicants | Applicants to receive funding on the first try | First-time grantees |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 68 | 11 (16%) | 15 (out of 22 total grantees) |
| 2024 | 38 | 9 (24%) | 14 (out of 23) |
| 2023 | 40 | 10 (25%) | 16 (out of 21) |
| 2022 | 11 | N/A | 10 (out of 17) |
| 2021 | 35 | N/A | 12 (out of 16) |
We also continue to see a vast range of different topics and issues covered in the applications we receive.
Looking Ahead
Our next call for applications opens on 1 December 2025 and will run until the end of February 2026. We are anticipating a large number of applications again.
Remember to check out the resources on our website, including our application guides and litigation toolkit, to start thinking about or preparing a future application.
If you want to see more detail about the outcomes of the projects of our grantee partners, make sure to browse through our case study page and read Highlighting Litigation Success in the Digital Rights Community, a report we published earlier in 2025 that summarises and analyses the impact achieved through strategic litigation we have supported between 2018 and 2024.