Our past events
DFF regularly organises events and convenings as well as develops resources to support organisations and individuals in pursuing litigation on digital rights issues. This area of work includes projects which have their own vision and objectives, while also sharing common goals and adhering to transversal values based on decolonial and anti-oppressive principles.
In Berlin, our 2024 strategy meeting brought together diverse groups to discuss digital rights, set future grant priorities for DFF, and exchange skills and knowledge.
We covered many topics, among them, Algorithm and Labour Rights, Prisoners’ Internet Access, Pegasus Spyware, and a Dutch ruling against ethnic profiling. Further sessions explored Queer & Trans* Rights, Surveillance, Accessing Welfare, AI and Disability, and EU Charter Rights, highlighting the strong interconnectedness of social justice issues with digital rights. We also shared knowledge sessions on Movement Lawyering, Leadership, Decolonial approaches to digital archival work, and data-driven policing, among many others. Stay tuned for more information on key takeaways.
With the EU Representative Actions Directive recently entering into force, we believe that collective action will become a crucial legal avenue to harness collective power before national courts to unlock meaningful digital rights protection and enforcement.
During the just concluded Speaker Series, we discussed collective redress mechanisms and cases from the EU and around the world. It was co-organised with the digiRISE project, and overlapped with our fourth DFF Speaker Series, titled Digital Rights are Charter Rights.
We mapped out the issues at the intersection of technology, online platforms, and social and racial justice, to identify potential partnership opportunities and to start strategising toward building transformative action- and movement- oriented coalitions, in order to support the expansion of an intersectional transfeminist and antiracist space working on these issues.
Speaker Series 2023 - Digital Rights are Charter Rights
During this session led by Dr. Nawal Mustafa, Legal officer at Public Interest Litigation Project (PILP) and Jill Toh, PhD student at Institute for Information Law (IViR) and co-founder of the Racism and Technology Center we discussed how digital technologies are developed using race as a factor to systematically discriminate and oppress individuals and/or populations.
This was the second follow- up workshop aimed at sharing best practices for enforcing the Charter in digital rights litigation. We unpacked different legal avenues in using the Charter in digital rights litigation, we shared successes and lessons learnt from utilising the EU Charter in strategic litigation, and we will ensure that the digital rights community are equipped with the tools to utilise the EU Charter in digital rights strategic litigation.
The decolonising data event session takes a critical look at how data infrastructures centralise power while dispossessing and disenfranchising certain groups and communities. The session also explores strategies that can be adopted by activists and organisations to push and fight for the decolonisation of data and broader infrastructures.
Our annual strategic litigation retreat took place on the 11th-14th September 2023. This retreat specifically focused on platform accountability and collective redress. Participants worked on litigation and advocacy plans for a strategic case of their choice by means of group work, individual brainstorming and knowledge and skills sharing.
During DFF’s Access to Justice in Data Protection workshop held in Dublin in December 2022, we hosted collaborative discussions on access to justice in the #DataProtection space using different tools in the #GDPR, as well as other legal frameworks & strategies.
The Digital Freedom Fund brought litigators, campaigners, and technologists together to identify the opportunities and risks in litigation from both a legal and technological perspective. #platformaccountability #strategiclitigation
Our Annual Strategy Meeting, is where we bring together a wide group of organisations and individuals working on digital rights topics to jointly strategise, share information and lessons, and co-ordinate work going forward. It helps us define our grant-making funding priorities and overall strategy going forward. Our 2023 strategy meeting was held on March 14-16, 2023, in Berlin, Germany.
This opening session of the speaker series ‘Another Tech is Possible?’ saw Anasuya Sengupta, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Whose Knowledge? and Bonnita Nyamwire, Research Manager of Pollicy Uganda explore some of the central questions around what it means to resist oppressive tech, as well as how to make and deploy technologies that serve our communities.
The second session in the ‘Another Tech is Possible?’ speaker series saw Yigit Aydin, Yaseen Aslam, and Emilse Icandri discuss the challenges to workers rights posed by tech and platform companies and how workers are mobilising to fight back.
The third session of the speaker series “Another Tech is Possible?” saw saw Madhuri Karak and Paz Peña explore some of the central questions around Digital Climate and Environmental Justice.
The final session in the ‘Another Tech is Possible?’ speaker series saw Ife Thompson, Laurence Meyer and Sarah Chander in conversation to explore how we can build effective movements against digital policing.
Participants in the decolonising the digital rights field process share what they worked on in the partnership and funding working groups.
The final session in the ‘Another Tech is Possible?’ speaker series saw Ife Thompson, Laurence Meyer and Sarah Chander in conversation to explore how we can build effective movements against digital policing.
In October 2020, DFF held a three-day workshop that aimed to tackle the use of AI in the time of COVID-19. It brought together participants at the forefront of challenging government use of automated decision-making systems (ADMs), who brainstormed strategies for safeguarding digital rights compromised by these systems during the pandemic. We have published a report, as well as numerous other resources, from the workshop here.