ECNL experts are joining RightsCon 2025 to connect with a global community of human rights advocates, academics, journalists and policymakers shaping the future of digital rights and freedoms. See below the list of sessions we are (co)-hosting and find out how we want to ensure that human rights are embedded into the way technologies are developed and used.
All session times are shown in local time.
25 February 2025
Fit for purpose: does the UN’s AI governance regime ensure a rights-respecting approach?
ECNL Role: co-host with Global Partners Digital (GPD)
11:30 -12:30 | Dialogue | in-person | Room 101B
Human rights defenders have recently engaged with a range of initiatives seeking to shape the governance of new and emerging technologies, particularly with respect to AI. Among the principal initiatives are those at the UN, including the work of the UN’s AI Advisory Body and the Secretary General’s Global Digital Compact (GDC), resulting in the creation and implementation of newly established and empowered entities under the auspices of the UN. Amidst this context, this session will take stock of the UN’s revamped AI governance landscape, asking whether it is fit for purpose from a human rights perspective. The session will begin with an exchange between panelists to share views on the UN’s AI governance framework, its design and whether it fulfils the priority functions the UN should perform with respect to AI governance from a human rights perspective. GPD and ECNL's joint report will be referenced, which analysed proposed models for the UN’s AI governance architecture from a human rights perspective.
The evolution of digital trust and safety and the role of industry standards in APAC and around the world
ECNL role: speaker, hosted by the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership (DTSP)
12:45 -14:00 | Dialogue | in-person | Room 201F
With billions of people across the globe logging on each day, the “trust and safety” field is rapidly growing as a key enabler for digital citizens’ ability to connect and interact within each other—within and across borders. This session will bring diverse stakeholders together to discuss how the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership’s best practices and assessment processes are driving transparency and accountability when it comes to platform governance, with a specific focus on how these issues arise in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Alignment between trust and safety best practices, standards and regulatory frameworks are particularly important in APAC, which is home to many popular digital products and a high number of users across a wide variety of cultural contexts.
Side event: Technology and the future of protests. Principles for freedom of assembly and association
ECNL Role: co-host with Gina Romero, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and University of Southampton
13:30-15:30 | Dialogue | in-person | Grand Hyatt Swan Room
The UN Special Rapporteur's guidance document for the use of digital technologies in the context of peaceful protests is designed to help law enforcement officials uphold their duty to promote and protect human rights while using digital technologies to facilitate peaceful protests, both online and offline. This RightsCon side event will foster an inclusive and constructive dialogue with tech innovators, activists, policymakers and CSOs to develop ideas on their respective role in promoting and implementing these principles and how to tackle challenges during implementation.
26 February 2025
Lessons learned from public human rights assessments of generative AI
ECNL Role: speaker, hosted by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR)
11:30-12:30 | Dialogue | in-person | Room 201E
In this session, panelists will reflect on their experiences conducting HRAs of generative AI. They will discuss the key findings of their assessments, what they reveal about the future of generative AI, and how to better integrate human rights across the responsible AI field. We'll end with Q&A from the audience.
The precarious future of the global multi-stakeholder model for cyber and digital governance
ECNL Role: speaker hosted by Global Affairs Canada
16:30-17:30 | Dialogue | in-person | Room 102
The multi-stakeholder model is integral to the free, open, interoperable Internet and broader, human rights-respecting global digital governance efforts. It is through the concerted efforts of, and partnerships with, civil society that human rights are upheld, promoted, and mainstreamed across global technology governance, including for emerging technologies like AI. Yet, the multi-stakeholder model is under threat across the international system. This session convenes stakeholders to map the ways—both overt and less obvious—through which actors are reshaping the international technology governance to the exclusion of civil society and other partners. It is also an opportunity for the international community to explore what we can collectively do to combat this trend.
Who’s watching whom? Online disobedience and digital surveillance in climate activism
ECNL Role: co-host with Asian Forum for Human Rights Development (FORUM-ASIA) and Universal Rights Group (Latin America and the Caribbean)
17:45-18:45 | Dialogue | online
Environmental human rights defenders are increasingly engaging in peaceful protests, including acts of civil disobedience in physical and digital spaces. However, whether these protests are organised online (for example via social media campaigns) or through hacktivism (mail bombing, DoS attacks, webpage defaces), the States’ response to peaceful disruptive actions is increasingly to repress and criminalise those seeking to speak up for the environment. Meanwhile, evidence of intrusive, disproportionate tech-based surveillance (social-media monitoring, metadata analysis, VPN bans, hacking, spyware) and coordinated online abuse targeting environmental activists keeps growing. Our session will offer the opportunity to learn about the latest global and regional trends, and empower participants to engage in international mechanisms and initiatives to protect activists from state repression.
27 February 2025
GenAI, LLMs, COMO & TS: where do human rights and communities fit in today’s hottest acronyms?
ECNL Host
11:30-12:30 | Roundtable | in-person | Room 202A
Integrating emerging technologies in existing content governance systems is still at early stages. However, there’s a race to finance, build, and use them with little to no understanding of their implications on human rights. Focusing on Generative AI (GenAI) and their underlying technologies like foundation models or large language models (LLMs), we will explore the human rights impacts of these systems in content governance. We will look at how these systems are deployed in the Global Majority, where considerations of local language, context and cultural nuances are critical, e.g., during elections in fragile democracies or in conflict zones. As AI-driven platforms increasingly rely on these technologies for content governance, they risk unintentionally suppressing legitimate content while fueling violence online, disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. We will unpack this by using Discord as a case study, as the platform is currently piloting ECNL’s framework for meaningful engagement in AI while developing LLMs for enforcing its bullying and harassment policies, with a focus on children and teens.