Shabnam Mojtahedi is ICNL’s Legal Advisor for Digital Rights, providing technical assistance on how technology impacts civic space, freedom of expression, and privacy online. She works with local, regional, and international coalitions to promote an enabling environment for civil society in the digital realm through legal analysis, trainings, and other capacity building initiatives that seek to improve civil society’s understanding of international legal standards as well as legal and non-legal strategies for addressing existing and emerging digital challenges.
Prior to joining ICNL, Shabnam worked with Benetech’s Human Rights Program, leading efforts to apply artificial intelligence to human rights and war crimes investigations in Syria and beyond. For over four years she was the Legal and Strategy Analyst with the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC) where she developed and oversaw methodologies for SJAC’s documentation collection, data analysis, and human rights reporting. At SJAC, she advanced strategies on how to leverage new technologies and social media to assist in the documentation and analysis of human rights violations. She holds a J.D. from American University’s Washington College of Law.
Disinformation, online gender-based violence (GBV), and hate speech greatly impact online civic space and democratic processes. Governments should take steps to promote healthy and safe information ecosystems online while also protecting the exercise of online civic freedoms.
The right to seek and share information is a fundamental element of free expression and a core component of the freedom of association and assembly. When digital identification systems make it harder to seek information or increase the threat of surveillance and harassment, they impede these fundamental freedoms.
Access to an open and free internet is integral to individuals’ and organizations’ ability to exercise fundamental freedoms online, and to benefit from, and contribute to, digital open government initiatives.
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