✍️ Op-Ed by Seher Shafiq.
Seher is the Global Engagement Manager at Mozilla Foundation, based in Toronto, Canada.
After a break of almost two years, last week, the digital rights community gathered in Taipei for RightsCon 2025 – a global convening of human rights in the digital age. Amidst several ongoing conflicts, democratic backsliding, economic instability, and a digital safety infrastructure that is now more than frayed at the edges, a convening of this kind felt crucial, not optional, for the sector.
Setting the conference in Taipei was an international and impactful choice – after many from Global South countries experienced visa restrictions at RightsCon 2023 in Costa Rica, the RightsCon team took a break to conduct a series of deep community consultations before choosing its next destination. Ultimately, RightsCon landed on Taipei, citing its “recognition globally for the freest online environment and greatest human freedom in Asia, a whole-of-society approach to human rights, and a vibrant civil society community.”
RightsCon 2025 Taipei was a beautiful and chaotic mish-mash of folks across different sectors – civil society, industry, philanthropy, policy, research, creatives, and more – with the common denominator being a dedication to digital rights.
I am writing this on my flight back home to Canada, where even a few hours without internet has seen major breaking news stories in the area of human rights. Here are three themes that emerged top of mind as I reflected on the last week:
1. The unignorable elephant in the room that followed us everywhere: the crisis being caused by funding cuts.
The panic and urgency around this was in the air at RightsCon right from day one. USAID’s abrupt closure and funding cuts for the sector by other governments has had a tremendous impact on the ecosystem – life-saving projects have been cut or shut down completely, and many organizations are being forced to close. Deborah Zamd of the Human Rights Funders Network shared sobering numbers: 2023 saw $223.3 billion given in foreign aid; 2025 cuts are estimated at $78 billion. That’s one-third of funding that disappeared overnight, creating a gap so massive that Deborah Zamd argues philanthropy simply does not have the dollars to fill it without completely new strategies and quick mobilization.
I did not realize what a true crisis this was for the ecosystem until I attended some sessions on this topic. In fact, the impact was so immediate that RightsCon organizers added two emergency sessions on this topic, providing a space for collaboration and strategizing a path forward, as many organizations are on the verge of closing operations without alternative funding solutions. Folks I spoke to at RightsCon shared that since the US set this precedent with Trump making this policy change acceptable, other countries have announced similar cuts, including the UK and the Netherlands, exacerbating the sector’s financial instability.
2. The misuse of AI systems in war, conflict, and genocide.
One of the most powerful sessions I attended was titled “Tech giants and genocide: Indigenous struggles for digital justice.” The panel featured Nadim Nashif (7amleh), Jalal Abukhater (7amleh), Htaike Htaike Aung (Myanmar ICT for Development Organization), Timnit Gebru (Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute), and Haiyuer Kuerban (World Uyghur Congress).
The panel covered examples of AI being misused in situations of war, at times, contributing to genocides. In Gaza, AI tools are unethically deployed using dubious criteria to target Palestinian men, with up to 15-20 civilian deaths permitted for each “target” killed – all enabled by Google and Amazon via Project Nimbus. In the case of Uyghurs, this represents the largest interment of a single ethnic group since the Second World War, largely driven by AI and biometric tools trained to recognize Uyghur faces and detain individuals for inconsequential reasons, such as having a beard or fasting. Similarly, Amnesty International reported that Facebook’s systems actively promoted violence against Rohingyas and ignored early warnings about the risk, exacerbating the genocide. During the Tigray genocide, calls for violence went viral on Facebook and YouTube, yet these platforms failed to take meaningful action.
The panelists agreed that none of these platforms are “systematically promoting human rights.” This issue is compounded by the fact that companies are left to self-regulate and police themselves, with AI-driven content moderation developed in the Global North disproportionately affecting Global Majority countries.
3. The importance of uplifting Global Majority perspectives in the AI ecosystem.
With fewer visa restrictions for RightsCon 2025 Taipei, more participants from Global Majority countries attended (also referred to as Global South by some) compared to the 2023 Costa Rica conference. This led to more sessions centering on perspectives often overlooked in AI governance and development.
In the session “Rethinking AI Development and Governance to Avoid Marginalizing the Marginalized,” Caleb Moses (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms – MILA) shared an insight that resonated deeply. He explained that Indigenous approaches to technology are inherently holistic, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all parts of a system, whereas Western approaches tend to be more one-dimensional. He illustrated this with a moral dilemma he faced—how to ethically use a large dataset of historical text from his Māori heritage in AI development.
The conference was bookended by a sobering call to action to Free Alaa, a RightsCon community member unjustly imprisoned for the past 10 years. On day one, we watched a video of Alaa’s mother, Professor Laila Soueif—140+ days into a hunger strike—pleading with the RightsCon community to take action to help free Alaa. Four days later, at the closing ceremony, we received an update that Professor Soueif had since collapsed from her hunger strike and is currently hospitalized. Her video may have been her final public call to action. It was a sombre reminder of the urgent and unfinished work in the fight for human rights and justice — especially now.
What’s Next?
RightsCon 2025 highlighted the impact of the funding crisis, the brutal outcomes of misusing AI in warfare, and the need to consider the Global Majority perspectives when discussing trustworthy AI. Despite the complex issues facing the world today, RightsCon 2025 was still a space of hope and inspiration.
Walking through the corridors and stopping by the booths for projects like Stop Killer Robots, Internet Society Foundation, and Amnesty International reminded me that for all the injustice we see today, there’s an army of incredibly passionate folks working tirelessly to co-create a more just digital future.