Carnegie Mellon University

The Human Rights Technology Program

The Technology Program focuses on ensuring that emerging technologies can be harnessed to advance accountability, transparency, and justice without jeopardizing the mandate, sustainability, or safety of individuals and organizations involved in human rights work. We work in close collaboration with human rights practitioners to understand the technical challenges human rights organizations face, analyze potential technological solutions to these problems, and develop tools and systems that make sense for the human rights community.

The Human Rights Technology Lab

The Human Rights Technology Lab (a.k.a RightsLab) is a collaborative and cost-effective R&D platform for exploring, testing, and proactively documenting best practices, technological innovations, and methodological advancements that could be of use to human rights practitioners and journalists dedicated to documenting and analyzing human rights conditions around the world.

RightsLab is rooted in the core principles of collaboration and solidarity. Methods, tools, and systems that emerge from RightsLab projects are always open and publically available.

Our projects:

The Emerging Technologies Observatory

The Emerging Technologies Observatory critically analyses emerging technologies, methods, and use cases from a human rights perspective. Through this initiative, we explore and assess the potential human rights impacts, opportunities, and threats of emerging technological trends, tools, and methods.