Annual Report 2023 - Digital Freedom Fund

Digital Freedom Fund

Annual Report Advancing digital rights in Europe

2023

www.digitalfreedomfund.org

DFF

Digital Freedom Fund

www.digitalfreedomfund.org

Table of contents Upholding our integrity 03 The team 06 Message from the team 08 Our key milestones and activities in 2023 11 Reflections on 2023 12 Our work in 2023 14 Strategic Litigation Support Programme 16 Community Strengthening and Support Programme 18 Decolonising the Digital Rights Field in Europe 24 Our Impact 25 Success Stories that made an impact 26 Our finances and spending 30 Our Governance 30

DFF

Annual Report 2023

Upholding our integrity

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DFF

Upholding our integrity

Annual Report 2023

Our commitment in 2023

To apply an anti-oppressive and anti-colonial framing throughout our work, recognising that we are stronger when we work together and that those facing the most oppression deserve to be at the forefront of our efforts.

Our community

Encompasses all organisations working on digital rights topics, including groups working on all kinds of racial, social, environmental and economic issues where human rights are impacted by digital technology or the internet.

Up to this point

In 2023, we collaborated with around 200 human rights defenders and activists from 147 organisations around Europe. In November, we achieved a major milestone by approving our 100th grant since our founding in 2018. To date, we have supported the strategic litigation activities of nearly 70 organisations and individuals in around 30 countries, disbursing over EUR 4 million in total.

And beyond

By the end of 2024, we expect to approve 20 additional grants, totalling another EUR 800,000.

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DFF

Upholding our integrity

Annual Report 2023

Why we exist

The Digital Freedom Fund (DFF) exists to support the digital rights community in Europe to advance and protect human rights in digital spaces and reduce the negative impact of technology in the world.

Vision

We envision a society in which technology and digital spaces are used justly and fairly so that all communities and individuals can fully enjoy their human rights.

Who we support

We support Europe’s digital rights litigators and human rights activists, enabling them to become more effective in their work and seek justice by using strategic litigation as a tool to advance digital rights. Our geographical scope currently covers all 46 Council of Europe countries, as well as European regional courts and forums like the European Court of Human Rights, Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Commission.

How we do things

We do this through grants for legal, advocacy, research, and other costs involved in strategic litigation.

Our support extends to organisations advancing digital rights across Europe, offering resources, skill and knowledge-sharing workshops, networking opportunities and strategy-building events.

The combined efforts of these approaches enables digital rights organisations from Europe to engage in more effective and strategic litigation and build a stronger, more resilient community of diverse groups and individuals.

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Annual Report 2023

The team

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DFF

The team

Annual Report 2023

We are a dynamic group with diverse expertise and passions, all united by a shared mission to ensure that everyone has access to justice and can exercise their digital rights in the online and offline world.

Joel Hide Racial and Social Justice Support

Nikita Kekana​ Senior Legal Officer

Laurence Meyer Racial and Social Justice Lead

Thomas Vink Programme Officer

Adelaide Hirwe Racial and Social Justice Support

Ewa Pieszczyk​ Finance Officer

Ekaterina Balueva Communications Support

Vaska Cvetanoska Development Officer

Darrah Hassell Finance Manager

César Manso-Sayao Legal Officer

Jihane Jadrane Events and Operations Lead & Well-Being and Care Officer

Alexandra Giannopoulou digiRISE Project Coordinator

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DFF

The team

Annual Report 2023

Message from the team 2023 marked a turning point for the Digital Freedom Fund.

Six years after our founding, we had moved beyond the teething stage. It was the right moment for us to reflect upon our values and ensure that we were living them both in our programmatic work and internal operations.

We were thrilled to hit a phenomenal milestone by making our 100th grant in 2023. Even more exciting was the significant increase in new applicants, especially those focused on racial, LGBTQI+, economic, gender, asylum, and children’s rights. As 2023 became the hottest year on record, we’re also working to extend this momentum to digital environmental justice in the coming years.

Recognising the importance of emerging European laws, such as the Collective Redress Directive, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act, we made these a focal point at our Community Strengthening and Support events. This approach ensured that our civil society partners across Europe had the chance to upskill and collaborate, using these tools to enhance digital rights protections.

We also completed the design phase of the decolonising programme which we co-led along with European Digital Rights (EDRi). The resulting programme, “A Vision for Digital Justice Organising in Europe”, was soft-launched in October in Brussels. In 2024, this programme will evolve into an autonomous organisation called Weaving Liberation.

Internally, we engaged in a deep reflection on what it truly means for DFF to embody anti-oppression values. This process led us to realise the importance of aligning our internal operations with our commitments to social, racial, economic, and feminist justice in order to fully realise our potential as a human rights organisation. After nearly a year of assessing our organisational needs and exploring the most suitable approaches, we are pleased to announce that in early 2024, DFF adopted a new distributed leadership model.

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DFF

The team

This model shifts DFF from a traditional centralised leadership structure with line management to a peer-based, decentralised system with a flatter hierarchy. In this new structure, our team is organized into circles, where staff coordinate their work, annual leave, and other plans collaboratively.

By integrating anti-oppressive principles within DFF, we have prioritised our staff’s well-being, fostering greater stability, resilience and team cohesion. While this process of self-reflection and change was challenging, it has positioned us to enter 2024 better prepared than ever to support our digital rights community.

Annual Report 2023

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Reflections on 2023

Annual Report 2023

A year of transition - shifts in organisational culture and structure

Designed a fairer, more transparent salary model together.

Increased staff retention, archiving of institutional knowledge and connection and trust between staff

Established a childcare policy for working parents.

Further developed home office allowance, wellness stipends, and time off in lieu policies.

Moved permanently to a four-day working week following a sixmonth trial.

Became a fully remote organisation on a permanent basis

Began to collectively design a new leadership model that would be implemented in 2024

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Annual Report 2023

Annual Report 2023

Our key milestones and activities in 2023 October

February Began a six-month trial of the four-day working week Speaker Series: Another Tech is possible?

Pre-launch of the decolonising programme ‘A Vision for digital justice organising in Europe’

February-April Consultation on the programme that emerged from the collaborative decolonising process that ran between 2020-2023

September

Speaker Sries: Collective Redress – Lessons from around the Globe

Strategic Litigation Retreat

April Workshop on Legal avenues for platform accountability

December Platform workers strategic workshop

Publication of the report Evidence Gathering for Platform accountability

March Sixth Annual strategy meeting

Speaker Series (continued): Digital rights are Charter rights

November May

June

Workshop on Opportunities and Challenges utilising the EU Charter

Close of Grant round 1: 11 grants approved

Workshop on Taking fortress Europe to court held in Berlin

Capstone workshop on Evidence gathering

Speaker Series: Digital rights are Charter rights

August Permanent four-day working week is implemented

Close of 2nd Grant Round: 10 new grants including our 100th grant

Workshop on best practices for utilising the EU Charter in digital rights litigation

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Annual Report 2023

Reflections on 2023

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Reflections on 2023

There is a need to profoundly change the way digital rights are conceived and guaranteed to ensure that all of us can enjoy our fundamental rights, both on and offline, free from systemic oppression.

Annual Report 2023

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Annual Report 2023

Our work in 2023

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Our work in 2023

Our work falls into two programmes The first is our Strategic Litigation Support Programme, which provides financial support through grants to groups and individuals using litigation to advance digital rights.

The second is our Community Strengthening and Support Programme which focuses on facilitating events and convenings as well as developing resources to support organisations and individuals in pursuing litigation on digital rights issues.

Annual Report 2023

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Our work in 2023

Annual Report 2023

Strategic Litigation Support Programme We closely assess how the organisations we support engage with communities most impacted by digital rights violations. Our goal is to avoid funding litigation that is extractive or disregards the needs and desires of those most affected. Over the past three years, through our expanded outreach efforts, notably through the project Digital Rights for All, we have significantly increased our support for a wide range of groups working on racial, social, and economic human rights issues.

2023 was our most popular year for grant applications so far with 70 applications received. We also achieved a major milestone, approving our 100th grant. This year we approved 23 grants supporting activities across 14 countries: Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

We were particularly excited to see so many new groups, with 40 of the 70 applications coming from first-time applicants, including organisations focused on issues like LGBTQI+ rights, racial justice, worker rights, asylum rights, children’s rights and women’s rights.

In 2023, responding to regular requests over recent years, we started supporting “post-litigation” activities, such as workshops to share lessons and advocacy to push for enforcement of decisions.

We continue to update our case study page with new cases and case updates. We upgraded the web page in early 2023 to make the cases easier to search and filter by topic, organisation, jurisdiction, and status.

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Our work in 2023

Annual Report 2023

DFF-supported projects completed in 2023: 5 Wins

Litigation instances

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3 Partial wins 11 Losses

Completed

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Research projects

Ten are being appealed so projects are ongoing from:

8 Lost instances

2 Partial wins

2 Completed in 2023

between 14 Completed 2018-2023

41 Instances completed in total between 2018-2023

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Our work in 2023

Annual Report 2023

Community Strengthening and Support Programme Since our founding in 2017, we have brought together over 450 participants from more than 140 organisations across Europe through various events and gatherings focused on digital rights issues. In 2023, we organised a wide range of events and created a range of resources aimed at supporting work on digital rights topics, as part of a range of different projects.

Our focus this year was on widening the spectrum of organisations and activists involved in our work, placing the role of digital technologies in (re)producing and deepening structural inequalities at the centre of our focus. This was reflected in our choice of focus topics for our events as well as in the way the agendas for the events were set and how participants were selected.

Participants

+450

+140 Organisations across Europe

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Our work in 2023

March

Sixth annual strategy meeting

Annual Report 2023

Learn more

Our sixth annual strategy meeting took place in March 2023 and was held in-person for the first time since February 2020. Around 60 people from a wide range of organisations attended the meeting. We had multiple sessions on topics ranging from unlawful handling of bulk communications to digital environmental justice, and private technological infrastructures for the public sector to decolonising the digital rights field.

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Our work in 2023

April

Legal Avenues for Platform Accountability

Annual Report 2023

Learn more

In April we facilitated the workshop “Legal Avenues for Platform Accountability” in Barcelona. This workshop looked at different legal pathways for holding platforms accountable within Europe. It focused on both new legislation such as the Digital Services Act, Digital Media Act and Collective Redress Directive as well as existing underutilised legal avenues such as anti-discrimination law and the EU Charter.

May

Taking Fortress Europe to Court

Learn more

In May, we organised a workshop in Berlin called “Taking Fortress Europe to Court” in partnership with International Women* Space. Over two days, around 25 attendees from anti-racist, migrant rights, and digital rights organisations discussed the key issues at stake in the Europe’s digital border regime.

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DFF

Our work in 2023

June

Evidence Gathering Event

Annual Report 2023

Learn more

In June, we held the capstone evidence gathering event as part of an initiative to bring together legal experts and tech-centred activists to work together on platform accountability. Following this, in September, we published a report on the role of technologists in evidence gathering for cases and how we can improve the collection, storage, maintenance and sharing of information and evidence.

September

Fifth Strategic Litigation Retreart

Learn more

In September, in collaboration with Homo Digitalis we coordinated our fifth strategic litigation retreat in Athens. This retreat brought together 14 different people from across Europe taking or planning litigation related to platform accountability and collective redress. Over four days participants built up their legal skills and tactics while thinking critically about how litigation can be more impactful if embedded in a wider strategy or movement. Participants were able to workshop their own proposed case in a relaxed and collaborative environment.

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Our work in 2023

May – November

Annual Report 2023

digiRISE

Learn more

For our European Commission-funded digiRISE project that launched at the end of 2022, we produced an essay series (in both English and Spanish) which articulates how digital rights are EU Charter rights, and coordinated two workshops: the first, held in May, on opportunities and challenges utilising the EU Charter and the second, held in November, on best practices for utilising the EU Charter in digital rights litigation.

Digital Rights are Charter Rights December

Illustration by Nicole Snaiderman, featured in Digital Rights are Charter Rights essay series

Platform Workers Strategic Workshop

Learn more

In December, we co-organised our final event of the year with Observatorio TAS (Algorithm, Work and Society Observatory), a Spanish civil society organisation. The event focused on platform accountability from the perspective of empowering platform workers across the sector.

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Our work in 2023

Annual Report 2023

Speaker Series

Over the year, we also ran three online speaker series.

These consisted of seven sessions on lessons about collective redress from around the globe, two sessions exploring concrete cases where the EU Charter of fundamental rights was utilised to protect digital rights at a national, cross-jurisdictional or EU level, and two additional sessions on how to deploy an anti-colonial lens and approach in digital rights work.

Collective Redress Lessons from Around the Globe

PLAY

The European Union Representative Actions Directive

PLAY

Lessons Learnt from South America

PLAY

EU Data Protection

Another Tech is Possible?t

PLAY

Digital Climate Justice

PLAY

Movement Lawyering and Abolition of Digital Policing

PLAY

Rohingya Complainants v. Meta

Digital Rights are Charter Rights PLAY PLAY

Countering Discriminatory e-proctoring systems

PLAY

Challenging racist digital technologies

Intersection with the Digital Services Package and other EU regulatory instruments

PLAY

Lessons Learnt from Southern and East Africa

PLAY

Case Studies from EU Member States

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Our work in 2023

Annual Report 2023

Decolonising the Digital Rights Field in Europe

Learn more

Since 2020, together with European Digital Rights (EDRi), we have co-led an ongoing effort to decolonise the digital rights field in Europe. Throughout this process, we have remained actively engaged in shaping a more inclusive approach. In 2023, we completed the design phase, during which we consulted over 30 people from around 24 organizations and invited them to collaborate and cocreate the decolonizing programme. The consultation work was led by a consultant with the support of a drafting group and embraced a variety of methods from open calls for feedback as well as interviews with people with expertise on thematic areas that the participants named as needing reinforcement in the programme. We then drafted a final programme to support and sustain a digital justice ecosystem in Europe through new activities, spaces and processes that integrated the feedback and new ideas harvested through the consultation process.

The programme, called “A vision for Digital Justice Organising in Europe”, was pre-launched in October in Brussels among members of the growing Decolonising Digital Rights in Europe community. A Blueprint of the process was also produced, sharing lessons from the design phase process with the intent of supporting other similar initiatives in their journey.

To support the implementation of the programme, a new entity named ‘Weaving Liberation’ will be established in 2024. Weaving Liberation is intended to be a collective structure better suited to supporting a decentralised and coordinated implementation of the decolonising digital rights field programme. The broader goal of this space will be to support transformative work on digital justice and liberation in Europe, by connecting movements to work towards structural durable change. Weaving Liberation will initially be a hosted entity at DFF. It will have separate leadership and staff, decision-making and governance, while employing DFF’s administrative, accounting infrastructure.

The co-leads of the decolonising process, Sarah Chander (EDRi) and Laurence Meyer

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Annual Report 2023

Our impact It’s not all about winning a case…

Beyond court judgments, positive outcomes from taking litigation include influencing the way in which certain topics are portrayed in the media, increased agency or representation of affected communities in legal proceedings, prompting others to engage in legal action, or developing and applying knowledge gained through their pre-litigation research to improve the quality and reach of other advocacy campaigns.

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Our impact

Annual Report 2023

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Success Stories that made an impact DFF plays a crucial role in fostering significant and meaningful progress in the field of protecting the digital rights across Europe. Explore the most inspiring success stories of 2023:

January

The year started with a win in litigation bought by Liberty and Privacy International, when a UK tribunal found that there were “very serious failings” at the highest levels of MI5 – British secret service, and that they had unlawfully handled individuals’ private data.

April

In April, a court in Amsterdam found in favour of workers and against Uber and Ola Cabs in a case coordinated by Worker Info Exchange. Among other rulings, the court ordered Uber and Ola Cabs to provide information to workers on automated decision making relating to work allocation and fares including dynamic pay and pricing.

DFF

Our impact

Annual Report 2023

September 2023, in a case supported by the Norwegian September In Consumer Council and noyb, the Norwegian Privacy Appeals Board announced that it upholds the Norwegian Data Protection Authority’s fine of NOK 65 million (EUR 5.8 million) against LGBTQI+ dating app Grindr for illegal data sharing, the highest fine that the authority has ever imposed.

November

The year ended with a ground-breaking decision for Romani rights in Slovakia in November 2023, with the court ruling that the Slovakia government had discriminated against the plaintiff, a Romani girl, in access to education on the grounds of her social origin, property, and Romani ethnic origin and had also violated her right to access to information. The lawsuit, supported by the Center for Civil and Human Rights, had argued that Roma children were disadvantaged by a move to online distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Our impact

An important outcome of our overall work is a sustainable community of stakeholders from different fields having close connections, further working together and exchanging on digital rights and justice issues to coordinate efforts.

In 2023, our events continued to be praised for their relevance, the quality of facilitation and for the essential connections and networks that are established. Across different workshops and gatherings in 2023, an average of 98% of participants stated that their objectives for attending a particular event were met.

The event organisation, networking and social opportunities, and meeting facilitation were particularly praised (above 90%), rating these aspects as good or excellent.

“I think DFF is playing a key role in gathering groups working on digital rights, tech world and groups working on social justice issues… Let’s have some more joint action!”

Legal Avenues for Platform Accountability Workshop 2023

Annual Report 2023

“The Court’s decision is groundbreaking, as it is the first decision in a ‘digital divide’ case not only in Slovakia but also in Europe.”

Center for Civil and Human Rights

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Our impact

Annual Report 2023

“Learning is a journey. The DFF meeting more than exceeded my learning objectives. But the problem now is I have replaced a set of questions with a whole new set of questions.

It is a happy dilemma” Legal Avenues for Platform Accountability Workshop 2023

Additionally, 97% of participants agreed our events provided a safe and open space that was free from inappropriate and unacceptable behaviour from other participants and DFF staff, and 86% of participants reported having a better sense or understanding of the topics being covered following the event.

In 2023, a number of cases were taken forward after being directly influenced by our community strengthening events. Additionally, we are expecting a number of other groups that workshopped cases at our litigation retreat to submit grant applications to us in February 2024. This highlights the synergies between our litigation retreats and grantmaking programme.

“I think that in a years’ time there will be actions that would not have happened were it not for DFF bringing us together” Strategic Litigation Retreat 2023

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Annual Report 2023

Annual Report 2023

Our finances and spending

Our Governance

2023 was another year of growth for DFF and improvement across the board in financial performance and health. Direct spending on programme activities grew 26%, outpacing growth in operational cost leading to higher financial efficiency. Activity spending growth was concentrated in core community strengthening activities, and most notably in the digiRISE programme launched at the very end of 2022. All activities resulted in total operational spending of EUR 2.19 million in 2023 (2022: EUR 1.77 million). All of these gains were achieved while reducing staff work time through permanent adoption of a four-day workweek.

DFF’s Board is formally charged with oversight of all activities and vested with all decision-making power of the organisation. In 2023 they were fully involved in every part of our internal changes providing the team with significant support and guidance.

See our 2023 audited accounts here.

A list of our Board members and their expertise and experience can be found here.

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Annual Report 2023 The Digital Freedom Fund supports strategic litigation to advance digital rights in Europe, by applying decolonising principles to enable the digital rights community to exercise their collective rights in digital and networked spaces. Providing financial support for strategic cases, DFF is well placed to catalyse collaboration among activists, litigators, and the whole digital rights community.

Credits All other content © Digital Freedom Fund 2023 and CC BY-SA 4.0 Graphic design Justina Leston

www.digitalfreedomfund.org info@digitalfreedomfund.org

Illustrations and Artwork Berenice Álvarez and Laura López Kruthika NS Nicole Snaiderman

Postal address Digital Freedom Fund Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 104-108 1012 SG Amsterdam The Netherlands