The Dutch digital rights NGO Bits of Freedom has awarded Nani Jansen Reventlow the “Felipe Rodriguez Award” for her outstanding work championing digital rights and her crucial efforts in decolonising the field. In this (Dutch language) podcast she is interviewed by Bits of Freedom’s Inge Wannet about her strategic litigation work and her ongoing fight to decolonise the digital rights field.
The Felipe Rodriguez Award is named after a Dutch privacy pioneer and is an award presented to people who stand out for their contribution to our right to privacy. It the positive counterpart to the Big Brother Awards that, in contrast, highlight the biggest privacy violators of the year. That award was given to the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Safety and the Minister of Health Welfare and Sport.
Jansen Reventlow has been awarded this price for her great effort over the past years in the digital rights field. Most notably she founded the strategic litigation NGO Digital Freedom Fund (DFF). Building on her extensive experience as a human rights lawyer she grew DFF into a leading organisation that also functions as a place to bring the digital rights field together. She has fostered an intersectional approach to human rights within the digital context as an integral part of DFF’s work, which has opened up a broader understanding of digital rights. Importantly, she is at the forefront of a large project to Decolonise Digital Rights, together with European Digital Rights (EDRi). This project aims “to reflect on the way in which uneven power dynamics, exclusion, and privilege play out in our field, including how these shape the way in which digital rights are conceived and how they are protected.” Recently, she left DFF to found a new NGO called Systemic Justice, which “seeks to radically transform how the law works for communities fighting for racial, social, and economic justice.”
In this moving and informative podcast Jansen Reventlow speaks about the strategic litigation work of DFF over the past years, her experience as a woman of colour in the digital rights field, the importance and struggles of the decolonisation process and the essential work still to be done.
See the podcast or the article about Nani Jansen Reventlow at Bits of Freedom.
Image by Tetsuro Miyazaki.