RightsCon 2026
Each year, RightsCon convenes thousands of participants from across the world to address the growing impact of digital technologies on human rights. Through panels, workshops, roundtables and closed-door meetings, the summit provides a space for collective strategy-building across sectors and regions.
Over more than a decade, RightsCon has grown into the world’s leading global forum on digital rights, rotating across regions and adapting to the evolving political, technological and regulatory landscape. Its programme reflects the complexity of today’s digital environment, from surveillance and censorship to platform accountability and emerging technologies.
The 2026 edition will take place in Lusaka, Zambia, marking a return to the African continent and the first RightsCon hosted in South-Central Africa. The summit will be held in person and online from 5 to 8 May 2026, building on discussions and outcomes from RightsCon 2025 in Taipei.
RightsCon 2026 aims to strengthen global solidarity, amplify regional perspectives, and support coordinated action to defend human rights in an increasingly digitised world.
Drugs, Data & Justice: Resisting Algorithmic Policing, Building Community Safety
The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), Conectas Direitos Humanos, Statewatch, and European Digital Rights (EDRi) convene this roundtable to examine how artificial intelligence and other digital technologies are reshaping drug policy, law enforcement, and access to public services — often with harmful consequences for marginalised communities.
The session will explore the expansion of algorithmic policing, biometric surveillance, and welfare profiling in the name of drug control, and how these systems intensify racialised surveillance, exclusion, and institutional violence. Drug policy reform advocates, harm reduction practitioners, people who use drugs, digital rights activists, and sex workers’ rights advocates will share concrete case studies from Oceania, Europe, and Latin America, highlighting both harms and resistance strategies.
Through facilitated discussion and breakout groups, participants will identify current digital implementations, assess existing advocacy and accountability approaches — including litigation, oversight, and narrative change — and explore community-driven, care-based alternatives that advance harm reduction and community safety. The session aims to distil 5–7 actionable strategies and lay the groundwork for sustained cross-movement collaboration at the intersection of digital rights and drug policy.