International Conference “Data-driven human rights research”

The annual international conference on human rights organised by the Human Rights Centre “Antonio Papisca” and by Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies of the University of Padova was held on 9 and 10 November. Realised in virtual platforms, this year’s theme is “Data-driven human rights research”. Scholars, experts and researchers from over ten countries actively participated in the conference.

The Conference addressed, adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, the challenge of the "measurement" of human rights and the production of research and knowledge based on empirical evidence and concrete data.

During the morning plenary session on 9 November, the importance of measuring human rights as a whole, the reliability of the sources used, and the adequacy of the indicators, were the central themes discussed by Attilio Pisanò from the University of Salento (Lecce) and Maria Green from Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Lund).

In the 3 parallel panels held in the afternoon of the same day, the central themes addressed by the scholars and researchers were:
-Human rights violations – collecting data, accessing facts
-Computing and human rights: opportunities and challenges of using personal data
-Methods in human rights research – human rights in research methods
Each panel ended with an active debate between the speakers and the attendees.

In the closing plenary session, Jonas Grimheden from the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, introduced the approach of using data in the EU human rights researches, while Edzia Carvalho from the University of Dundee (UK) presented the opportunities and challenges in data-driven activism.