Information Management & Machine Learning for Human Rights: Digital Transformation in the Public Sector - Workshop at the 2025 LATSIS Symposium

Event

LATSIS Symposium

Theme

This interactive, two-part workshop will explore how modern data-science tools – including machine learning and AI – can be leveraged to support the United Nations in promoting and protecting human rights. The session is offered in collaboration with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the international NGO HURIDOCS. During the workshop’s first segment, several short case studies will give participants a better understanding of how policy-oriented human rights data is currently collected. These case studies will also help participants appreciate ongoing efforts at digital innovation, including nascent applications of AI tools by the OHCHR itself as well as by civil-society actors. Subsequently, the workshop will shift to an audience-driven brainstorming exercise. Participants – including ETH students and researchers – will be invited to think about further ways in which applications of data science (including AI) could improve the collection and analysis of human-rights data, in ways that are both scalable and ethical.

Goals

• Understand the mandate of OHCHR, its key stakeholders, and the critical role of information collection, processing, and dissemination in supporting the Office’s work.
• Learn from concrete examples of existing human rights information systems (e.g., OHCHR’s Universal Human Rights Index (UHRI) and National Recommendations Tracking Database (NRTD), as well as HURIDOCS’ “Uwazi” platform).
• Explore current automation practices, especially existing applications of Natural Language Processing to policy documents on human rights.
• Brainstorm with participants – including students with a data-science background – on how to address concrete technical challenges, including: • Developing multilingual NLP tools to align human rights recommendations across UN languages; • Exploring how fine-tuned LLMs could support the drafting of new human rights recommendations; • Designing secure digital workflows for processing citizen petitions while ensuring privacy; • Building accessible, interactive tools to help Member States and the public better understand and engage with the UN’s human rights work.

A special focus of this workshop is to connect OHCHR practitioners with ETH students who are interested in volunteer projects that support human rights work, including through the new “UN-ETH Student Team”. The workshop also seeks to foster greater interdisciplinary understanding between students and researchers from STEM subjects, human-rights lawyers, and social scientists. To that end, the workshop will offer room for exchanges between these three stakeholder groups on how ethical, data-driven human rights work can best be attained.