RightsCon Costa Rica 2023, San José (5-8 June 2023)

From Monday 5 to Thursday 8 June 2023, Access Now convened the twelfth edition of RightsCon — the world's leading annual summit on human rights in the digital age — at the Costa Rica Convention Center in San José and online, in the first in-person gathering of the summit series since RightsCon Tunis in 2019 and the first time the summit had been hosted in Central America in its twelve-year history. The hybrid edition brought together 8,332 participants — 2,871 in-person and 5,466 online — from 689 organisations across 174 countries, across 638 sessions in fifteen programming tracks. The summit was also the largest RightsCon to date by session count and in-person participant numbers, a scale that reflected both the pent-up demand from three years of online-only editions and the deliberate choice to host in Latin America and the Caribbean for the first time since RightsCon Rio de Janeiro in 2012 — a return that drew 1,863 LAC participants, 22.3% of the total, the highest LAC share in the summit's history.

Context

The RightsCon summit series was established by Access Now in San Francisco in 2011 as the field's dedicated global convening on human rights and digital technology, with editions since in Rio de Janeiro (2012), Silicon Valley (2013, 2014, 2016), Manila (2015), Brussels (2017), Toronto (2018), and Tunis (2019), before three consecutive online editions (2020, 2021, 2022) under the pandemic. San José was accordingly the first in-person RightsCon since Tunis, and the first edition in the Americas in seven years. Access Now's own framing emphasised the geopolitical weight of the location: Costa Rica and its Latin American regional neighbours are home to a disproportionate share of the world's environmental defenders — 70% of murdered environmental defenders globally come from seven Latin American nations — making the region a front line for the intersection of digital security and physical safety for rights advocates that RightsCon's programming explicitly addresses.

The Costa Rica edition's confirmed speaker roster spanned the breadth of the digital rights field: Timnit Gebru of the Distributed AI Research Institute, Meredith Whittaker of Signal, Sevgil Musaieva of Ukrainska Pravda, Dolkun Isa of the World Uyghur Congress, and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Marwa Fatafta of Access Now and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk headlined the summit's most attended session. The financial structure of the summit included government donors (SIDA Sweden, Swiss FDFA, UK Aid, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Canada, Denmark) alongside corporate sponsors (Google, Microsoft, Amazon), a funding mix that drew pointed commentary from civil society attendees given the corporate sponsors' simultaneous appearance as subjects of many sessions' critique.

What happened across the four days

Artificial intelligence governance was the summit's dominant thematic thread, an increase in both session volume and urgency from previous years. Sessions examined potential AI harms across multiple vectors — data collection, content moderation, surveillance — with UCLA Law fellow Courtney Radsch articulating the conference's recurring concern that "AI is reinforcing the power of big tech." European Parliament AI Act negotiations broke down over facial-recognition deployment in member states in the lead-up to and during the summit, giving the regulatory debates a live charge; Google's Kent Walker argued from the stage that responsible AI must be grounded in human rights standards — a formulation contested by civil society participants who questioned corporate actors' self-regulatory claims.

The three most-attended sessions reflected the summit's substantive priorities. The "In conversation with Volker Türk and Marwa Fatafta" session on UN human rights mechanisms and their relationship to emerging technologies drew the summit's highest attendance. The "Fireside chat: encryption ideology — a conversation with CEOs" produced the summit's highest-profile public commitment: the chief executives of WhatsApp, Signal, Element, and OpenMLS collectively affirmed their organisations' commitment to protecting end-to-end encryption from government pressure. Meredith Whittaker of Signal stated that the platform has "no reason to exist" without providing private communications, as representatives from both services warned that encryption faces intensifying regulatory attack globally. The "Future/s of human rights documentation" session addressed the evidentiary and legal challenges of using digital evidence in human rights accountability processes.

Spyware and surveillance remained a persistent theme. Participants from countries with known state surveillance programmes sought spyware detection resources from technical civil-society organisations at the summit, and the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism proposed creating legal liability for companies that sell surveillance tools without conducting human rights review — a proposal directed specifically at the commercial spyware vendor ecosystem that the summit's host, Access Now, has documented through the Citizen Lab's Pegasus and NSO Group investigations. Amnesty International called on all states to immediately ban highly invasive spyware.

Four coalitions and campaigns launched at the summit. The #MigrarSinVigilancia LATAM Coalition — convened by over 20 organisations in response to the extensive surveillance of migrants and people on the move across the Americas — launched with the goal of defending migrants' human rights by protecting their personal data through research, campaigns, and policy advocacy; the coalition's name and its launch at a Latin American edition of RightsCon linked the surveillance-of-migration issue directly to the regional context. The Association for Progressive Communications launched a gender-responsive cybersecurity policy assessment tool. Digital Action launched the Global Coalition for Tech Justice and its #YearofDemocracy campaign, targeting Meta, Google, Twitter/X, and TikTok on elections. JAAKLAC's Critical Digital Education for All initiative, developed with twelve or more youth and civil society organisations, launched a multi-format digital content campaign on digital education rights.

The summit's most structurally significant failure was the visa barrier that prevented over 300 participants from 64 countries from attending, disproportionately affecting African speakers. Timnit Gebru named the visa system "the biggest apartheid system that exists today," a statement that generated widespread coverage beyond the summit and placed the access-to-digital-rights-spaces question — alongside the access-to-digital-rights question — at the centre of the post-summit record.

Significance

The San José edition is the corpus's first Event entry for Costa Rica and the first for Central America, and the first standalone RightsCon event entry in the corpus — the earlier RightsCon Silicon Valley 2016 appears in the corpus as the launch moment for the #KeepItOn campaign rather than as a RightsCon event in its own right. It closes the Central America event anchor (previously zero), the Costa Rica event anchor (previously zero), and the annual global digital-rights summit sub-type (previously zero) in the corpus's event register.

Inside the corpus's coverage of annual regional civil-society digital-rights convenings, RightsCon San José joins the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly 2023 (EngageMedia's regional Asia-Pacific annual convening, Chiang Mai 2023) and the Paradigm Initiative DRIF26 (pan-Africa) and SMEX Bread & Net (West Asia and North Africa) as the global tier of that corpus arc — but where the regional convenings each cover a sub-continental frame, RightsCon is the singular global convening that links those regional digital-rights communities into a shared annual agenda. Its placement at 638 sessions and 8,332 participants from 174 countries dwarfs the regional convening scale by an order of magnitude and makes it structurally a different type of corpus entry: less a regional-community anchor than the federated apex of the field's annual meeting infrastructure.

The AI-harms discussion at RightsCon San José 2023 is also temporally significant: the summit ran in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT's November 2022 launch and the first wave of generative-AI public discourse, placing it at the moment when the grassroots and civil-society digital-rights field first collectively absorbed large-language-model harms as a front-line concern alongside its existing surveillance, encryption, and content-moderation agenda. The collapse of EU AI Act facial-recognition negotiations during the summit window and Timnit Gebru's visa-barrier intervention together make the San José edition the corpus's first event at which AI governance and structural access barriers to the AI-governance conversation appeared on the same stage simultaneously — a convergence the corpus's growing AI-and-human-rights and global-south-inclusion threads both run through.