Brief Project Description
Authorities in closed societies have increasingly employed financial lawfare to restrict civil society access to needed resources, amounting to an undue interference with their freedom of expression and association. This has adversely affected both national and diaspora civil society actors, sometimes magnified through tactics of financial transnational repression. This project sets out to create a knowledge base on relevant laws and policies affecting financial institutions and digital payment companies handling of sensitive user data, and to enhance the capacity of target civil society and payment companies to improve civil society financial resilience and payment company rights-based due diligence.
Project Update
To date, we have completed a detailed legal analysis of relevant financial and data privacy regulations in the United States and United Kingdom, identified as the prevailing registered location for leading target payment companies. In addition, we have completed a significant draft of target company policies focused on user data handling. The legal and policy analyses are valuable outputs in their own right, but will primarily inform the development of a targeted manual for civil society actors in relevant jurisdictions to better understand their rights and risks in setting up and managing relevant payment platform accounts. A first draft of the manual has been completed and is currently being reviewed through a tiered consultation.
Project Impact & Target Audience(s)
While we are progressing well and have had positive feedback from the target community, the project is at an interim point of output creation whereby more substantive impact has not yet been measured. We look forward to the final outputs and more in depth engagement and evaluation of impact.
Progress on Objectives, Key Activities
The original proposal outlined legal and policy analyses, which are nearly completed. We are also nearing a final draft of the practical manual we set out to produce. The proposal also outlines the creation of recommendations to digital payment platforms, which will be informed by the legal and policy analyses and tiered consultation. This has not begun yet but will start next month. We especially look forward to sharing the output for digital payment platforms with the Interledger Community and hope it may likewise be helpful in their own research or advocacy on rights-based policies at digital financial institutions.
Communications and Marketing
We have not disseminated outputs in public yet, as this will come with the final outputs at the end of the project. But look forward to sharing and receiving community input at that time.
What’s Next?
Over May and June we will be working with the project team and external tiered consultation participants to finalize the project materials. We are looking forward to the final outputs release and the ability to hopefully move onto a second stage with more targeted capacity building and advocacy around these issues.
Community Support
We are eager to learn more about what others are doing!
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