On February 17, 2025 Dr. Elena Pribytkova presented her paper “Securing a Digital Minimum in International Human Rights Law” in a panel “Privacy and Data Protection in Digital Age”.

In her presentation, Dr. Pribytkova addressed digital aspects of a decent social minimum, which she defines as a set of guarantees aimed at protecting persons from extreme poverty, enabling them to lead a decent life, ensuring their involvement in society and access to shared material and intellectual values, and providing the opportunity for their moral and intellectual flourishing. She discussed challenges that people living in poverty are facing while claiming a secure access to a decent social minimum in the digitalized context. In particular, she explicated how digital technologies have been used by multiple actors as a means for violating human rights and deepening poverty, inequality, social exclusion, and marginalization of people, especially of the most vulnerable. She argued that a decent social minimum should embrace a “digital minimum”, i.e., basic (digital) rights guarantees indispensable for alleviating digital poverty, reducing digital divide and digital illiteracy, resisting digital colonialism, and empowering individuals and social groups. She also analysed some strategies of efficient governing as well as innovative methods and good practices of applying digital technologies to ensure a decent social minimum.