Pat de Brún is an international human rights lawyer and researcher. His work focuses on investigating and understanding the impacts which technologies including social media and AI have on the enjoyment of our human rights.
Pat is currently on sabbatical from his role as Head of Big Tech Accountability for Amnesty International. Pat’s team at Amnesty is dedicated to investigating, exposing, and ultimately holding to account Big Tech companies which are harming individuals’ and communities human rights. His work is especially concerned with the role that Big Tech business models and algorithmic recommender systems play in fuelling extremism, misinformation, and offline violence.
During his sabbatical, Pat is focusing on his PhD at SOAS University of London, which critically interrogates the possibilities and limitations of international human rights law as a tool for queer communities pursuing justice and liberation.
Pat has worked with a wide range of human rights organisations and activist groups for the past decade. He spent five years working in Cambodia, including periods working with the UN’s Khmer Rouge Tribunal, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, and various queer activist groups and international human rights organisations. Pat has led investigations into Meta (Facebook)’s role in the persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and Big Tech’s role in silencing human rights activists in Vietnam. He has also led several research projects on LGBTIQ rights in Cambodia, including research on trans people’s lived experiences of discrimination in urban centres, and a major study on marriage equality and gender recognition rights, among many others.