Ruth Adler Memorial Lecture: Making the Digital Welfare State work for people

The Edinburgh Law School and the Global Justice Academy are hosting Professor Philip Alston, who will deliver the Ruth Adler Memorial Lecture on Tuesday 1st October from 18.00-19.30. 

Professor Alston is one of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of international human rights law. He is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and Faculty co-Chair of the NYU Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Prof Alston was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights in 2014, having held a range of senior UN appointments for over two decades, including as UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions from 2004 to 2010.  In April 2019, he released a report on his mission to the United Kingdom in his capacity as Special Rapporteur, which examined the consequences of austerity for the enjoyment of human rights in the UK. 

His talk will explore the opportunities and challenges posed by the digital welfare state: 

The application of digital technologies by governments is already transforming governance, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the welfare sector. The emergence of the digital welfare state in the UK and elsewhere should be a cause for celebration because of the immense potential that artificial intelligence, data matching, and automation have to create a better and more supportive world for those most in need in society. But experience to date points in a very different direction. The digital welfare state is often endlessly intrusive and demanding, it is rigid and heartless, and it is driven by notions of efficiency and cost-savings that have all too little to do with welfare. Can it be turned around?

 

The Ruth Adler Memorial Lecture series was founded by the Adler family in memory of our former colleague Ruth and her career-long advocacy and activism in the field of human rights.

Register for this event on eventbrite.