Monika Zalnieriute

Monika Zalnieriute

Dr. Monika Zalnieriute is a human rights scholar and advocate, working in the area of Internet policy, data protection and privacy, surveillance, freedom of expression and the rights of marginalized and vulnerable groups online. She is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Melbourne Law School at University of Melbourne in Australia and holds a PhD in Law from European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Monika believes that research only matters if it has a strong and tangible impact well beyond academia; and thus is actively engaged both within academic, as well as civil society and policy-making circles.

Monika is also a visiting Fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a founding Director of a researched-based non-governmental advocacy organization ‘ZEPHIRO: Progressive Platform for Human Rights’ in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is an expert with the European Union, Council of Europe, World Health Organization and a number of non-governmental organizations; and often delivers talks and represents civil society interests at various international Internet policy gatherings and international workings groups, such as the United Nation Internet Governance Forum, EuroDIG, International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications, Council of Europe Committee on Data Protection, and Asia-Pacific Internet Governance Forum, among others. Monika is currently serving on the Executive Committee of the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) within Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and works towards the strengthening of the human rights protection within ICANN policies and procedures in particular.