Our Trustees
Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE is the Founder and Chair of 5Rights. She is a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment and a global authority on digital regulation and accountability. She has played a determinative role in establishing standards for online safety and privacy across. the world. Baroness Kidron sits as a crossbench peer in the UK’s House of Lords. She is an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford, and a Commissioner on the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development.
Dr. Ansgar Koene (Vice-Chair) is Global AI Ethics and Regulatory Leader at EY (Ernst & Young) where he leads the AI related public policy team and contributes to the work on AI governance and EY’s Trusted AI framework. Ansgar chairs the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Working Group on a Standard for Algorithmic Bias Considerations and is a convener for the CEN-CENELEC JTC21 “AI” committee’s work on AI conformity assessment. He collaborated with 5Rights on the project “The Internet on Our Own Terms”, where young people aged 12 - 17 participated in deliberative juries to put the internet ‘on trial’.
“As a professional working on issues of data ethics and ethical uses of algorithmic systems, working with 5Rights has provided invaluable insights into the experiences of children and young people online. 5Rights takes a rigorous evidence-based approach to supporting the rights of children and young people online, by listening to their voices and recognising their diversity.”
Dr Amani Abou-Zeid is the African Union Commissioner in charge of Infrastructure, Energy, ICT & Tourism, with over 30 years’ work experience in Africa. Egyptian national, she has a BSc in Telecommunications Engineering; an MBA in project management; a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard School of Government; and a PhD in Social and Economic Development from The University of Manchester, UK. Dr Abou-Zeid was decorated Wissam Al Alawi by HM King Mohamed VI of Morocco and selected one of "The 50 Most Influential Women in Africa". She joined global leaders as Commissioner to the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development as well as the Global Commission on energy.
“Our children have the right to a safe present and a bright future. In this digital age, we need to work together to provide them with adequate digital literacy and a safe cyberspace.”
Anna Marie Corazza Bildt is President of Missing Children Europe and has been working in the field of children’s rights in a number of capacities throughout her life. Human rights champion, policy maker, volunteer and entrepreneur, she divides her time between Sweden and Italy and has contributed to the relaunch of the Child Dignity Alliance, an NGO engaged in the protection of children on the internet to fight against sexual abuse and in the support of victims.
She has been Digital Leader of the World Economic Forum since 2018 and was a Member of the European Parliament between 2009-2019 where she had many roles including European Parliament Coordinator for the Rights of the Child, as well as the Co-founder and co-chair, of the intergroup on children's rights. She has also been a peacekeeper and human rights champion with the United Nations Protection Force, and was the Special Assistant to the Undersecretary General for Human Rights at the UN in Geneva in 1992.
Manuel Costescu (Treasurer) is CEO-Europe for DFCapital, a financial institution providing working capital to SMEs. Prior to his current role, he advised on impact investment strategies for the EBRD, Global Harvester, a low carbon economy merchant bank. He also acted as Head of Investments at Open Society Foundation, Soros Economic Development Fund. In 2016, he was nominated Secretary of State for Trade & Investment and was subsequently elected as a Member of the Romanian Parliament. Prior to this, Manuel was an Executive Director with J.P. Morgan’s Corporate & Investment Bank and a consultant for McKinsey. Manuel holds a Master’s in Business Administration from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Masters in International Development from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
“As a father of three children, I live every day with the ever present virtual reality permeating family life. It is a privilege to be able to work with gifted people on ensuring that whatever the digital future brings, we would have been deliberate about it.”
Elizabeth Denham CBE brings extensive international regulatory expertise to 5 Rights. She served as the UK Information Commissioner from 2016-2021, following a decade of roles as a data protection and information rights regulator in Canada. As Information Commissioner for the UK, she built and led the largest data protection regulator in the world and Chaired the Global Privacy Assembly (international forum of data protection commissioners) from 2018-2021.
She is committed to making digital technologies and data work for the benefit of society. Under her leadership, the ICO embarked on some of the most daunting cross-border investigations on the misuse of individuals’ data -- including her investigation into political micro-targeting and election interference, data brokers and credit reporting agencies, and use of facial recognition technology by commercial firms and the police. She is passionate about the ethical and safe collection, storage and use of data. A highlight of her time at the ICO was drafting the first ‘privacy by design’ statutory Children’s Code – a set of fifteen enforceable standards to protect children’s safety and agency on- line. This Code is having global impact as technology companies and services making meaningful changes to their services to comply with the rigorous standards in the UK Code.
In the 2019 New Year’s Honours list Elizabeth was awarded a CBE for her services to protecting people’s privacy. In 2020 she received the BCS Society Medal, which recognises an outstanding individual whose work and values have helped to enhance the reputation of digital technology and its contribution to improving our lives. In 2021 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Victoria for international leadership in information rights.
Dorothy Gordon works at the nexus of international development and digital technology with a focus on capacity-building for inclusion and equity. Leveraging on government, corporate, civil society, and UN policy experience; her work as a leader, advocate, advisor, speaker and management consultant has taken her to over 100 countries. Her experience includes management responsibilities in the design, delivery and evaluation of multi-million dollar programmes mainly in Africa and South Asia. She currently works with a diverse range of partners and serves on a number of boards and advisory panels including UNESCO- IITE (Institute for Information Technologies in Education) and the Linux Professional Institute. A gender advocate, she actively supports the ROAM principles (Rights, Open, Access, Multi-stakeholder), building on her work with the Open Movement and Creative Commons. In addition to her work as a management consultant, she continues to monitor the impact of technology on society including the effects of frontier technologies such as AI on the most vulnerable.
Mikiko Otani is a member and former Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. She is an international human rights lawyer and a practicing lawyer of family law in Japan for over 30 years, with a focus on women’s and children’s rights. She is a Commissioner and a Member of the Executive Committee of the International Commission of Jurists, a Member of the Executive Council of the Asian Society of International Law, and a former Chair of the Committee on International Human Rights of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations. She has published and taught extensively in the area of international human rights and on issues impacting children. The areas of her particular interest are human rights education, child participation, children and armed conflict, girl child, human trafficking, access to justice for children, among others.
Peter Wanless has been Chief Executive of NSPCC, the UK’s leading child protection charity, since 2013. He was previously the Big Lottery Fund’s Chief Executive, and Director at the Department for Education from 1998 to 2008. He is on the Royal Foundation Taskforce for the Prevention of Cyberbullying.
“Childhood shapes who we become, abuse never should. That is why I feel so strongly that children’s rights must apply online as well as offline so the wonderful opportunities afforded by digital technology help children flourish, rather than subject them to potentially devastating and unnecessary risk.”
Shoshana Zuboff is the author of the books In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with James Maxmin. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, integrates her lifelong themes: the digital revolution, the evolution of capitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human development.
Zuboff's work is the source of many original concepts including 'surveillance capitalism', 'instrumentarian power', 'the division of learning in society', 'economies of action', 'the means of behavior modification', 'information civilization', 'computer-mediated work', the 'automate/informate' dialectic, 'abstraction of work' and 'individualization of consumption'.
