User:Elsa Saade

Elsa Saade (Lebanon) is a Lebanese cultural and social activist, aspiring historian, political artist, mobilizer and Program Officer at Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights (UAF) based in New York City.

Interests and skills surround the fields of feminist Human Rights, Digital Security, Advocacy, Middle Eastern History Politics and Activism, Artivism, Philanthropy and Justice.

She served as the Asia-Pacific representative in the Executive Committee of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 2017-2018 and was appointed as a GNSO Council member representing the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) 2018-2020.

When at ICANN, she engaged as a Human Rights Officer at Gulf Center for Human Rights (GCHR) whereby she coordinated digital rights, capacity building and advocacy campaigns in addition to projects, building up an array of experience in the field of human rights on a national, regional as well as international level. Her focus lied mostly, on a freedom of expression project related to hate speech in the MENA, Data Visualization and the importance of verification in research and documentation, and finally the export of surveillance tools from European based corporations to the Gulf. Elsa was also active for several years in Lebanese civil society starting with grassroots activism in student movements and is now an organizer in the diaspora in parallel to her work in philanthropy with UAF.