User:Elsa Saade

Elsa Saade (Lebanon) is a social and political activist working in the fields of campaigning, humanitarian assistance, advocacy, digital rights and capacity building. She is the current Human Rights Officer at Gulf Center for Human Rights (GCHR) whereby she coordinates 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 lies mostly, at the moment, 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 has also been active for several years in Lebanese civil society starting with grassroots activism in her university campus. Currently, she is engaging in several campaigns related to women's rights and feminist movement building, war reconciliation with a particular emphasis on the case of the disappeared in Lebanon. Elsa has also gained well-founded experience in monitoring national and regional elections from Beirut with an independent observer organization, in youth leadership through capacity building and skills training, as well as peace-building.

For the past three years Elsa has been active on the local, regional and the international level, as part of several human rights defender and feminist networks around the globe (including the MENA Women Human Rights Defenders Coalition, the MENA, South, and South East Asia Women's Network, and the global Internet Society). Most recently, she has been elected to represent the Asia-Pacific region in the Executive Committee of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Her passion and commitment to a wide range of human rights issues is driven by her dream for strategic and collective change in her region.