Technologies at war: The role of tech companies and the EU in facilitating war crimes and genocide in Gaza

  • Panel
  • Grande Halle
  • Friday 23.05 — 14:15 - 15:30

Organising Institution

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International

  • Business 3
  • Policy 3
Israel has deployed digital technologies to fuel the atrocities committed in its war in Gaza. The report by the United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories highlights how digital technologies are facilitating human rights abuses in Gaza, including actions consistent with the crime of genocide. Israel's digital warfare in Gaza presents an unprecedented blueprint for the militarization of data and digital technologies, “AI-washing” gross violations of international law. It also forces the door wide-open for further collusion between Big Tech and the military posing grave risks to fundamental rights, peace, and security elsewhere. Gaza, and occupied Palestine at-large, have become open-air technology expositions; a live laboratory for the testing and marketing of unprecedented technologies of violence, at the expense of Palestinians.

Questions to be answered

  1. How are tech companies facilitating war crimes and genocide in Gaza through cloud computing, content moderation, hardware provision etc?
  2. What role is the EU playing here, such as through funding or the export of technologies by EU companies?
  3. Which legal instruments are applicable to the role of technologies here, and what avenues can be taken to stop this facilitation of war crimes and genocide?
  4. What strategies or leverage points can be used to challenge and resist complicity in the tech-facilitated war on Gaza?