Ella Jakubowska

Ella Jakubowska is the Head of Policy at European Digital Rights (EDRi), the pan-European network of civil-society organisations defending rights and freedoms in the digital environment, and the corpus's on-record Brussels / EU-secretariat public voice on biometric mass surveillance, facial recognition, and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (see Person entry). She is tracked here as a Voice because her sustained named public output — the EDRi Brussels secretariat's biometric mass surveillance archive of named-byline campaign statements and policy briefs; the Euronews op-ed Retrospective facial recognition surveillance conceals human-rights abuses in plain sight; the Social Europe analysis European Parliament on AI Act: Still rights gaps to fill; the SHARE Foundation video interview on biometric mass surveillance; the CPDP 2024 Europe AI Policy Leader award recognising her leadership of the Reclaim Your Face campaign; and the on-record EDRi spokesperson role on the biometric track of the EU AI Act civil-society coalition through the legislative cycle — carries the working frame that biometric mass surveillance is the AI-policy file on which European fundamental rights stand or fall and the Reclaim Your Face coalition's ban-biometric-mass-surveillance demand is the corpus's clearest single articulation of grassroots civil-society resistance to the AI Act's law-enforcement and migration carve-outs.

The Voice anchors three movement-area registers that the corpus's voices slice had previously left underweight.

• The second Continental Europe voice anchor and the first Brussels / Belgium voice anchor. The corpus's existing Continental Europe Voice — Matthias Spielkamp — anchors the German national-civil-society register through AlgorithmWatch's Berlin technical-research-and-advocacy line. Jakubowska's Brussels / EDRi secretariat register is structurally distinct: pan-European policy spokesperson based at the EU institutions, working the inter-institutional advocacy beat (Commission, Parliament, Council, member-state delegations) on the EU AI Act, the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, and Prüm II rather than national-civil-society organising. The Voice gives the corpus its second Continental Europe voice and its first Belgium-based / Brussels-anchored voice — the structurally distinctive pan-European policy-advocacy register.
• The EDRi-network voice anchor entirely. EDRi is in corpus as the principal pan-European digital-rights network coordinating the EU AI Act civil-society coalition, the Reclaim Your Face European Citizens' Initiative, and the network's wider biometric-mass-surveillance and platform-power campaigns. Jakubowska is the named EDRi spokesperson the European AI & Society Fund names alongside Access Now, AlgorithmWatch, Amnesty, and Fair Trials on the facial-recognition file in the coalition's reading of the 9 December 2023 political agreement. Without this Voice entry, the EDRi network — the corpus's structurally most load-bearing pan-European civil-society anchor on AI policy — had no corresponding Voice. The Voice closes the EDRi-network voice anchor. On the EDRi member-organisation side, the corpus's Person entry for Katarzyna Szymielewicz — Panoptykon Foundation co-founder and EDRi Vice-President 2012-2020 — sits as the parallel anchor on the national-member-org leadership register, structurally complementary rather than equivalent.
• The Brussels / EU-policy-spokesperson voice sub-type on biometric mass surveillance. Structurally distinct from the corpus's existing Voice anchors on the AI policy file — Reema Patel (UK / Ada Lovelace Institute participatory-data-stewardship register), Andrea Miotti (UK / ControlAI AI-safety-pause federation register), and Jamila Venturini and J. Carlos Lara (Latin American AI-and-human-rights regional-advocacy register) — Jakubowska's distinctive register is the Brussels-based pan-European policy spokesperson whose named public output runs as the EDRi-coordinated coalition's reference public voice on the EU AI Act's biometric track. The lawyer-advocate (Jakubowska's MSc in Human Rights and her named EDRi specialisms on biometrics, AI Act, CSA Regulation, and Prüm II), the policy-spokesperson side (her named-spokesperson role through the legislative cycle), and the campaign-organiser side (her leadership of the Reclaim Your Face European Citizens' Initiative that secured the CPDP 2024 Europe AI Policy Leader award) are integrated through the Brussels-secretariat institutional vehicle.

Public output and venues

Jakubowska's public-facing work runs through four overlapping channels.

• EDRi-coordinated EU AI Act civil-society coalition spokesperson on biometric provisions. The most load-bearing channel of Jakubowska's voice is her named EDRi spokesperson role on the biometric track of the EU AI Act civil-society coalition through the legislative cycle. She is named as a Policy Advisor contributor on the coalition's 30 November 2021 founding joint civil-society statement, was promoted to Senior Policy Advisor by the time of EDRi's 9 December 2023 political-agreement public verdict on the trilogue deal, and is now Head of Policy. Her verbatim public statement on the December 2023 political agreement — "it's hard to be excited about a law which has, for the first time in the EU, taken steps to legalise live public facial recognition across the bloc" — was the coalition's principal on-the-record framing of the Act's law-enforcement and migration carve-outs from the prohibition on remote biometric identification, and is corroborated by the European AI & Society Fund's civil-society round-up which names her alongside Access Now, AlgorithmWatch, Amnesty, and Fair Trials as the EDRi spokesperson on facial recognition in the coalition's mixed public verdict on the adopted text.
• Named-byline op-ed register in European mainstream and policy outlets. Jakubowska carries a recurring named-byline op-ed register across European mainstream and policy outlets. The Euronews op-ed Retrospective facial recognition surveillance conceals human-rights abuses in plain sight — republished on EDRi's own platform — argues that retrospective remote biometric identification operates as a structural concealment of human-rights abuses, not a more limited variant of real-time surveillance, and is the corpus's clearest single artefact of the substantive argument the coalition makes against the AI Act's retrospective-biometric carve-out. The Social Europe analysis European Parliament on AI Act: Still rights gaps to fill carries the coalition's reading that even the European Parliament's strengthened June 2023 mandate left structural rights gaps in the biometric provisions — the on-the-record civil-society register on a parliamentary mandate that mainstream coverage frequently described as a civil-society victory. The op-ed register is the on-record vehicle through which the EDRi-coordinated coalition's biometric-policy positions reach the pan-European general-readership and policy-readership audiences.
• Reclaim Your Face leadership and the CPDP 2024 Europe AI Policy Leader award. Jakubowska's biometric-rights work at EDRi sits inside the Reclaim Your Face coalition — the EDRi-coordinated European Citizens' Initiative against biometric mass surveillance in European public space, registered on 7 January 2021, running signature collection from 17 February 2021 through 1 August 2022 and gathering nearly 80,000 verified signatures. The campaign was awarded the CPDP 2024 Europe AI Policy Leader award — the corpus's clearest single artefact of international recognition for the campaign Jakubowska anchored — and the framings the campaign installed ("ban", "remote biometric identification", ban-biometric-mass-surveillance) are widely credited inside the coalition with entering the AI Act proposal text as a direct consequence of the mobilisation. The award is the on-record international acknowledgment that the campaign Jakubowska helped lead became the reference public-facing artefact of European civil-society biometric-rights organising.
• Public-speaker and named-byline campaign-and-policy authoring portfolio. Jakubowska is on the recurring speaker roster of regional and international civil-society biometrics-and-AI convenings, with the SHARE Foundation video interview on biometric mass surveillance as the corpus's clearest single artefact of the peer-network video-interview register — anchored on the Reclaim Your Face / biometric-mass-surveillance framing she carries into peer-network conversations. The substantial named-byline output across EDRi's biometric mass surveillance article archive records the campaign-statement and policy-brief authoring through which Jakubowska's voice carries the EDRi Brussels secretariat's biometric-rights line into the network's own publishing pipeline.

Signature framings

Two framings recur across Jakubowska's public output and have done the most to install her register into the European AI-and-fundamental-rights field.

• "Legalising live public facial recognition across the bloc." Jakubowska's verbatim 9 December 2023 statement that the AI Act has "for the first time in the EU, taken steps to legalise live public facial recognition across the bloc" became the coalition's principal on-the-record framing of the Act's law-enforcement and migration-context carve-outs from the prohibition on remote biometric identification. The framing refuses the framing widely used by member-state delegations and Commission spokespeople that the Act prohibits live facial recognition, and reads the carve-outs as the substantive content of the provision rather than as exceptions to it. The framing carries through the campaign body as the coalition's reference public verdict on the biometric file and through the European AI & Society Fund's civil-society round-up as the coalition's spokesperson position.
• "Retrospective facial recognition surveillance conceals human-rights abuses in plain sight." The framing Jakubowska delivers in her Euronews op-ed is that retrospective remote biometric identification — the AI Act's carve-out from the real-time prohibition that the political agreement preserved — is not a lesser variant of live surveillance but a structural concealment of human-rights abuses. The proposition is that the time-of-identification distinction is a category error that misdescribes the rights interference: a database of named faces drawn from public space is the same rights interference whether the identification is real-time or retrospective, and the carve-out misframes the prohibition by treating the time-of-processing question as the load-bearing variable. The framing carries through Jakubowska's named-byline op-ed register, the EDRi Brussels secretariat's biometric mass surveillance archive, and the coalition's spokesperson positions on the AI Act.

Organisational vehicle

Jakubowska's public output runs primarily through European Digital Rights (EDRi) — the pan-European network of digital-rights civil-society organisations, headquartered in Brussels, where she is Head of Policy of the network's Brussels secretariat, having previously held the Policy Advisor and Senior Policy Advisor roles through the EU AI Act legislative cycle. Her training — an MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science (distinction, 2018-2019), with a focus on intersectional feminist sociology of science and technology — anchors the academic-and-policy authority on which her named EDRi specialisms in biometrics advocacy, the EU AI Act, the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, and Prüm II are built. Beyond EDRi's own publishing channels, her voice carries through the Reclaim Your Face coalition (the EDRi-coordinated European Citizens' Initiative against biometric mass surveillance), her named-byline op-eds in Euronews and Social Europe, the regional civil-society convening circuit (including the SHARE Foundation interview), and the EU AI Act civil-society coalition inter-institutional advocacy through which the EDRi Brussels secretariat coordinates the coalition's public-facing biometric-policy line. The recognition of the Reclaim Your Face campaign with the CPDP 2024 Europe AI Policy Leader award is the on-record international acknowledgment of the institutional vehicle through which her voice runs.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Jakubowska's public-facing output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the EDRi Brussels secretariat's biometric mass surveillance archive of named-byline campaign statements and policy briefs; the named-byline op-ed register at Euronews and Social Europe; the SHARE Foundation video interview anchoring the public-speaker register; the CPDP 2024 Europe AI Policy Leader award recognising the Reclaim Your Face campaign she anchored; the on-record EDRi spokesperson role on the EU AI Act civil-society coalition biometric track through the legislative cycle; the verbatim "legalising live public facial recognition across the bloc" framing that became the coalition's reference public verdict on the December 2023 trilogue deal; and the Reclaim Your Face leadership through which the ban-biometric-mass-surveillance framing entered the AI Act proposal text. The corpus's Continental Europe Voice slot previously carried only the German register of voice-matthias-spielkamp; this entry gives the corpus its second Continental Europe voice and its first Brussels-based / EU-secretariat policy-spokesperson voice, closes the EDRi-network voice anchor entirely, and anchors the pan-European biometric-mass-surveillance public-voice register that the corpus's voices slice had previously left empty. Affiliation, training, and biographical detail are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.