Elizabeth Atori

Elizabeth Atori is a Ugandan human rights lawyer, scholar, and advocate whose work sits at the intersection of digital rights, AI governance, data governance, and feminist advocacy across Uganda and East Africa. Her career has been defined by a sustained commitment to ensuring that the design and governance of digital systems reflect the rights, realities, and agency of the communities most affected by them, and least consulted in their construction.

 

Elizabeth holds a Master of Laws in Technology Law and Policy from Georgetown University Law Center, where she graduated with Distinction and Dean's List honors on a full merit scholarship and the Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa (LAWA) Fellowship. Her LLM thesis examined Uganda's Ndaga Muntu digital identity system, developing the concept of "double dispossession", the simultaneous exclusion of marginalized populations, especially women, from digital public services and the extraction of their data for state and corporate ends, laying the empirical and conceptual groundwork for her current research on surveillance capitalism, epistemic rights, and Digital Public Infrastructure in low-income countries.

 

She is currently an Impact Scholar at Georgetown University's Massive Data Institute (MDI), where she contributes to legal knowledge engineering and leads benchmark evaluation for Policy for the People (P4P), a Gates Foundation-funded initiative developing an AI-assisted statutory research tool to make complex federal and state education statutes, and eventually all public statutes, more accessible to researchers and practitioners. The project builds a legal ontology and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system, using FERPA as a benchmark to test and validate the framework. Her contributions include developing the Cookie Cutter Framework, a 16-category legal ontology built through systematic analysis of FERPA and validated against the full statute, enabling AI systems to classify statutory provisions by function rather than structure. She has also designed adversarial evaluation protocols that identified systematic AI failure patterns, including negative definition omission, exception underspecification, and temporal conflation, building the evidentiary infrastructure necessary for accountable, equitable AI legal reasoning. Concurrently, she holds a Georgetown Public Interest Fellowship at the International Senior Lawyers Project (ISLP), where she supports responsible technology policy and digital governance initiatives across the Global South.

 

Before Georgetown, Elizabeth spent over six years at the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) in Uganda, progressing from Legal Officer to Program Manager for Business, Human Rights and Digitalization. At ISER, she led strategic litigation that removed digital ID barriers to COVID-19 vaccine access, a policy victory with direct impact on hundreds of thousands of Ugandans, directed EU-funded corporate accountability programming across four districts, coordinated a 30-member global task force on digital identity advocacy spanning governments, civil society, and development partners, and led Uganda's civil society submissions to the UN Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review. She has contributed to UNDP's Universal DPI Safeguards Framework, and advised women-led enterprises across East Africa through Muyi Consulting Group.

 

Elizabeth's research and advocacy consistently centre the experiences of those most systematically excluded from digital governance: women, older persons, rural communities, and linguistic minorities, while engaging the international frameworks, development finance institutions, and technology governance bodies that shape the environments in which those communities live. She is a member of FIDA Uganda, the Uganda Law Society, and the Network for Public Interest Litigation (NETPIL).

 

Fellowship Project: This project examines how Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in Uganda operates as a form of surveillance capitalism, producing what Atori terms "double dispossession": the simultaneous exclusion of marginalized populations, especially women, from digital systems while extracting their data and behavioral patterns for state and corporate ends. Drawing on Zuboff's surveillance capitalism framework and Risse's theory of epistemic rights, the project argues that DPI in low-income countries constitutes a structurally distinct and more coercive variant of surveillance capitalism, one in which extraction and exclusion are not contradictions but co-constitutive features of the same system. The research proposes an Epistemic Sovereignty Framework as a rights-based response, offering both theoretical contribution and concrete policy tools for democratic accountability in the digital age.