Technology & Human Rights Fellow (2026-27)
Inés Huergo González is a researcher specializing in the impact of new technologies on fundamental rights, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence, medicine and gene editing. She holds a Law degree with a specialization in International Law and a minor in Humanities from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and has also completed the Master's Degree in Advanced Human Rights Studies at the same university.
From 2024 to 2026 she was a researcher on the Communities of Practice for Advancing Equality in the Digital Environment Project, led by the ONCE Foundation and "Gregorio Peces-Barba" Institute of Human Right in collaboration with Red.es, where she studied the right to equality under the Digital Rights Charter and emerging public policies on human rights and technology.
Her research experience includes notable international collaborations:
Hellenic National Commission on Bioethics and Technoethics (Athens, Greece) — drafting academic reports on the ethical-legal impact of neurorights.
Spanish Committee of Representatives of People with Disabilities (CERMI) — research assistant on the AIDEG project, on inclusive governance of artificial intelligence in the employment of people with disabilities.
Mar del Plata Lab (National University of Mar del Plata, Argentina) — a university volunteer programme focused on artificial intelligence and digital rights.
Collaboration grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education with the Department of Public International Law, Ecclesiastical Law and Philosophy of Law at UC3M, dedicated to studying the ethical and legal impacts of emerging technologies.
She is also the organizer of DERTECNIA: Human Rights, Diversity and Technology, an initiative promoting seminars and activities at the intersection of human rights, business, society and technology.
Inés has spoken at national and international forums, including the Digital Citizenship Congress at the University of Buenos Aires (2025), where she addressed children's rights in the digital environment, and the UNITWIN/UNESCO webinar on Digital Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2025), presenting the paper "Human Vulnerability in the Technological Age: Ethical and Legal Challenges for the Protection of Human Rights." She has also been a speaker and organizer at the 8th Congress: The Time of Rights (2024-2025) and a speaker at the 5th International Meeting on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Private Law.
Fellowship Project: This project develops the concept of "epistemic vulnerability" to explain why surveillance capitalism and AI-mediated decision systems pose a threat to human rights. Building on this diagnosis and on a framework of epistemic agency and rights, it argues that infrastructures of data extraction and inference expose individuals and publics to structural asymmetries of information and behavioral steering, eroding the conditions for democratic self-government.
Integrating the theory of vulnerability as a universal human condition with relational approaches focused on institutional and technological barriers, the project distinguishes between vulnerability as condition and vulnerability as situation. The application of AI in medicine illustrates this tension, as it promises to overcome diagnostic limits, yet depends on systems of measurement and prediction that generate new dependencies and can give rise to forms of "algorithmic paternalism" reshaping patient agency through opaque choice.