Laura Lazaro Cabrera
Counsel and Director of the Equity and Data Programme
Laura Lazaro Cabrera is Counsel and Director of the Equity and Data Programme at the CDT Europe Office in Brussels, where she leads the work promoting the effective protection of fundamental human rights in the implementation of European Union legislation regulating new technologies. Her work focusses on identifying the adverse impacts of artificial intelligence on human rights and the regulatory or policy gaps that enable them, while working closely with affected individuals or communities to map effective solutions.
Laura joined the data and tech community after working in claimant-side strategic human rights litigation. She was part of a legal team which successfully challenged abuses of law enforcement powers in Mexico, and worked on a precedent-setting case which enabled victims of serious human rights violations in Colombia to access classified government files which would assist them in their pursuit of justice.
Laura comes to CDT with a robust background in privacy and data protection. Having worked as a senior legal officer at Privacy International (PI), a leading international NGO, she has extensively engaged with governments, regulators and courts worldwide to challenge laws and practices in the context of unlawful surveillance. Among others, she has led interventions before the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and drafted submissions to several domestic courts.
She has undertaken robust human rights advocacy before UN and global bodies to highlight the intersection between privacy and other rights, and worked alongside beneficiary-led organisations to build a shared understanding of the ways in which data and a broad range of rights may interact. Most notably, Laura contributed to the development of a position paper by ESCR-Net on Data for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and assisted the WHO in the development of online modules on the ethics and governance of AI for health.
Laura holds an LL.B and LL.M in Transnational Law from King’s College London, where she was a Dickson Poon Scholar. She is a member and scholar of Inner Temple.
