Alfiana Qisthi
Project Officer for the Digital Democracy Initiative project at Tifa Foundation,
Lead of the DDI Financial Support Mechanism (Re-D Fund)
Tech accountability and digital rights resourcing advocacy should start upstream: Notes from DRAPAC 2026
This article is part of the DDI at DRAPAC 2026 series.
Attending DRAPAC26 in Manila was my first Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly, and I came to it from a background rooted more in criminal justice and international development than in digital rights specifically. Sitting through these sessions was, in many ways, my first real exposure to watching human rights concerns get worked through in digital spaces rather than reading about them from a distance. What struck me across the sessions I attended was a single pattern: a widening gap between how quickly institutions adopt technology and how slowly they build the accountability structures meant to govern it.
That gap showed up first in a conversation about artificial intelligence in the judiciary, and it was the session where my own background gave me the most familiar footing. What stayed with me was how consistent the pattern was across very different judicial systems. Indonesia’s Early Case Detection system, designed to flag similar cases and reduce disparity in judicial decisions, sounded reasonable in principle, but when I pressed on whether any binding rule obliges judges to actually engage with its output, the honest answer was that nobody outside the system really knows. India’s Digital Future Lab presented similar ambitions around ethical AI adoption, and Taiwan’s Judicial Reform Foundation offered a civil-society vantage point on the same tension from a jurisdiction with far more mature technology governance. Hearing the same underlying problem, which tools introduced with a legitimate rationale but minimal transparency, recur across three quite different legal systems made it clear this is not an Indonesia-specific gap but a structural one across the region’s judiciaries. I recognized in it a familiar shape of the “pasal karet” problem I have spent years tracking in Indonesian law: a good-faith mechanism whose safeguards are undermined by the absence of disclosure norms.
The same shape reappeared, sharper, in the session on surveillance and migration, again playing out similarly beyond Indonesia alone. Spyware procured by law enforcement, biometric systems expanding under “smart city” branding, detention “alternatives” that in practice extend rather than shorten a person’s time under monitoring — in each case, a private vendor sits quietly behind the technology, earning revenue for as long as the system keeps collecting data. The OHCHR’s contribution reframed all of this for me: rather than treating each abuse as a downstream harm to document and respond to, they argued that a human rights impact assessment belongs at the procurement stage, before a system is ever deployed. That shifted where I now think the intervention point should be — upstream, in the purchasing decision, not after the fact. A related workshop in the same track, hosted by Engage Media, stayed with me for a more personal reason: Engage Media is one of Tifa’s Re-D Fund Cohort 1 partners, and here they were presenting their own work building and maintaining VPN tools for human rights defenders navigating censorship and blocked access. Watching a partner I already work with through a grant relationship demonstrate that work in real time made the funding relationship feel concrete in a way a narrative report never quite does — this is what the funding support is actually for.
If accountability in surveillance systems means intervening before deployment, I found myself asking whether funding needed its own version of "upstream" — building trust, flexibility, and coordination into a grant relationship from the start, rather than only reacting once funding tightens or a program ends.
That connection carried directly into the resourcing session, which mattered most to me on two fronts at once: as the Re-D Fund lead, and as someone who came into Tifa from international development work where funding architecture was often designed far from the movements it was meant to serve. If accountability in surveillance systems means intervening before deployment, I found myself asking whether funding needed its own version of “upstream” — building trust, flexibility, and coordination into a grant relationship from the start, rather than only reacting once funding tightens or a program ends.
Listening to SIDA, Luminate, and DT Global describe what makes a funding relationship trustworthy — movement-led decision-making, flexibility, sustained presence on the ground, trust built over years rather than assumed on day one — I found myself measuring it against both the Re-D Fund and my earlier experience with bilateral programming. What stayed with me most was a reframing I had not expected: just as accountability needs to start upstream, so does the question of sustainability — in a period of shrinking funding across the region, the real question is not only how development partners sustain the funding itself, but how they help sustain the movement when funding contracts. Flexible grants and trust matter, but so does whether a donor’s exit or downsizing leaves behind functioning networks, retained expertise, and shared infrastructure — or just a gap. I also left with a genuinely new question: how do intermediaries and donors avoid duplicating support or working in silos around the same grantees? As our Cohort 1 (and now Cohort 2 too) partners increasingly sit at the intersection of multiple funders, that coordination question is not hypothetical for us, and it is one I want to raise more deliberately with our own donor counterparts.
Coming from criminal justice and development work into this space for the first time, I am leaving DRAPAC26 with a sharper sense of where advocacy needs to happen: not only responding to how technology is used, but pushing to be present when decisions about how it is built, bought, and funded — and how it is sustained once the funding shifts are made.