Emma Day
CEO Asia and North America
Human Rights Lawyer
FHCA, certified auditor for the UK Children’s Code, 2023
CIPP/E, International Association of Privacy Professionals, 2022
LLM law and technology, UC Berkeley California, US, as a
Fulbright Scholar, 2020
Solicitor and barrister exams, British Columbia, Canada, 2010
LLM international human rights law, University of London, UK, 2006
CPE (Law conversion), University of Westminster, UK, 2003
BA (Hons) Sociology, University of Leeds, UK, 1997
About Emma
Emma Day is a British lawyer with 25 years’ experience working in human rights.
Starting out as a social scientist, Emma spent two years working with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Rwanda (1999-2001) where she was inspired to learn more about law and justice in the context of a society reconciling the after-effects of a genocide. Emma started her legal career in a community law centre in London bringing actions against the local authority on behalf of homeless young people. From there she moved to Canada where she qualified as a solicitor and barrister, training at a leading international law firm in British Columbia. She then moved to Kenya where she worked for three years as a freelance human rights lawyer for the Open Society Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and KELIN Kenya, carrying out socio-legal research related to access to justice for marginalised populations. From Kenya, Emma moved to Thailand for six years where she worked as a legal consultant most recently for the UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office, leading its work on child online protection. While at UNICEF, Emma led several research studies and convened multistakeholder fora in six countries across the Asia Pacific region, bringing together governments, civil society and technology companies to address children’s rights in relation to technology.
Inspired by the platform regulation aspects of child online protection, Emma took a sabbatical in 2019-2020 to attend UC Berkeley as a Fulbright Scholar to complete her second LLM, with a focus on law and technology. Emma then continued to consult for UNICEF on data governance for children before co-founding Tech Legality, co-authoring The Case for Better Governance of Children’s Data: A manifesto ; and on children’s rights and business for the technology sector, writing a Special Briefing for the UN Human Rights (OHCHR) B-Tech project. She has also consulted for the 5Rights Digital Futures Commission, providing a legal analysis of the governance of EdTech in schools, and for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on hate speech, disinformation and misinformation. Emma is a Non-resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab, and an alumna of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. She is also a member of the European Data Protection Board Support Pool of Experts, and part of the Privacy Expert Group for the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
Emma is based in Portugal.
Publications
2015
Toolkit: Gaps, Traps & Opportunities for working with gender and HIV in plural legal systems
UNDP
