Ella Jakubowska of “Reclaim Your Face”: We chose to launch a European citizens’ initiative because it's a really powerful democratic process

Ella Jakubowska is one of the coordinators of the European citizens' initiative “Reclaim Your Face”, campaigning to ban biometric mass surveillance in Europe. She works as a policy and campaigns officer at European Digital Rights.

The Reclaim Your Face campaign received a huge boost on June 21, 2021 when the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) called for a ban on use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for automated recognition of human features.

Q:  How did you come up with the idea to launch a European citizens’ Initiative?

Ella:  We looked at lots of different options for how we can engage people across all of the EU Member States. It is very challenging to find ways that that will make a difference, that transcend the Member State's borders; so when we came across the European Citizens’ Initiative it really appealed to us, because it's a formal process, so people know that by signing, by raising their voice they will actually be heard at a national level and at an EU-wide level, so that opportunity to influence EU law and to make our voices heard at the highest level of the EU was really, really appealing to us.

We were really drawn to the fact that the European Citizens’ Initiative allows us to potentially influence EU legislation. That's a massive thing and, you know, "sometimes the EU can seem kind of remote to people and it's not always clear how the EU’s work connects to people's lives".

The European Citizens’ Initiative, being a process that anyone can launch and that requires the signatures of one million people, means that it's really broad, it's a really great way of engaging people that might not realise that they actually have a chance to influence the laws that the EU creates. We chose to launch a European citizens’ initiative because it's a really powerful form of democratic process that allows people who might otherwise see the EU as something remote, to actually realise that they can have a chance for their voice to be heard and to influence the laws that impact all of our lives. That's why we felt that the European Citizens’ Initiative is so powerful compared to other forms of petitions or other campaigning tools that we might come across.

Q:  What was your experience with the registration of the initiative, what were the most challenging parts of it, what worked best for you? What is your advice to potential future organisers, what should they be looking to avoid or learn from?

Ella: Approaching the European Citizens’ Initiative registration, I think the main thing we felt at the beginning was a little bit overwhelmed. There's a huge amount of information and actually you are taking part in a legally recognised process, so it's a lot heavier than other campaign tools that we might have used in the past and that's why the biggest takeaway that I have from the beginning of the process is to read as much as you can to understand the full process before you get started and really to make use of the networks that are out there that can give you advice, because it was only through speaking to people that had been through the process before and speaking to the advice team that were on hand that we were really able to fully understand not only the intricacies of the process, but also how best to get the most out of it.

When we first started the process of getting our European citizens’ initiative registered, I think we hadn't fully appreciated the complexity of the process because this is a legally recognised process and you have to take care in how you write your proposal and how you submit it, so "my biggest takeaway really is to get as much advice early on as you possibly can there are some really brilliant resources out there through the European Citizens’ Initiative Forum".

Once we started taking advantage of those it got a lot easier. We realised that there are so many other people that have been through this process, that were willing to talk to us and give us the benefit of their learning and we also had a really positive experience getting legal advice from the ECI Forum team because we had to make sure that our initiative was within the competence of the European Commission, and as a group of citizens that can be a fairly challenging thing to make sure that we're achieving. Being able to speak to this dedicated team who were there to help us, who could give us advice and say “don't include this thing, do include that”, was really helpful and really made the difference in helping us to get our initiative registered.

Q: What was the most important advice you received from the Forum?

Ella: One of the challenges that we faced when we were seeking to register our European citizens’ initiative was which Treaty basis could be the legal basis for the demand that we were putting forward to the Commission and as a group of citizen organisers that's something that we weren't 100% comfortable with ourselves, so actually being able to turn to the ECI Forum and ask for their advice, "their legal advice was really, really powerful and made the difference with the things that we weren't not sure about".

They were able to give us some recommendations on the legal basis for our demand that led to our initiative being registered in the end, so that advice was invaluable and we probably wouldn't have known exactly what to ask for if we hadn't had that. For me probably the best bit of the ECI Forum was the Seek Advice function where there is a group of super helpful, friendly, dedicated people on hand to give you advice on whatever questions you might have.

Q: What were the biggest challenges you faced when campaigning in COVID-19 times?

Ella: Campaigning at any time is a challenging thing, trying to mobilise people, and "translate what is quite a heavy policy message into something that helps people understand why this topic actually impacts their day-to-day life".

When signing a European citizens’ initiative, people  need to give more personal data than they would for a regular petition, so some of the challenges for us have been in trying to make sure that people are really aware of why we're asking for so much data, and reassuring them that it's going to be kept securely and we've found that that has helped people to really understand what it is that we're doing, and what we're asking for from them. In addition, "we've found that building our network and our coalition has really helped us to get the word out about our European citizens’ initiative".

Our coalition is currently at 50 organisations and we're bringing new ones on board every day, because running a European citizens initiative is not a small task. Getting enough people engaged in the topic so that they will sign, it is a challenge and what we're finding is that the more we can help people to understand the issue in their national context, the better, because that's how we really make it feel real to people and not just something distant or abstract.

Having national partners that are on the ground, doing the work, has been something for us that's been really positive and in particular finding trusted organisations that have a good supporter base that they can address. It has been one of the ways that we have found is most effective whether that's through direct emails, newsletters, social media, because of course, right now in COVID-19 times it's harder to get out there, we can't run events in the way that we might have done normally, we can't reach people at protests, so we're having to be creative and use the online means that we have in order to reach people. That's really important.

What we've found in our experience with the European Citizens’ Initiative is that it takes a lot of work to raise awareness about the fact that we're doing this to help people understand what signing means and why it's so important for them and one of the ways that we've found is most successful in doing this is building national level coalitions of civil society groups and other organisations that can help get the message out across different topics and help different communities and different groups to understand how the issue relates to them.

For example, Germany for us is a really important country, because not only is the topic very present, we're seeing a lot of biometric mass surveillance happening in Germany, but we've got a really strong civil society presence there and we're finding that I think around half of our signatures so far have come from Germany. That shows that our investment in strategies in Germany is really working. I would really advise anyone that is considering or that is starting to run a European citizens’ initiative to think carefully about how you are building your coalition, how you are building the movement, which countries are the most important for you, not just in terms of presence, but also politically, which are the countries that might be able to help you achieve political change when you do reach your one million signatures, because the point of a European citizens’ initiative is to have real democratic change, and once you collect your one million signatures you want this to be taken forward. "The more political support you can get in influential countries, the better."

We choose not to use any paid targeted advertising and so we don't advertise on Facebook because we're a digital rights organisation and we don't want people to be targeted by our ads, which adds in some extra challenges to us, because that's often a way of reaching a lot more people. We've had to think quite creatively about how we can get some of our content to be picked up and to go viral  on social media and one of the things that "we found that is really effective is to hook what it is that we're campaigning for onto things that are happening in the news, because that is where people seem to be most interested". 

We've been keeping an eye open for relevant stories, especially surprising ones, so in our context we recently had a big hack of biometric and other security cameras from a tech start-up in the US. We were able to use that to engage a lot of people who were really interested in that hack to make them aware that we're campaigning to stop that kind of thing from happening in the future. That's been one method of helping increase our social media influence.  Another tactic that we found really  helps us get awareness for our campaign is having the support of political groups. Whilst as a campaign we are politically neutral and we're not affiliated to any political organisation or group, because we've put our information out there publicly, what that allows us to do is to have political groups, "political entities, politicians give their support independently of us, for our campaign, and that's one of the ways that people really take note".

If you have an influential politician saying “This thing is important”, then people are likely to take note and we've also had other kind of national figures that have really helped our campaign visibility by sharing the fact that they support it. We had a data protection official or a former data protection official in Serbia who gave their support for the campaign and that was that helped us to massively raise our profile in Serbia which is one of the countries in which we're campaigning even though they're not currently an EU member state, but having those high-profile figures organically hear about their campaign and endorse it has led to real spikes in our signature numbers, so that has been really effective for us. We're currently trying to do that even more, we're looking even more broadly, beyond politicians at a national level, but even thinking about are there celebrities, are there comedians, are there high-profile journalists that can help us to get the message out?

We really are trying to think in different ways who are the people that have credibility, that people will listen to if they say that this is important, and crucially how can we convince them that our cause is important so that they can then communicate that to people that follow them. The million-dollar question is of course how do we convince those people that this is an important topic, and even though we're typically a rights-based organisation, fundamental rights are at the core of what we do, we've done a lot of messaging work and message testing to understand what it is that resonates with everyday people and in their regular lives and what we've found is that talking about things like the rights to privacy and data protection in the abstract don't really do it for people because it's really hard to imagine what that means for your life. You might know that you have a right to privacy but actually is that going to mobilise you and get you to take an action? Unfortunately, we've often found that that's not the case, so "what we've been trying to do is develop a narrative and we've got that narrative running throughout the visuals of our campaign, the social media communications, the text on our website where we try to focus on what are we actually trying to protect".

For us it's been about public spaces, the right to express yourself in public, whether that's the way that you address the religious symbols that you wear, the way that you style your hair or things like your freedom to protest in public, so your right to just turn up in a public square and raise your voice and tell your leaders about the things that are important to you, these are the kind of tangible activities that we've been able to use to help people understand that if we have biometric mass surveillance in our streets, these are the kind of everyday actions that are going to be impacted on. It's "translation from the rights based language and the policy language into actually what does this mean for me as an individual and how might it harm my children or my grandma or my friends, is something that we found to be a lot more powerful and effective", and it's helped us move beyond our traditional supporter base of people who are engaged in privacy and data protection and to actually reach a much wider audience and to help them understand the importance of privacy and data protection as well.

In our European citizens’ initiative we are calling on the European Commission to propose a new law that will sort out the grey areas and close the current loopholes that we're seeing in the terms of regulating what we call biometric mass surveillance. By that we mean things like facial recognition deployed by police, other types of recognition, of our walking patterns, and things to do with the way that we look, and the way that we act in public spaces, in libraries, concert venues, schools, everywhere, that we should be able to freely go as human beings, to be able to take part in society.

"We think we are being threatened by the rise of the use of these biometric facial recognition technologies in our public spaces and we think that if we're going to protect our democracy and protect people's rights it's really essential that we have a prohibition in law" and the European Commission and other EU institutions take this issue really seriously and listen to the voices of civil society and the voices of the people that live in the EU, rather than the voices of industry that we are currently hearing the loudest.

Q: From your experience, what is the most important advice you can give to other current and future initiatives' organisers?

Ella:   Remember the importance of planning and being really organised and not underestimating how much work is involved in a European citizens’ initiative! A few people mentioned it to me at the beginning that this is a lot of work and I think it was quite difficult for me to really understand what that meant but in in practice I think just being aware that you really need to put in the time to get a good effect with your European citizens’ initiative, so at the beginning making sure that you've understood all of the obligations that are on you, and putting a lot of time and effort into making sure that your proposal is within the legal competence of the European Commission and seeking advice to help you making sure that you've thought about it not just from the perspective of the European Commission, but also people that are then going to sign it.

"Have you got a snappy name? Are people going to understand your objectives?"

There's a lot of things to think about in those early stages, and then there's a lot of decisions to make about how you want to collect your signatures, and then of course your strategies about how you're going to build momentum, how you're going to engage others in your coalition, how you're going to communicate this in different Member States and how the message might actually differ from one context to another. These are all things that the more time you can invest in planning at the beginning about how you're going to do them and where it makes sense for you to put your effort, will pay dividends in the long run, because it's then a lot easier once you've launched your European citizens’ initiative, if you already know that you've got a lot of organisations to rely on and you've got good campaigns materials and an attractive website and that you've checked that it's understandable to an everyday person and all those little things. It's just to be aware that it's worth it but, it's a lot and you need to be prepared to really put in the effort. Recently, we are experimenting with getting more people engaged / involved with our ECI via our new "Bootcamps" which have had an amazing response from people all across Europe wanting to support the cause! More information on the "Bootcamps" is available here: https://reclaimyourface.eu/bootcamp/

Q: How did you personally get involved with this initiative?

Ella: I come from quite a diverse background. I trained in English literature and then I went to work for an engineering and technology company for almost five years where I was involved in a team looking at artificial intelligence and data science which got me really interested in technology, but I also decided then that I wanted to be involved from a human rights perspective, so I retrained in human rights from a legal and sociological perspective and that is what brought me to European Digital Rights about a year and a half ago. It's been fantastic because I get to engage with issues of emerging technology and the impact of data and technology on our society from the perspective of human rights.

Watch “Meet-And-Greet Initiative Organisers” with Ella Jakubowska