DAO for Human Rights
This project involves the scoping, designing, building and ultimately testing of an online tool called a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) for Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand and represents a great opportunity to establish innovative and influential partnerships, that can not only bolster Amnesty's reputation within New Zealand, but also reinforce it as a thought leader in the field of Human Rights Education (HRE).
Part of Technology Architecture
What began as a research question in early 2024 – can a global human rights movement govern itself through decentralised infrastructure? – is now a live pilot.
The Amnesty Human Rights DAO is a governance and coordination architecture developed for Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand, with application to the global Amnesty movement across 65+ sections and 10 million supporters worldwide. As of late 2025, a pilot application is in active testing with Amnesty advocates, available on Android and iOS.
This is the first project of its kind to move from research to deployed infrastructure within a major international human rights organisation.
By sharing our expertise and knowledge in HRE, we aim to empower individuals to make informed decisions and take meaningful actions to uphold human rights. This, in turn, will elevate human rights advocacy, provide indicators for social impact in the human rights arena, strengthen the Amnesty movement, and broaden reach and diversity.
Our focus is on providing a central coordination mechanism for the crowd-sourced ideation and advocacy of the Amnesty 10 million person supporter base, whilst developing a world-leading unique human rights value backed token to incentivise positive human rights advocacy and micro-engagements. View the Amnesty project page here.
Working with our development team we have designed DAO wireframes to meet the needs of the community and we provided a concept Lite Paper and deck to outline the project. The full research paper was completed August 2024 and can be viewed here, and has been published on SSRN here.
Github Link: https://github.com/Sugarlicks/AmnestyDAO-Token
We have also received funding to develop the project on the Cardano Blockchain through the Project Catalyst funding ecosystem. You can view the full project here.
Research outputs
Research Paper (August 2024) — Member and Public Engagement in Amnesty International: Digital Democracy, Decentralised Governance, and the Case for a Human Rights DAO — SSRN · PDF
White Paper (July 2025) — DAO Governance Models for Social Impact and the Potential for a Human Rights Token for the Global Amnesty International Movement on the Cardano Blockchain — SSRN · PDF
Lite Paper and Deck — Concept Lite Paper · Discussion Deck
GitHub — github.com/Sugarlicks/AmnestyDAO-Token
The project can also be expressed as a problem-solution statement as follows:
The Problem Statement:
Amnesty International has 10 million supporters globally. Their participation in advocacy and governance is structurally limited: communication flows top-down, supporter energy is difficult to coordinate at scale, and the organisation's decision-making does not reflect the distributed intelligence of its membership. Viewed at full scale, a genuinely coordinated supporter base would give Amnesty the diplomatic weight and crowd-sourced resource of a nation. The question was whether decentralised technology could provide the infrastructure for that coordination — without sacrificing accountability, transparency, or human rights values in the process.
The Proposed Solution:
Amnesty International Aotearoa NZ aims to harness the transformative power of blockchain technology to create a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). This DAO will serve as a digital town hall—a hub of knowledge, inclusivity, and transparency, dedicated to human rights education, advocacy, and policymaking.
Our vision for this innovative project is to:
Record the unforgettable: Implement an immutable ledger to capture and preserve every human rights micro-engagement, providing an invaluable historical record.
Amplify Voices: Create a platform where our supporters, the public and institutions can collaboratively shape the discourse on human rights, infusing it with diverse perspectives.
Empower decision-making: Utilise blockchain to enhance decision-making processes, ensuring inclusivity and facilitating governance.
Illuminate Transparency: Bolster transparency in our advocacy operations ensuring trust in the process
Encourage Participation: Drive widespread participation and encode incentive mechanisms, transforming passive supporters into active advocates for human rights.
What was built?
Working as Project Lead alongside Tech Lead Razali Samsudin and the development team at Matou.nz, the following was delivered:
A full DAO governance architecture – covering participation structures, decision-making layers, delegation models, and accountability mechanisms designed specifically for a human rights context where incentive design and values must be held together.
A Human Rights Token model – a value-backed token designed to incentivise micro-engagements and advocacy actions. Unlike speculative token models, this was designed from first principles around the question: what does meaningful participation in a human rights movement actually look like, and how do you encode that in an incentive structure without distorting it?
A pilot application – developed by Matou.nz, now in active testing with Amnesty advocates. Available on Android and Apple iOS.
Community consultations – conducted across Amnesty International chapters and allied civil society organisations in Q3 2025, shaping the governance design from within the movement rather than imposing it from outside.
Two published research outputs – a research paper (August 2024) and a comprehensive white paper (July 2025), both available on SSRN, establishing the theoretical and governance foundations of the model.
External funding validation – the project received funding through Cardano's Project Catalyst ecosystem, providing independent assessment of both technical feasibility and governance design quality.
Gareth Farry & Razali Samsudin - HRDAO project leads
What was learnt?
We are currently receiving stakeholder feedback and will update in Q3.
Replicability
The governance architecture developed here is not Amnesty-specific. The core design logic – layered participation, value-backed incentives, milestone accountability, and a clean separation between participation and stewardship authority – is replicable across any membership-based organisation that needs to coordinate distributed human agency at scale.
Organisations currently facing analogous coordination problems include international climate movements, indigenous rights networks, global development organisations, and civic bodies exploring participatory accountability mechanisms. If you are working on governance infrastructure in any of these contexts, the research, architecture, and deployment experience from this project are directly applicable.
Collaboration call to action
This project is moving toward public deployment in 2026. I am interested in conversations with:
Human rights and civil society organisations exploring decentralised governance as a coordination model for large, distributed membership bases — particularly those that have found conventional digital engagement tools insufficient for genuine participation.
Governance researchers and theorists working on participatory decision-making, token-based incentive design, or the intersection of blockchain governance and institutional accountability.
Funders and institutional partners interested in supporting the next phase of development, or in exploring how this architecture could be adapted for their own organisational contexts.
DAO builders and protocol designers who are working on governance infrastructure for social impact rather than financial speculation, and who want to engage with a project that has moved from theory to deployment.
The Amnesty project page is at amnesty.org.nz/dao. For collaboration enquiries: garethfakhry@gmail.com