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Cameran Ashraf is an assistant professor at the Department of Public Policy, head of Human Rights at the Wikimedia Foundation, and co-founder of international human rights and technology organization AccessNow. In recognition of his work, the European Parliament selected AccessNow as a finalist for the 2010 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the European Union's highest human rights honor.
In 2009 he assembled a team which provided digital security and communications tools to thousands of threatened activists and journalists while securing key websites during Iran's Green Movement, "the first major world event broadcast worldwide almost entirely via social media". This work led Cameran to co-found AccessNow, one of the world's largest international human rights organizations dedicated to defending and extending digital rights.
He has advised the International Criminal Court on digital security, given expert input to the offices of U.S. Senators on internet censorship policy, and is a recipient of the University of California's Herbert F. York Global Security Fellowship. In 2022 Cameran co-founded the Azadi Archive for Human Rights, Justice, and Accountability, now one of the largest video archives of the 2022-23 Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran and part of a global archival consortium supporting human rights investigations.
Cameran has been invited to speak at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and as an invited expert for the Kofi Annan Commission. He has also appeared in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired Magazine, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Cameran continues to work for human dignity and human rights at the Wikimedia Foundation and through teaching, research, and meaningful engagement with students. From 2018-19 he served as Deputy Director of the Open Society Foundations Internship for Rights and Governance, helping to prepare the next generation of human rights defenders. Cameran completed his Ph.D. at UCLA on the geopolitics of Internet censorship and cyberwar.
