Dr. Petra Molnar

Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in technology, migration, and human rights. Petra has worked all over the world including Kenya, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Philippines, Colombia, Canada, and various parts of Europe. She is the co-creator of the Migration and Technology Monitor, a collective of civil society, journalists, academics, and filmmakers interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders. She is also the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Critical Internet at Harvard University. Petra’s first book is called The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (The New Press, 2024).

Petra is the author of numerous academic and popular press publications on technology and migration and one of the first and leading international voices on these issues. Her work has been widely featured in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times, among others, and she is frequently quoted in international and local media as well as various policy briefings at the national and international level. Petra helped to draft the influential report on digital borders and racism by the UN Special Rapporteur on Discrimination, Racism, Xenophobia and Related Forms of Intolerance and a report on the human rights-based approach to digital border governance for the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.