20 June: WORKSHOP for domestic election watchdogs Click here for details

21 June: Unhack Democracy Conference

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08h30 – 09h30: Registration and welcome coffee

09h30 - 09h40: Welcome remarks by Zoltán Tibor Pállinger, (Rector, Andrassy University).

Watch full version below and highlights here.

Zoltán Tibor Pállinger is the rector of Andrássy University Budapest and professor for Political Science. His research focuses on political theory and the history of ideas, democracy research, direct democracy, elite research, European governance and comparative politics.

09h40 - 10h30: Keynote: Olga Aivazovska (OPORA)

Watch full version below and highlights here (Part 1 and Part 2).

Olga Aivazovska

Olga Aivazovska is Head of the Board of the Ukrainian Civil Network OPORA NGO, an international expert in electoral matters, parliamentarian, and the development of draft laws. OPORA is one of the critical organizations that catalyze changes in Ukraine by attracting citizens to decision-making at various levels and advocating for good governance. Ms. Aivazovska was a director of national, nonpartisan observation missions in Ukraine with over 25,000 activists involved from 2010 to 2022 and participated in electoral observation in more than ten countries of Europe. Olga represented Ukraine in the political subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group (Ukraine-Russia-OSCE), settling the conflict in Eastern Ukraine (2016-2018), and the Head of the Board of the Global Network of Domestic Election Monitors. She was included in the top 100 most influential and most successful women of Ukraine from 2014-2021. Olga often participates in political TV programs and publishes articles and information materials on electoral legislation reform and the advancement of democracy. Olga Aivazovska is an alumnus of the Draper Hills Summer Fellowship on Democracy and Development Program at Stanford and the Ukrainian school of political studies.

10h30 - 11h30: Hybrid regimes: Countering state capture and interference in democratic institutions

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Freedom House’s recent Nations in Transit report reveals that for the first time this century, the prevailing form of governance in Central-Eastern Europe & Central Asia is the hybrid regime. Hybrid regimes risk developing into dictatorships with Russia's war against Ukraine an example of the deadly consequences of this trend. This panel focuses on failures of electoral management and rule of law violations facilitated by growing government interference/state capture of democratic institutions including media across Europe and the Black Sea region. By analysing these anti-democratic trends from both outside and inside the EU this session identifies how civil society can work to reverse electoral and institutional engineering and rebuild trust in democratic institutions.

**Moderator: Garvan Walshe**
Garvan, co-founder and chair of Unhack Democracy is an Irish political strategist. A former foreign policy adviser to the British Conservative Party, after the Brexit referendum defeat, he turned his attention to protecting liberal democracy from authoritarian demagogues. He runs the political AI startup Article7 and is a research associate at the Wilfred Martens Centre for European Studies and works with the ARENA programme at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He writes regularly for Foreign Policy and holds a PhD from the University of Manchester.

**Mike Smeltzer**
Mike Smeltzer is the Senior Research Analyst for Nations in Transit, Freedom House’s annual survey of democratic governance from Central Europe to Eurasia. He serves as an expert on developments in the post-Soviet space in the *Nations in Transit* survey region. Prior to joining Freedom House, Mike’s professional experience included stints in both the non-profit and higher education sectors, where he worked in operational and research capacities. He holds a master’s degree in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies from Harvard University and a B.A. in Russian language and philosophy from St. Olaf College.

**Edit Zgut**
Political scientist and a guest lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department of the United States. Vice president of Amnesty International Hungary and a Visegrád Insight Fellow. PhD candidate at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology in the Polish Academy of Sciences. Focusing on informal power and populism in the context of Hungarian and Polish democratic backsliding.

**Miklós Ligeti**
Miklós Ligeti is the legal director of Transparency International Hungary and has been fighting against corruption at TI since 2012. He won several public interest information lawsuits against the Hungarian state and also conducts research and surveys on corruption. His background is in law enforcement and prosecution. Prior to TI he worked at the Prosecutor’s Office in Hungary for five years then at the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Interior, where he was involved in preparing legislation in the field of criminal law and national security.

**Krzysztof Izdebski**
Expert at the Stefan Batory Foundation and the Open Spending EU Coalition. Member of the Osiatyński Archive Advisory Board. Marshall Memorial, Marcin Król and Recharging Advocacy Rights in Europe Fellow. He is a lawyer who graduated from Warsaw University and specialized in Freedom of Information, re-use of public sector information and technologies which impact democracy. He has wide expertise in relations between public administration and citizens. He is the author of publications on freedom of information, technology, public administration, corruption, and public participation.

11h30 - 12h30: Defining and defending democracy in the digital age

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What do the rise of tech platforms in the political sphere and a new generation of tech-savvy political actors mean for ‘democracy’? This session looks at what civil society is doing to counter disinformation, improve transparency around the financing of online campaigns and political advertising, and help election management bodies move with the times.

Moderator: Kyle Taylor

Based in London, UK, Kyle Taylor has spent his career working on issues surrounding data, democracy and the impact of the digital age on society. He is an expert on digital privacy and data issues and the author of The Little Black Book of Data and Democracy - a beginner's guide to social media and society. Kyle is also the founder and director of Fair Vote UK, which he set up in the wake of whistleblower allegations relating to global data misappropriation and law-breaking. Fair Vote UK now works on digital democracy and election safeguarding in the UK and around the world.

**Lisa Reppell**
Lisa Reppell is the International Federation of Electoral Systems’ Senior Global Social Media and Disinformation Specialist. She serves as the focal point for research, program design and technical assistance to country programs for IFES’ information integrity and counter-disinformation portfolio. She has engaged with a wide range of interlocutors in more than 25 countries. Reppell also facilitates IFES’ relationships with private sector technology companies and serves on the Board of the Observatory on Social Media of the Global Network for Electoral Justice.

**Maia Mazurkiewicz**
Maia is an expert on fighting disinformation and behavioral changes. She is a Co-founder and Head of Intelligence & Campaigns of Alliance4Europe. Coordinator of the European Front and co-creator of Keyboard Warriors in Poland. Vice-President of the Free European Media Association. She advises clients on strategy building and public affairs, as well as trains on project management, leadership, and campaign building. From 2011-2015 she worked in the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, where she was responsible for transatlantic and European relations.

**Nino Dolidze**
Nino Dolidze is a civil activist and freedom fighter from Georgia. Currently, she is an Executive Director of International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), a key election watchdog in Georgia. Before joining ISFED, she worked at the International Republican Institute (IRI) for eight years, leading the Election Program, Developing Multi-party Democracy and Political Empowerment of Women. Outside of her work at ISFED, she serves as an expert on electoral and gender equality issues in various international organizations, including USAID and the EU. She has participated in more than 20 domestic and international election observation missions, including OSCE/ODIHR, IRI, NDI, and ENEMO, in Georgia and abroad.

12h30 - 13h30: Networking lunch

13h30 - 14h30: Innovation in the face of tyranny - Belarusian civil society

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This session brings together leading Belarusian civil society groups and political actors to discuss how they have used innovative strategies to engage, organise and mobilise citizens against the regime. This is followed by a panel discussion on how to safeguard civil society/political actors, the change of strategy following the war in Ukraine, and what the future holds.

This panel is supported by the GMF Fund for Belarus Democracy

**Moderator: Alexandra Logvinova**
Alexandra is the head of Public Outreach working with activists, volunteers, social and professional groups, initiatives, and diaspora on behalf of the Office of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Her past experience is as a strategist and concept developer with international organizations and businesses working in Europe and supporting fundraising for independent publishing in Belarus.

**Mike Ananyin**
Mike came to web3 from the academy world of theoretical physics. He has been working in a field of digital economy and governance since 2017, assisted private clients in adopting innovative solutions using blockchain, AI and BI, participated in international conferences regarding 4th industrial revolution and blockchain, provided advising and coaching in tokenomics and decentralized governance. Now Mike is an Ambassador of Aragon network and one of the leaders of the meta-Belarus initiative for the Grassroots Digital State implementation, focusing on decentralizing society & economy with the aim to embrace personal freedom and collective resilience.

**Tsimafei Malakhouski**
Project coordinator at *Honest People, a Belarusian civil society organisation that operates in Polish exile. He was an independent observer during the 2020 Presidential election in Belarus and worked on *Honest People's strategies on electoral transparency at that time. Currently, he manages campaigns of *Honest People aimed at electoral fairness, public accountability of governmental officials, and civic education of Belarusian citizens. He studied political science at the European Humanities University and his academic interest is electoral integrity in non-democratic regimes.

**NATALLIA ZHABURONAK**
Project manager at *Honest People. She became a political refugee after active participation in the central campaign team of opposition candidate, Viktor Babariko and member of the *Honest people NGO. Within *Honest People Natallia aims to build a politically active civil society in Belarus, with projects in civic education, engagement and electoral integrity campaigns.

14h30 - 15h30: Not free or fair? Rethinking election observation in the EU

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This panel asks whether a new methodology for election observation is needed to counter the growing threat posed to electoral integrity by hybrid regimes across the region. Should EU institutions do more to counter electoral irregularities and democratic backsliding within its own borders and what role can and should domestic observers play in safeguarding and strengthening their own elections? This panel begins with a presentation by Sławomir Szyszka of a working paper on citizen observation by a consortium of election observation organisations led by the EPDE.

**Moderator: Vujo Ilic**
Vujo is Policy and Research Advisor at the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (Crta). He is a political scientist, a PhD graduate in comparative politics and social research methodology at the Central European University in Budapest, and a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He is interested in everything related to elections, and often talks about data and research design.

**Meaghan Fitzgerald**
Meaghan began her career with the US State Department in Belarus and Estonia. Her first experience with the OSCE was in 2002 in Belarus as the Human Dimension Officer after which she worked in Dushanbe. Following law school, Meaghan began working in election assistance for the UN in Sudan. From 2011-2019, she contributed to election observation missions as Mission Director, Deputy Head of Mission and Legal Analyst with the OSCE and The Carter Center, analysis of election legislation for Democracy Reporting International and lecturing on observation. Meaghan joined the Democratic Institution and Human Rights (of OSCE) in 2019 as the Deputy Head of the Democratization Department and later served as the Head of the Democratization Department. In 2021, Meaghan became the Head of ODIHR’s Election Department managing all of the office’s work on elections and all ODIHR election observation efforts.

**Pierre Peytier**
Pierre has been involved in election monitoring, management and administration of multiple USAID, OSCE and EU funded democracy building programs since 2014. His career has focused on Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, in particular work with civil society organizations, political transparency and accountability, and electoral reform projects. He has been representing Kyrgyz NGO “Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society” in the Governing Board of ENEMO since 2018, and was several times Election and Campaign Expert, Political Analyst and Deputy Head of Mission in ENEMO’s 2019-2021 International Election Observation Missions to Ukraine, Moldova, Montenegro and Albania. Recently, he was also Head of Mission to ENEMO’s IEOM in Kosovo (2021) and Head of Mission to ENEMO’s IEOM in Serbia (2022). He has trained international short-term observers for the US Embassy and various European and Central Asian civil society observation groups performing Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT).

**Zofia Lutkiewicz**
Zosia Lutkiewicz is the Vice President of the Political Accountability Foundation (PAF) where she leads projects on democracy promotion, election integrity, and countering disinformation. PAF is the leading Polish NGO organising non-partisan domestic election monitoring in Poland, as well as election observation missions across Europe and the former post-Soviet space.

**Adam Busuleanu**
Adam Busuleanu joined the European Exchange team in 2008 and is Programme Manager of the European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE). He studied politics and journalism in Opole/Poland and Eastern European Studies in Berlin. During his studies he focused on alternative movements in socialist Poland and on election monitoring in post-soviet countries. Since 2004, he participated in multiple election observation missions to countries of the former Soviet Union. Currently he is working on projects supporting domestic election observation in the partner countries of the European Exchange.

15h30 - 16h00: Coffee break

16h00 - 17h00: How to make democracy sexy again

Watch full version below and highlights here.

Closing out the conference, this final session looks at why democracy is increasingly under threat across Europe and Black Sea Region, and the idea of ‘democracy’ increasingly undervalued, especially amongst the young. This panel explores how to re-frame elections and election work (including developing a new lexicon), to position democracy as the cornerstone from which to tackle issues such as climate change, and in so doing engage a new generation of political actors.

**Moderator: Benjamin Novak**
Benjamin Novak is a journalist based in Hungary. He has reported from Hungary since 2013, and began reporting for The New York Times in 2018. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

**Márta Pardavi**
Márta Pardavi is co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. She holds a law degree from the ELTE Faculty of Law in Budapest. She has recently been focusing on the threats to the rule of law and civil society space in Hungary and in the EU, and on strengthening alliances between human rights defenders in the EU. Márta serves on the boards of PILnet, International Partnership for Human Rights and Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. She has been awarded the 2018 William D. Zabel Human Rights Award from Human Rights First, Civil Rights Defender’s Civil Rights Defenders of the Year 2019 award and was chosen to be a member of POLITICO28 Class of 2019. In 2020/2021, she was a Policy Leader Fellow at the European University Institute’s School of Transnational Governance in Florence, Italy.

**Mindaugas Lapinskas**
Mindaugas Lapinskas is a campaign consultant, strategist and commentator. During the last decade he's been working with election and advocacy campaigns across the former Soviet Union and South-East Asia. He has managed and consulted several political campaigns of candidates endorsed by Smart Voting in Russian regional elections in 2019, 2020, 2021.

**András Simonyi**
András Simonyi is a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and former Hungarian ambassador now living and working in Washington, DC. He was the managing director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS Johns Hopkins University (2012-2018), presently working with the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science. Prior to moving to the United States, he was Hungary’s ambassador to the US (2002-2007). He was the first Hungarian ambassador to NATO, becoming the first permanent representative of Hungary, after the country’s accession to the Alliance. His prior assignments include deputy chief of mission of Hungary to the European Union (later European Commission).

**Anna Ackermann**
Anna is a professional in the field of energy and environment with experience in NGO, energy design and research sectors in Eastern and Central Europe. Her main areas of expertise include energy efficiency in buildings, renewables, climate change mitigation and policy advocacy. Between 2016 and 2018 she managed the expert "Energy Policy Reform" group of Ukraine's largest civil society platform Reanimation Package of Reforms. She is a founding member of Ukraine's key environmental NGO Centre for Environmental Initiatives “Ecoaction”.

Conference: Closing reception drinks provided by the Austrian Cultural Forum, with remarks by Christian Autengruber (Director, Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest)

For more information and supporting materials relating to the conference please email: info@unhackdemocracy.eu

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