Niamh Lenihan

Niamh Lenihan is a legal philosopher, a practising lawyer, and the Founder of the Centre for Digital Ethics, where her work is directed at the protection of human autonomy, dignity, and fundamental rights in the age of artificial intelligence. Her research asks whether Mill's Harm Principle is still adequate to the harms digital systems now produce, with particular attention to AI-mediated manipulation, algorithmic influence, vulnerability, and the conditions necessary for meaningful human self-determination. The question underneath it is the one a trust protocol has to answer: what law and governance owe people when digital systems no longer merely act on human choices, but shape the processes through which preferences, beliefs, and decisions are formed at all. She participates in the United Nations U4SSC initiative and the UNESCO Global Civil Society and Academic Network on AI Ethics, contributes to the Centre for European Policy Studies Task Force on the Apply AI Strategy, and is an Affiliate Member of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence and of the Children's Rights Alliance. Her policy work spans the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the development and implementation of the EU AI Act, and national legislative consultation on artificial intelligence. The founder of NLG Solicitors, she combines legal practice, political and moral philosophy, human rights, and AI governance, and works with policymakers, researchers, civil society, and industry on human-centred approaches to emerging technologies. She serves on the AI Trust Council in an independent capacity, bringing a legal, philosophical, and human-rights perspective to questions of trust, identity, provenance, governance, and accountability, and holding the protocol to a single test: that technological innovation remain compatible with human agency, democratic values, and fundamental rights.