From 26 to 29 September 2025, Freedom not Fear, a self-organised conference on privacy and digital rights, will take place in Brussels.
We invite people from all across Europe to meet and work towards more freedom in the digitalised world, to plan actions against increasing surveillance and to promote stronger civil rights.
Do you have a question that is not answered here? Please contact us and let us know.
Table of Contents
1 Locations
- 26–28 September Conference venue: JES Brussels (Werkhuizenstraat 3, 1080 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek (OpenStreetMap)
- 29 September European Parliament (EP): 60 rue Wiertz / Wiertzstraat 60, Brussels (OpenStreetMap)
2 Participation – How can I register?
The FNF (un)conference from Friday evening to Sunday is open for everyone. You can find the call for registrations here: https://freedomnotfear.org/2025/call-for-registrations
Registration is not mandatory. You can join as long as there are places available, but by registering you reserve a spot and make sure you receive all the relevant information.
We would appreciate if you could register via the form in any case, as the information is very important for our planning. In the form you can also indicate if you’d be interested in participating in the visit of the European Parliament (EP) on Monday, and if you require support with travel or accommodation. Participating in the EP visit requires timely registration.
This link will take you straight to the registration form: https://freedomnotfear.org/register
3 Costs for Conference & Food
There is no registration fee, but we do ask for voluntary donations to cover expenses such as venue hire and facilitation. During the event we will ask for donations for lunches and networking dinner(s) as well as donations to support organisational expenses.
Please bring cash!
4 Travel & Reimbursement
We encourage travelling by train rather than plane.
For planning your journey, here are some approximate times to guide you: The conference will probably start at ca. 18:00 on Friday, so try to arrive in the hour before for welcoming and socialising. The EP visit is scheduled to end at about 14:00 on Monday.
We’re trying to obtain financial support for travel costs. Thanks to MEP invitations and donations, we can offer some financial support for travel expenses to those who wouldn’t be able to (completely) cover their travel expenses themselves. Make sure to always keep receipts and tickets, because we can’t reimburse travel expenses otherwise.
If you require financial support to participate in FNF25, please indicate this in the sign-up form and submit before 11 August.
See below at “Official EP visit & meeting with MEPs” for more information.
5 Accommodation
We generally ask participants to make their own arrangements. We do encourage couchsurfing and try to facilitate contacts among participants who can offer or seek a place to stay.
A small number of beds is available in shared dormitories on the conference grounds.
6 Catering / Food
Usually we book catering for lunch on Saturday and Sunday and organise a networking dinner on Saturday evening. We are further exploring whether we can organise similar dinner opportunities for Friday and/or Sunday.
You can help us plan this by indicating your interest during registration.
7 Official EP visit & meeting with MEPs
We’re organising an EP visit at the invitation of MEPs, as we have done in the past. European citizens may receive a travel reimbursement for participating in this EP visit.
We cannot guarantee a spot for all participants. If you want to be part of the visit, please make sure to indicate so in the registration form (deadline: 11 August).
We will review all registrations at the end of the sign-up period and allocate the available spots and will send you an e-mail with the relevant information for the next steps to confirm and register for the EP visit. Once you have been confirmed for the EP visit, participation is mandatory and comes along with some financial support for travel and accommodation. This will also require an official registration with your official national ID and valid documents brought for the EP visit.
8 Self-organised MEP & policy-maker meetings
The European Union is changing. We feel it is more important than ever to share our ideas and concerns, to network and to develop strategies for digital rights advocacy. We strongly encourage FNF participants to reach out to EU-politicians well before the conference and to schedule personal meetings with them in Brussels (ideally after 14:00 on Monday when we are done with the EP visit).
You can use these meetings with policy-makers to discuss topics and issues that were brought up at FNF. Last year, we prepared a guide to help you with that. We will update this guide soon and we are planning an online info session on this in August (week 34).
You can help others in getting in touch with policy makers? Please consider to offer a session, prepare MEP meetings together during the weekend and take other participants along!
9 Schedule
The rough schedule is:
- Friday, 26 September, 18:00 (tbc): registration and opening
- Saturday 27 September, all day: your sessions | opening plenary at 9:30 (tbc)
- Saturday evening: networking dinner (tbc)
- Sunday 28 September all day: your sessions | opening plenary at 10:00 (tbc)
- Monday, 29 September: 9:30 (tbc) – 14:00: EP visit | afternoon: self-organised advocacy meetings with policy makers
10 Programme
FNF follows a barcamp format where the programme is being created on the spot by participants’ contributions.
We invited everyone to consider and submit session proposals earlier. This call is still open. Submitting your session in advance helps us to create a first rough schedule, prevent conflicting schedules in case someone can attend FNF only at a specific time slot or connect people who want to hold sessions on the same topic.
We will compile a preliminary programme and more sessions will be added during the morning plenaries of FNF.
11 Language
The main language for communication and workshops at FNF25 will be English.
We cannot provide facilities for translation/interpretation. If you organise a session and find that it will be more appropriate to hold it in another language, please check with the participants that they are okay with that or provide some help for taking part in English.
12 Code of Conduct
We want everyone at Freedom Not Fear 2025 to be as safe and empowered to participate as possible. At the event we ask everyone to be conscious of your own behaviour and respect needs for distance or other safety measures of people around you. There will be a code of conduct for FNF25 and we ask everyone participating and co-organising to read the code of conduct beforehand. We consider participation in Freedom of Fear 2025 as acknowledgement of the FNF25 code of conduct. Until we publish the code of conduct here, you can look at last year’s code of conduct as a reference.
13 Stay informed
To stay informed about FNF-related developments and meet other participants & friends, sign up to the mailing list:
https://listen.akvorrat.org/mailman/listinfo/akv-international
Historically Freedom not Fear was founded by people from the German working group against data rention (AKVorrat) in 2006. The title “Freedom not Fear” is used by AKVorrat and like-minded groups for a series of activities related to human rights internationally. There have been events of all kind supporting human rights called “Freedom not Fear” from South America, the United States, Canada and all over Europe. The Brussels Freedom not Fear started as one activity out of many around the globe. During the first Brussels Freedom not Fear in 2011, it was decided to use “AKV-international” as the official mailing list for FNF instead of starting a new mailing list. Today this list is exclusively used by Freedom not Fear.
14 Donations
Since FNF has no official organisational structure, we need to collect donations via some other legal entity. This year, the non-profit association Digitale Gesellschaft from Germany is providing an account for donations – our heartfelt thanks for that!
Donations to the Digitale Gesellschaft account will reach us without any deduction. Please mark your donations clearly by stating “FNF25 donation” in the reference.
Bank details:
Recipient: Digitale Gesellschaft e. V.
IBAN: DE34 4306 0967 1125 0128 02
BIC: GENODEM1GLS
Bank: GLS Bank
Reference: FNF25 donation
https://freedomnotfear.org/2025/donate
15 How is FNF organised?
Freedom not Fear is organised by a group of committed volunteers who prepare throughout the year. The event itself then is largely self-organised by participants.
The organising team is newly set up every year. Looking for an adequate venue and accommodation, contacting MEPs and dealing with a lot of EP administration and communication is part of the tasks as well as calculating a budget, looking for donations and funding, writing texts, setting up forms, advertising the event and communicating with participants.
Interested to join the organising team? Great! Check our call for co-organisers and don’t hesitate to contact us.
This year the event is organised purely by volunteers and with the help of German-based non-profit association Digitale Gesellschaft. We often receive further support by other digital rights NGOs and will make this transparent.