Access Now’s mission is to defend and extend the digital rights of people and communities at risk around the world. In the European Union (EU), our team works towards a vision of a just, fair, and sustainable society, where every person is treated equally and with care. Digital rights are the foundation for achieving this vision and policy is a key instrument for ensuring the protection of these rights in the digital era.
As the EU’s new 2024-2029 mandate begins, we invite EU policymakers to join us on our mission of defending and extending digital rights, by focusing on:
- Protecting fundamental rights, equality, and justice for all.
- Building an inclusive, democratic, and sustainable EU.
- Fostering transparent governance and effective enforcement.
- Upholding human rights standards around the world.
Access Now engages with the EU because we believe in the transformative power and potential of policymaking to conceive of, then legally enshrine, the infrastructure for a just society. But this is only possible when the process of shaping and making policy is grounded in principles of protection and safety for all, prioritising those at the margins of society.
We believe that civil society organisations must play a central role in the EU policymaking process; from drafting to debating, from amending to enforcing rights-respecting policies. Civil society organisations help hold the EU to its founding values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and human rights.
However, as it stands, the EU is far from being a just and inclusive society. EU policies are codifying racism, exclusion, and injustice, instead of combatting them. Industry lobbyists and the prevailing nexus of securitisation are systematically undermining the policymaking process. The EU and its Member States fail to adequately enforce existing laws intended to protect fundamental rights, while funding the development of surveillance technologies with EU taxpayers’ money.
The EU must recommit to its mission of strengthening “the protection of fundamental rights in the light of changes in society, social progress, and scientific and technological development.” Over the next five years, we commit to holding the EU to the high standards it has set itself, so that these rights can regain their rightful position at the heart of EU digital policy.
1. Protecting fundamental rights, equality, and justice for all
The EU must ensure every person is treated equally and lives with dignity. But European and national legislative frameworks continuously prioritise national security over fundamental rights. The EU and its Member States are reinforcing existing forms of discrimination against racialised and marginalised groups, who are less protected than others. These include but are not limited to: girls, women, and non-binary people; migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers; LGBTQ+ people; people with disabilities; people living in poverty; sex workers; and other historically oppressed communities.
To reverse this trend, the EU must enact measures to protect, not surveil, and support, not neglect, those whose rights are most at risk.
We call on the EU to:
- Comprehensively prohibit practices, including those enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), that are simply incompatible with human rights;
- Stop using migration, welfare provision, or criminal justice policies as testbeds for spreading oppressive technologies;
- Reorient EU migration policy around principles of safety, protection, and justice for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers; and
- Stop weaponising the concept of “national security” in EU laws, and ensure that Member States do not abuse the narrow national security exemption included in the Treaties to circumvent their human rights obligations.
2. Building an open, democratic, and sustainable EU
The EU has a duty to ensure that its Member States protect and respect the basic principles of democracy, the rule of law, and sustainability. Yet despite this, several EU governments have made an ideological choice not to comply with these European obligations.
The EU must stop the shrinking of civic space and the continued deterioration of fundamental rights protections, offline and online, while nurturing a legal environment for civil society organisations (CSOs) that is safe, enabling, and free from reprisals and intimidation, arbitrary restrictions, smear campaigns, or threats.
We call on the EU to:
- End online and offline surveillance, which has a chilling effect of silencing and censoring journalists, political dissidents, human rights defenders, and CSOs;
- Stop criminalising solidarity movements unlawfully restricting the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression, and harassing civil society actors, including climate activists and those working with marginalised groups, via judicial means;
- Reject so-called foreign agent laws that stigmatise any CSO that receives foreign funding with the designation of “foreign representative;”
- Tackle the environmental impact of digital policies and technologies, and prioritise care for the planet and its people, over unsustainable progress; and
- Ensure meaningful and formalised stakeholder engagement with CSOs, human rights experts, and marginalised and racialised groups.
3. Fostering transparent governance and effective enforcement
In the past decade, the EU has adopted legislative acts addressing key digital rights issues such as platform accountability, data protection, content governance, and artificial intelligence. But some of these instruments fall short in delivering on their promises, and effectively enforcing them remains a major challenge. In this new mandate, the EU and its Member States must provide effective enforcement mechanisms for this new generation of laws.
We call on the EU to:
- Ensure coordination and cooperation between the various EU authorities responsible for enforcing digital policies;
- Establish a proper legal basis for fundamental rights on which all digital policies can be based, not just data protection or internal market harmonisation;
- Make interinstitutional policy negotiations (so-called trilogues) open and transparent;
- Create human rights-centric benchmarks for legally mandated risk assessments, which recognise and adopt heightened due diligence standards for marginalised groups;
- Properly enforce new regulatory and policy tools, especially flagship laws such as the Digital Market Act and Digital Services Act, to curtail corporate power over people’s fundamental rights;
- Address critical shortcomings of the EU AI Act during its implementation, to ensure that protection are maintained and the exemptions and derogations in the text are not exploited to undermine people’s rights;
- Uphold the General Data Protection Regulation’s high standards and strengthen its enforcement, by enabling effective individual redress and encouraging data protection authorities to be proactive;
- Ensure that people can access effective remedies against corporate abuse, by enabling mechanisms for collective redress and strategic litigation at the EU and Member State level; and
- Complete and adopt a modernised ePrivacy legislation, to harmonise rules governing electronic communications’ confidentiality across the EU.
4. Safeguarding human rights standards worldwide
In recent years, the EU has adopted several pieces of digital policy that are having a global regulatory impact, thanks to the Brussels effect and the EU’s digital diplomacy efforts. However, while EU officials are quick to point out their role in setting high human rights standards, they prefer to keep quiet when EU foreign policies are implicated in human rights violations beyond its borders, perpetuating power dynamics rooted in European colonial history.
We call on the EU to:
- Ban the export of surveillance technologies, as well as other rights-violating technologies, to non-EU countries;
- Formally consult with CSOs and human rights experts outside of the EU, including representatives from marginalised groups, who are most often negatively impacted by short-sighted EU policies;
- Champion human rights standards in international fora, such as the Council of Europe and the UN, and resist attempts to water down protections, push for problematic national security exemptions, or exclude the private sector from human rights obligations; and
- Advance international convergence of norms, rather than interoperability, in data transfer adequacy agreements and uphold high data protection standards globally.
The EU stands on a precipice: new technologies are enabling both targeted and mass violations of fundamental rights on an unprecedented scale, a handful of technology companies are consolidating massive corporate power while accelerating the climate crisis, and extreme right-wing rhetoric is contaminating EU-wide policies. Over the next five years, these terrifying trends must be reversed and the EU and its Member States must place fundamental rights at the core of how they operate. Access Now urges the EU to work with digital rights organisations to ensure that technology is developed and deployed in a way that extends, rather than undermines, people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.