Democracy

The use of spyware against journalists in the EU is alarming. Saskia Bricmont explains how severe the threat is, who the perpetrators are and their intentions.

In 2022, European green parties increased their number of seats in most elections while witnessing some of their fiercest opponents win power. As such, the year was somewhat of a Pyrrhic battle for the Greens at the ballot box: though battles were technically won, the overall outcome can hardly be considered a complete victory.

The European Parliament has provided fresh impetus for a European Association Statute, yet this is by no means new. Looking back over the various initiatives of the last 35 years to create a European legal form for associations reveals the challenges the new initiative must face.

European associations and civil society organisations do not have their own legal status set out in the EU treaties to rely on. There are many good reasons to plug this gap and create a European Association Statute.

Legislation governing digital technology and services has changed a lot over the last five years due to increasing concerns about the power and adverse influence of Big Tech. The concerns are well known, including issues with privacy, content and monopoly power; what is perhaps less clear is how to get the best out of the different initiatives and to ensure that they are not undermining each other.

This paper outlines the main types of emerging digital regulation in the UK and the EU, characterises some of their interactions, and comments upon capacities needed for coherent strategies for digital policy.

The highly technical and quickly evolving nature of the digital industry requires significant regulatory capacity. It also requires significant global co-operation, as the harms that emerge online often cross borders and are linked to entities that are partly or entirely located outside of the jurisdiction where the harm occurs. This paper analyses both the One-Stop-Shop in the General Data Protection Regulation (often called "UK GDPR") and the Proposed EU AI Act and Standardisation.

This paper analyses the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which imposes a set of specific ex ante obligations on the largest digital players, including  interoperability and data access. It also analyses the UK's Digital Markets Unit (DMU), and whether it could be designed as a more flexible set of regulatory tools enabling a targeted approach to identifying emerging competition issues and market power in the digital field.

This paper outlines the policy background that has taken the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK’s Online Safety Bill down their respective legislative journeys and examines how law-makers have responded to the policy challenges in each jurisdiction, and highlights some important differences in the legislative approach.

The UK Government has indicated its desire to diverge from the European data protection regime. This brief considers some of the main areas of divergence in the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (DPDI Bill), the latest iteration of an effort to reform data protection to "free up the use of data" to "unleash its value across the economy" and for the UK to "operate as the world's data hub."