From declared rights to lived rights
Author: Carlos Montalvo
The EU has built the world's most advanced rights-based framework for the digital transition. Its main weakness is no longer a lack of rules but a lack of delivery: uneven enforcement across Member States, regulators working in silos, and governance that is designed about citizens rather than with them.
Closing the implementation gaps in EU digital policy from a digital humanism perspective
Digital humanism holds that technology must serve people, and that responsibility stays with humans. Policy makers should now measure, enforce and govern the framework so that digital rights are experienced in practice, not only written into law.
This is a reflection upon the European digital policy and governance landscape. The reflection is presented in the form of a policy brief minimising as much as possible legalese jargon for the benefit of the public reader.
The EU has built the world's most advanced rights-based framework for the digital transition. Its main weakness is no longer a lack of rules but a lack of delivery: uneven enforcement across Member States, regulators working in silos, and governance that is designed about citizens rather than with them. Digital humanism holds that technology must serve people, and that responsibility stays with humans. Policy makers should now measure, enforce and govern the framework so that digital rights are experienced in practice, not only written into law.
Why this matters now
More than 150 EU legal and policy instruments now shape the digital world. Since 2021 they have moved through three phases: a strategic vision (the 2030 Digital Compass), binding regulations (Digital Services Act [DSA], Digital Markets Act [DMA], AI Act [AIA] and Data Act [DA]) and an operational phase of targets, national roadmaps and large-scale funding under the Digital Decade. The European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles anchors the whole system in human dignity, democracy, inclusion and sustainability.
Support for these values is uneven. The Digital Rights Declaration, the DSA, the AIA and Horizon Europe Cluster 2 align strongly with digital humanism. The DA, the DMA and cybersecurity legislation support it indirectly, through fairness, competition and security. Innovation and infrastructure programmes treat it mainly as a constraint or an enabling condition. Meanwhile, citizens' concerns are sharp: 88% of Europeans worry about fake news and online manipulation, and 90% see protecting children online as a critical priority. As the 2025 ‘Omnibus’ simplification agenda and the 2026 reviews of the Digital Decade and the Digital Rights Declaration reshape the framework, there is a real risk that efficiency gains come at the cost of rights.
‘The digital transition is being extensively monitored, but what this transition actually means for people remains largely overlooked.’
Carlos Montalvo, Senior research scientist strategy & innovation policy
What the analysis found: three systemic gaps
1.
What gets measured
Digital Decade KPIs track connectivity, skills and uptake, but not online harms, disinformation exposure, children's safety, algorithmic transparency, energy use or regional disparities. What matters most to people is largely invisible in monitoring.
2.
How rules are enforced
Legal harmonisation coexists with practical divergence. Regulators differ widely in capacity, rely on complaints and on information supplied by the firms they supervise, and struggle to audit AI and algorithmic systems. Smaller firms carry a heavier relative burden than large platforms.
3.
Who interacts with whom
The framework assumes cooperation it does not organise. Authorities work in separate silos, EU targets do not translate evenly into national action, researchers lack data access, intermediaries are underused, and citizens and civil society have little role in day-to-day governance.
Recommendations for policy makers
Measure what matters to people
Use the 2026 Digital Decade review to add human-centred indicators alongside technical ones: exposure to disinformation and online harm, children's online safety, algorithmic transparency, accessibility, the energy footprint of digital infrastructure, and regional and city-level digitalisation. Report on them annually in the State of the Digital Decade.
Digital humanism: a transition that cannot see its effects on people cannot be steered towards their wellbeing.
Simplify procedures, never protections
Subject every Omnibus or simplification proposal to an explicit digital rights check against the Declaration. Reduce duplicated reporting and compliance paperwork, but keep the substantive safeguards of the DSA, AI Act, GDPR and Data Act intact.
Digital humanism: European values, not technical convenience, should guide regulatory choices.
Make enforcement equal across the Union
Pool EU-level technical capacity (shared audit units, expert teams, secondment schemes and common audit tools) to support weaker national regulators. Agree minimum enforcement benchmarks, move from complaint-driven to proactive supervision, and add burden-sharing and fast-track escalation to the lead-authority model to prevent forum shopping.
Digital humanism: rights that depend on a person's country of residence are not universal rights.
Join up the regulators
Establish permanent national coordination forums that bring together data protection, competition, consumer, cybersecurity and AI authorities and Digital Services Coordinators. Create joint case teams for cross-cutting harms such as recommender systems, AI-driven advertising and systemic platform risks, backed by EU interpretative guidance and common supervisory handbooks.
Digital humanism: harms to people do not respect institutional mandates, so oversight should not stop at them either.
Open systems to independent, human scrutiny
Fund independent research infrastructures and data trusts, expand secure data access for vetted researchers, and institutionalise trusted third-party auditing of platforms and AI systems. Invest in algorithmic audit capacity so that human oversight of high-risk AI is substantive rather than formal.
Digital humanism: responsibility stays with humans, which requires that humans outside the firm can see what systems do.
Govern with citizens, not only for them
Create user councils, civil society advisory panels and participatory review processes for major digital regulations, and feed their input into platform risk assessments, AI oversight and Digital Decade monitoring. Strengthen collective redress and pair implementation with digital literacy measures and citizen feedback loops.
Digital humanism: those affected by digital technologies should have a say in how they are shaped.
Keep compliance within reach of small actors and regions
Give European Digital Innovation Hubs, standardisation bodies and sectoral associations a formal role in translating obligations into practical toolkits for SMEs and public administrations, supported by proportional compliance models and regulatory sandboxes. Require regions and cities to be involved in updating national Digital Decade roadmaps, and tie EU funding to measurable implementation milestones.
Digital humanism: an inclusive transition needs many capable participants, not a few dominant ones.
Build in the capacity to adapt
Institutionalise horizon scanning, periodic reviews and delegated updates so the framework keeps pace with technology and replace ad hoc cooperation under the Open Method of Coordination with standing forums, shared tools and enforceable information-sharing duties.
Digital humanism: shaping technology actively, rather than reacting to it, is the core of a human-centred digital order.
A digital humanism test for every new measure
- Does it make a right in the Declaration easier to exercise for an ordinary person, in every Member State?
- Does it keep a human accountable for consequential decisions, and allow independent scrutiny of that accountability?
- Were the people affected, including citizens, civil society, SMEs and regions, involved in shaping it, and will its effects on them be measured?
Conclusion
Europe has largely finished writing its digital rulebook. The next phase is about institutional capacity: coordinated, well-resourced and participatory governance that turns digital rights into everyday experience. If the measures above are pursued together, they would strengthen consistent protection of privacy, safety, fairness and freedom of choice, and ensure that innovation in Europe remains anchored in human dignity, democracy and societal wellbeing.
European Digital Humanism Initiative (EUDHIT), Grant Agreement 101212890, Work Package 3. Derived from Montalvo et al. (2026), Impact and Gap Analysis: An overview of DigHum-relevant policies, impact and gap analysis and directions for the future. EUDHIT policy brief, based on Deliverable D3.1a. EUDHIT is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, Grant Agreement 101212890.
References
Montalvo C. et al., (2026) EUDHIT Deliverable D3.1a, Impact and Gap Analysis (TNO, eutema, Digital Enlightenment Forum, NTNU Samfunnsforskning, KInIT, ILO), version 1.0, April 2026. Survey figures cited from the 2025 State of the Digital Decade report as reported in D3.1a.
