Member States will discuss the third version of the French Presidency of the EU Council’s compromise text on the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade at a meeting of the EU Council’s Telecommunications Working Party on Thursday 9 June.
In concrete terms, apart from a few slight modifications of the previous version, mainly to improve the readability and clarity of the text, few changes have been made.
Specifically, the French Presidency first insists that the monitoring of actions undertaken to promote and put into practice the principles set out in the Declaration should not constitute an administrative burden for national authorities.
In addition, the importance of promoting a high level of cybersecurity, including “confidentiality, integrity, availability and authenticity, in all digital products and services (especially trust services) and processes” is also emphasised.
This change in the compromise text came after negotiators in the Council of the EU and the European Parliament reached an agreement on the revision of the NIS Directive on 12 May.
As a reminder, this ‘NIS2’ directive is intended to ensure a high level of cybersecurity throughout the EU and, among other things, to increase the capacity to respond to cybersecurity incidents in the public and private sectors (see EUROPE 12952/1).
Furthermore, the compromise document also adds “information manipulation” to the list of subjects from which citizens must be protected, whereas the initial text only referred to “disinformation”.
Still on the subject of citizen protection, the document also insists that citizens must have control over their own personal data.
Finally, this latest draft of the compromise document stresses the need to “making sure that the design, development, deployment and use of technological solutions” respect fundamental rights and promote inclusion and participation.
In this respect, the French Presidency of the EU Council also recalled the importance of ensuring that the digital transition “leaves nobody behind” and that it benefits “everyone”.
See the compromise: https://aeur.eu/f/1ys (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)