To mark its 30th anniversary, the Academy of European Law (ERA) is convening leading legal practitioners, lawmakers and policymakers to explore the legal challenges arising from new sovereignty concepts that have moved to the centre of public debate in recent years, including ‘budgetary sovereignty’, ‘strategic sovereignty’ and ‘digital sovereignty’.

Mireille Hildebrandt will deliver a keynote titled Digital sovereignty in technology and rule-setting: why (not) and how? which will consider the following:

• a brief introduction to the concepts of sovereignty (difference between political and economic power) and digital sovereignty (continuities and discontinuities)
• a discussion on the hardware side and the software side (and their interconnection): data localisation, cloud infrastructure, global mobile infrastructure, submarine cables, the internal EU market and content moderation, censure and social credit systems
• the issue of geopolitical interdependence as a bug and a feature, reminding ourselves of Grotius’ position on the high seas (while clarifying the relevant differences with the global internet), digital sovereignty and authoritarianism, strategic autonomy
• ending with the relevance of the EU acquis (including the Charter and the GDPR) and the upcoming legal framework (AI Act, DSA, AI Liability Directive) for the above exploration, perhaps also briefly referring to the EHDS

For more details and programme, click here.

For slides, click here.