The current phase of European digital regulation marks a structural turning point. With the proposal for a Regulation on the simplification of digital legislation presented on 19 November 2025, the Commission signals not merely a technical adjustment of the digital acquis, but a redefinition of the relationship between rights, powers, and competitiveness within the Union’s legal order.[1] Building on the strategic orientation inaugurated by the Draghi Report,[2] the Union’s digital policy discourse has progressively shifted: from a rights-expansive momentum on normative innovation, to a governance phase centred on “simplification”.
Hence, the Digital Omnibus proposal pictures this transition that is even visible from the wording that the European Commission used so far: the aim is, therefore, to «provide immediate simplification measures for businesses and individuals», and «optimisation of the digital rulebook».[3] The idea, different from the approach sustained in the last ten years of building the European digital regulations, reflects an ambition to rationalise the exercise of regulatory power across partially overlapping regimes. Simplification, in this sense, is welcomed as long as it does not amount to deregulation, but on the construction of a more integrated enforcement infrastructure capable of addressing unitary legal and regulatory phenomena through coordinated legal instruments.
This development must be read against the background of a broader transformation: the automation of decision-making processes and the consolidation of infrastructural private power in the digital public sphere. The AI Act,[4] the Digital Services Act,[5] the Regulation on political advertising,[6] the European Media Freedom Act[7] and evolving Codes of Practice[8] increasingly operate upon the same material reality: as a matter of fact, training-related risks, generative outputs and amplification dynamics do not align with sectoral legal categories. The fragmentation of regulatory oversight, therefore, risks fragmenting the very protection of fundamental rights.
From this perspective, the Omnibus turn should respond to a constitutional necessity, together with compliance ones. Where power operates across interconnected technological and economic architectures, rights protection cannot remain compartmentalised. An omnibus approach, understood not simply as legislative consolidation, but as coordinated interpretation, supervision and methodological alignment, becomes a structural condition for preserving intelligibility and accountability within the legal order.
More specifically, the AI Act exemplifies this tension with particular clarity. It internalises fundamental rights protection within a market-harmonisation instrument structured around risk governance. Yet it does so through two distinct regulatory grammars, which reflect different understandings of how rights relate to power in the automation era.
Art. 9, concerning the risk management system, embeds fundamental rights within a lifecycle-based architecture derived from product regulation. Providers of high-risk AI systems must identify and mitigate risks to health, safety and fundamental rights under reasonably foreseeable conditions of use. At this stage, power is architectural. It lies in design choices, model configurations, data selection and automation levels. Fundamental rights appear as risk categories that must be rendered visible, documented and addressed through technical and organisational measures. The logic is structural and anticipatory: governance of architecture is expected to prevent downstream harm.
Art. 27, by contrast, adopts a contextual and institutional perspective. The Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA) must be conducted by deployers prior to use, in light of the specific environment in which the system will operate. Here, power is exercised through the integration of automated outputs into decision-making processes that affect legal positions and material conditions. Fundamental rights function as normative limits requiring contextual evaluation and justification. The assessment cannot be reduced to probabilistic risk estimation; it entails identifying affected rights, analysing the severity and likelihood of interference, and examining safeguards in light of proportionality and effective remedy.
The distinction between these two critical obligations, therefore, reflects two complementary yet potentially disjointed conceptions of rights protection: one embedded in architectural risk governance, the other grounded in contextual constitutional scrutiny. The risk is twofold. If fundamental rights under art. 9 are absorbed into a hazard-based logic, they risk conceptual dilution, treated as another parameter within technical compliance matrices. Conversely, if FRIAs under art. 27 are conducted without meaningful integration of design-stage risk visibility, they risk operating in abstraction from the technical infrastructures that generate rights-relevant effects.
The coherence of the European model, therefore, depends not merely on institutional coordination but on functional integration across regulatory layers. Rights, powers, and remedies must form a continuous circuit: architectural transparency at the design stage; contextual evaluation at the deployment stage; and enforceable accountability when rights are infringed.
Given this context, this special issue intends to perform this analysis and originates from the Opening Conference of the FIS DigCon Project, Rights, Powers and Remedies in the Automation Era, held in October. The conference was conceived precisely as a space to interrogate the triangular relationship between these three dimensions. Automation redistributes power; rights must be re-articulated in relation to architectural and infrastructural forms of authority; remedies must remain capable of responding to harms that are often systemic rather than episodic. Thus, the DigCon project situates itself within this integration challenge: in the context of the project, a Fundamental Rights Assessment Sandbox is being elaborated not to test technological performance, but regulatory methodology.
The contributions collected in this special issue approach the presented issue from complementary perspectives. Some examine how automated systems reshape traditional doctrines of public power and accountability. Others interrogate the transformation of fundamental rights when translated into risk-governance categories. Several contributions focus on remedies, judicial, administrative and regulatory, and their adequacy in contexts where decision-making authority is partially embedded in technical design and probabilistic inference. Across these analyses runs a common concern: how to prevent the fragmentation of rights protection in an environment where regulatory competences, supervisory authorities, and compliance obligations are dispersed.
Within this broader inquiry, the DigCon project contributes to this debate not by proposing new substantive rights but by developing a methodological infrastructure aimed at bridging structural and contextual assessments through testing how risk management systems and impact assessments can be aligned within a single governance architecture capable of supporting effective remedies. In doing so, it addresses a central theme of the conference: the need to connect rights discourse to the concrete distribution of powers and to the institutional pathways through which remedies become operational.
The discussions initiated in October are here developed and systematised. The underlying claim is that the automation era demands not an inflation of isolated obligations, but a disciplined reconstruction of the relationships between rights, powers, and remedies across the entire lifecycle of automated systems.
[1] Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulations (EU) 2016/679, (EU) 2018/1724, (EU) 2018/1725, (EU) 2023/2854 and Directives 2002/58/EC, (EU) 2022/2555 and (EU) 2022/2557 as regards the simplification of the digital legislative framework, and repealing Regulations (EU) 2018/1807, (EU) 2019/1150, (EU) 2022/868, and Directive (EU) 2019/1024 (Digital Omnibus); Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulations (EU) 2024/1689 and (EU) 2018/1139 as regards the simplification of the implementation of harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Digital Omnibus on AI).
[2] M. Draghi, A competitiveness strategy for Europe, 2024.
[3] Commission Staff Working Document Accompanying the Documents Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council Amending Regulations (EU) 2016/679, (EU) 2018/1724, (EU) 2018/1725, (EU) 2023/2854 and Directives 2002/58/EC, (EU) 2022/2555 and (EU) 2022/2557 as regards the simplification of the digital legislative framework, and repealing Regulations (EU) 2018/1807, (EU) 2019/1150, (EU) 2022/868, and Directive (EU) 2019/1024 (Digital Omnibus), Amending Regulations (EU) 2024/1689 and (EU) 2018/1139 as regards the simplification of the implementation of harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Digital Omnibus on AI) {COM(2025) 837 final} – {COM(2025) 836 final}, 19 November 2025.
[4] Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence and amending Regulations (EC) No 300/2008, (EU) No 167/2013, (EU) No 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, (EU) 2018/1139 and (EU) 2019/2144 and Directives 2014/90/EU, (EU) 2016/797 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Artificial Intelligence Act).
[5] Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act).
[6] Regulation (EU) 2024/900 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 March 2024 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising.
[7] Regulation (EU) 2024/1083 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 April 2024 establishing a common framework for media services in the internal market and amending Directive 2010/13/EU (European Media Freedom Act).
[8] At the time of writing, the Working Groups instituted by the European Commission are working on the First Draft Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, published in December 2025.