IViR Lecture Series: EU digital law: Still not that simple

Months of policy and legislative discussions in Brussels about the ‘simplification’ of European Union (EU)’s digital law have shown the process is apparently more complicated than initially imagined by those who launched it, and nevertheless possibly more deeply impactful than ever feared by anyone trying to resist it. 

This talk will reflect on the effects of this ongoing ‘simplification’ wave by situating it in the broader landscape of the evolution of EU digital law, understood broadly as a field composed by EU data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) law. It will examine pervasive ambiguities about the object and goals of this ongoing intense effort, ranging from trying to (finally) make sense out of the extraordinary legislative frenzy of the first mandate of Ursula Von der Leyen’s European Commission to tackling supposed insurmountable complexities within the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that had never been identified before. It will also analyse the coexistence of these highly debated changes with a much less commented but incoming review of key GDPR elements via the Procedural Harmonisation Regulation, and it will additionally discuss also the occasionally paradoxical role of Data Protection Authorities in these debates. 

In this first IVIR lecture of the academic year, Prof. González Fuster aims to paint a picture of the current policy situation that may help navigating upcoming developments, for which further turbulence has already been announced.  

Gloria González Fuster is a Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)’s Faculty of Law and Criminology, and Director of the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) Large Research Group. She holds a research position on the theme ‘Digitalisation & a Europe of rights and freedoms’, and is one of the Principal Investigators of the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies (BCUS), as well as of the ‘AI-enhanced digital twins for climate-neutral cities’ (TWINVERSE) project. She is a member of the Academic Board of the AI for the Common Good – Brussels Institute (FARI), where she teaches ‘Governance and Organisational Aspects of AI’. She is also a member of the EUTOPIA interdisciplinary Learning Community ‘Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in Data Processing’ (FATE). At VUB, she teaches ‘Privacy and Data Protection Law’, ‘Bruxelles : La ville et le droit’ and ‘Introduction à la recherche scientifique en droit’. She also lectures on data protection law at the LLM in European and Transnational Law of Intellectual Property and Information Technology of Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and is a Professorial Fellow at the United Nations University – Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS). She was the Main Proposer of the successfully selected COST Action Moving Data for Europe, to kick off in October 2026.