Despite the EU’s long-standing focus on advancing digital policies, significant challenges remain in ensuring a truly inclusive digital transformation—one that does not deepen existing inequalities. Civil society organisations across Europe are voicing growing concerns about privacy issues, mass surveillance, racial bias in AI and algorithms, the spread of biometric technologies, and the inaccessibility of new digital tools. To address these challenges, it is essential to put human rights at the centre of digital development and ensure that Europe’s digital future is shaped by the people, for the people.
The first part of the 2024 Digital Inclusion Guidelines report highlights how civil society organisations are tackling these issues. Since 2021, ECAS has chaired the Digital Transformation cluster within the Civil Society Convention on the Future of Europe, a network of over 80 organisations. In this role, ECAS led a collaborative process to develop policy recommendations, identified through a crowdsourcing exercise, to guide EU policymakers in creating a more inclusive digital transition.
The second part of the report presents the final Digital Inclusion Guidelines, based on a comparative analysis of civil society contributions from across EU Member States. To inform this process, ECAS co-hosted co-creation events with local partners in ten Member States—five in 2022 (Ireland, Portugal, Latvia, Belgium, and Luxembourg) and five in 2023 (Germany, Greece, Croatia, Italy, and Bulgaria). These events explored key inclusion challenges in the digital transition and amplified civil society’s policy recommendations at both national and EU levels.
Together, these guidelines provide a people-powered roadmap for a digital transformation in Europe that upholds rights, promotes equity, and leaves no one behind.
