Month: October 2019

Digital public services in the European Union: eHealth through the lens of administrative interoperability

On By officialblogunioIn EssaysLeave a comment

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 by Joana Abreu, Editor and Jean Monnet Module eUjust Coordinator

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Digital Single Market appears as the common good to be achieved, in the political level, in the European Union which was also embraced by all its Member States, since national and European political agents understood new ICT tools changed the way the world works and how people relate to each other. Furthermore, its establishment allowed overcoming gaps that were appearing between national efforts on digitalization of their internal sectors, particularly when there was a need to make those sectors transnational, by connecting them in a cross-border dimension.

The path to make European efforts on digital domains more effective was to firstly modernise public services, by resorting to ICT tools – that would make them, and especially their relations with individuals, simpler and more flexible. Digitalization of public services was, then, approached through the lens of interoperability – method adopted in order to link national administrations amongst themselves and with European institutions.

Interoperability was proclaimed in the ISA2 Programme through article 1 (1) of the Decision 2015/2240: “[t]his Decision establishes, for 2016-2020, a programme on interoperability solutions and common frameworks for European public administrations, businesses and citizens (‘the ISA2 programme’)”. In this sense, a new paramount was born: the one of e-Government.

In order to meet e-Government goals, European and national agents have made particular efforts to develop other secondary public interests, that would rely on Public Administrations to concretize, implement and regulate them.

eHealth was one of them.
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Regulating liability for AI within the EU: Short introductory considerations

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 by Francisco Andrade, Director of the Master's in Law and Informatics at UMinho
 and Tiago Cabral, Master's student in EU Law at UMinho

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1. The development of Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter, “AI”) brings with it a whole new set of legal questions and challenges. AI will be able to act in an autonomous manner, and electronic “agents” will be, evidently, capable of creating changes in the legal position of natural and legal persons and even of infringing their rights. One notable example of this phenomena will be in data protection and privacy, where a data processing operation by a software agent may be biased against a specific data subject (eventually due to a faulty dataset, but also due to changes in the knowledge database of the “agent” under the influence of users or of other software agents ) and, thus, infringe the principles of lawfulness and fairness in data protection, but due to difficulties in auditing the decision one may never find why (or even find that there was a bias). More extreme examples can be arranged if we put software agents or robots in charge of matters such as making (or even assisting) decisions in court or questions related to the military.

2. One does not have to seek such extreme examples, in fact, even in entering into an agreement, a software agent may, by infringing the law, negatively affect the legal position of a person.
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Summaries of judgments

On By officialblogunioIn Summaries of judgmentsLeave a comment

 

Summaries of judgments made in collaboration with the Portuguese judge and référendaires of the CJEU (Nuno Piçarra, Mariana Tavares and Sophie Perez)
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Judgment of the Court (Grand Chamber) 24 June 2019, Commission V Poland, (Case C- 619/18, EU:C:2019:531)

Failure of a Member State to fulfil obligations — Second subparagraph of Article 19(1) TEU — Rule of law — Effective judicial protection in the fields covered by Union law — Principles of the irremovability of judges and judicial independence — Lowering of the retirement age of Supreme Court judges — Application to judges in post — Possibility of continuing to carry out the duties of judge beyond that age subject to obtaining authorisation granted by discretionary decision of the President of the Republic.

Facts

On 3 April 2018, the new Polish Law on the Supreme Court (‘the Law on the Supreme Court’) entered into force. Under that law, the retirement age for Supreme Court judges was lowered to 65. The new age limit applied as from the date of entry into force of that law, and included judges of that court appointed before that date. It was possible for Supreme Court judges to continue in active judicial service beyond the age of 65 but this was subject to the submission of a declaration indicating the desire of the judge concerned to continue to carry out his duties and a certificate stating that his health allowed him to serve, and had to be authorised by the President of the Republic of Poland. In granting that authorisation, the President of the Republic of Poland would not be bound by any criterion and his decision would not be subject to any form of judicial review.
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From Visual Arts to Virtual Arts – some insights about Law, Art & Technology

On By officialblogunioIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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 by Marcílio Franca, Professor at the Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil

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Leonardo Da Vinci’s life and work show us that innovation and technology have always been close to art and artists. Over the past few decades, however, deep technological innovations are modifying art in strange, new ways. The development and access to new technologies have radically changed not only the ways of producing art but also the ways of consuming, preserving, collecting and restoring art nowadays. Obviously, all this has complex legal repercussions.

Right at the University of Minho, for example, the researcher and multimedia artist João Martinho Moura is a world reference in digital art and computational aesthetics. For the past 15 years, he has been adopting new digital ways to represent audiovisual artifacts, with special interest in the human body. Some of his award-winning works can be seen at  http://jmartinho.net/. Light art, lasers, AI created art, artist robots, e-museums are also good examples the ways in which technology is making its impact in the art world and in the legal systems.

The complexity of authorship and the relevance of the dematerialization of artwork in the field of contemporary visual arts have already secured the birth of at least three Digital Art Biennials. The older is “The Wrong Art Biennale” (https://thewrong.org), a global, digital event aiming to create, promote and push forward-thinking contemporary digital art among artists, curators, collectors and institutions located in virtual pavilions. There is also the International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN), in Montréal, created in 2012. The younger Digital Art Biennial will happen in Brazil for the first time in 2020, but was born ten years ago in Belo Horizonte, as a Digital Art Festival.
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Editorial of October 2019

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 by Tamara Álvarez Robles, Lecturer at the University of Vigo

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On the reform of national law on data protection: the special incorporation of digital rights in Spain

The reform of the Spanish Organic Law on Data Protection (LO 3/2018), to adapt it to the General Regulation of Data Protection has introduced together with the European requirements a catalogue of digital rights. Title X “Guarantee of digital rights” has meant, undoubtedly one of the biggest novelties to data protection regulations. It is composed of a set of Articles, from 79 to 97, which present, for the first time in the Spanish national legislative sphere, the new generation of digital rights[i], inter alia, right to Internet neutrality, right to digital security, right to digital education, protection of minors on the Internet, right to rectification on the Internet, right to privacy and use of digital devices in the workplace, right to digital disconnection in the workplace, right to digital testament.

The inclusion in-extremis of the present Title X, of digital rights, through amendment of the Congress of Deputies dated April 18, 2018, responds to the fundamental importance, to the ever-present and dominating reality of the Internet, which reaches all spheres of our lives. That is why, Organic Law 3/2018 in section IV of the Preamble already points to the involvement of public authorities through the provision of public policies (Article 9.2 SC) in order to make effective the catalogue of digital rights based on the Principle of Equality (Article 14 SC), stating that: “it is the responsibility of the public authorities to promote policies that make effective the rights of citizens on the Internet, promoting the equality of citizens and the groups in which they are integrated in order to possible the full exercise of fundamental rights in the digital reality”.
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