Advancing Digital Rights in 2025: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities in the UK, EU and global landscape
This week global leaders and technology executives meet in Paris to discuss global AI governance.
Historically, policymakers globally have struggled to balance protecting citizens’ rights with enabling a flourishing technology industry to fuel economic growth and innovation. Yet, there are new tools at policymakers’ disposal.
Whilst strongly divergent priorities have emerged between China, the USA and Europe, across the world, we are observing an evolution of human rights norms and discourse surrounding ‘digital rights’.
In the last two years, digital rights have found form in national and regional instruments exemplified by the European Union’s Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles as well as South Korea’s recent Digital Bill of Rights. Such instruments provide a holistic framework of digital rights to guide legislative, policy, and technological development. In 2024, the United Nations committed to a Global Digital Compact and inspired some hope for more forward thinking and globally joined-up policymaking that protects and enables the basic rights of citizens in a digital world in 2025.
In this context, Demos, in partnership with the Oxford Martin School AI Governance Initiative, and supported by the the Government of the Republic of Korea, has explored the definitions, trends, challenges and new possible approaches to advancing digital rights in the UK and EU.
This report provides the backdrop to a united call for the UK government to develop and adopt a UK Declaration of Digital Rights & Principles through the following steps:
- Invite the public to have their say in a deliberative process that will shape the Declaration;
- Establish a national digital rights network, including the diversity of civil society; legal experts and academics; tech companies and industry representative bodies, to guide the Declaration’s development and ensure policy reflects the values of UK citizens;
- Adopt the Declaration and integrate digital rights into future policy decisions.
Read the Open Letter in full.
To support our call, contact report lead author, Hannah Perry at: [email protected].