Simona Demková Delivers Training on Remedies for the Digital Age at the 2025 Digital Constitutionalism Academy in Florence
Simona Demková from the Europa Institute participated as a key speaker at the annual Digital Constitutionalism Academy held in Florence, Italy on 27 and 28 March 2025. The two-day academy brought together leading scholars and practitioners to explore the evolving intersection of digital innovation, fundamental rights, and regulatory design in the European Union.
The first day featured three sessions, each with two parallel panels tackling themes such as AI regulation, democracy, administrative justice, digital sovereignty, and innovation. The structure promoted rich interdisciplinary discussion between legal scholars, policymakers, technologists, and civil society experts.
The second day opened with a keynote lecture by Professor Herwig Hofmann (University of Luxembourg), reflecting on the broader implications of the EU's digital regulatory model for the future of European law. This was followed by advanced training sessions led by the core faculty of the Digital Constitutionalism Academy:
- Amnon Reichman (Haifa University), on regulatory sandboxes as innovation tools and their limits;
- Simona Demková (Leiden University), on expanding legal remedies and enforcement challenges in the digital age;
- Thomas Streinz (European University Institute), on "thinking infrastructurally" in digital governance;
- Federica Paolucci (Bocconi University), on the methodological gaps in fundamental rights impact assessments; and
- Hans-W. Micklitz (European University Institute), on the intersection of digital constitutionalism and private law.
Simona’s one-hour training session, “Remedial Designs for the Algorithmic Age,” examined how digital transformation is reshaping the landscape of legal remedies available to individuals in the EU. Simona examined how in the era of algorithms traditional judicial remedies are often not sufficient to resolve potential risks caused by the uptake of artificial intelligence technology to fundamental rights. Emerging EU regulations governing such uses of technologies, including the GDPR, DSA and the AI Act therefore increasingly supplement judicial remedies primarily with ex-ante accountability mechanisms such as certification, self-assessments through impact assessments or standardisation. Nonetheless, the EU regulations also introduce a plethora of new ex post remedial mechanisms namely in the form of internal complaints systems, and administrative supervision. Simona argued that all these structures must be interpreted through the constitutional lens of the right to an effective remedy, as enshrined in Article 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and their implementation must be clarified in practice given the largely overlapping nature of many of the ex post remedial mechanisms.
Her training was based on a recent open-access publication co-authored with Giovanni De Gregorio: read the full paper.
You can also read Simona’s related blog post on the AI Act’s right to explanation here: A Plea for an Integrated Remedy.
As the next steps, Simona will build on this preliminary work on ex post rights enforcement in the algorithmic age. She has launched a new collaborative research initiative that will convene with the “Expert Roundtable on Enforcement of EU Digital Acquis”
connecting scholars in European law with experts in digital regulation. The Roundtable will be hosted by the University of Florence and take place on 14-15 April 2025. This initiative forms part of Simona’s Leiden-funded starting grant project, “The EU’s Human-Centered Digital Transformation”, and marks the first in a series of expert discussions focused on developing policy solutions to the emerging enforcement crisis in European digital policy.