EDRi-coordinated civil-society trilogue statement on the EU AI Act (12 July 2023)

On 12 July 2023, European Digital Rights (EDRi) published the EDRi-coordinated EU AI Act civil-society coalition's principal trilogue-stage statement — Civil society calls on EU to protect people's rights in the AI Act 'trilogue' negotiations — signed by 150 civil-society organisations and co-drafted by a thirteen-organisation nucleus spanning the pan-European digital-rights field. The statement arrived three weeks after the European Parliament adopted its AI Act negotiating mandate on 14 June 2023 (499 votes to 28, 93 abstentions), as formal trilogue negotiations between the Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission opened. It was the second major coordinated joint statement the EDRi-anchored coalition had produced across the three-year EU AI Act legislative cycle and the largest in terms of signatory count, building on the coalition's founding 30 November 2021 joint statement of 115 organisations.

The trilogue context

The statement marked a phase shift in the campaign's organising posture. Through the Parliament's drafting phase (2021–2023) the coalition had worked primarily through amendment language and bilateral briefings with MEPs, using joint statements as periodic coordination instruments around Parliamentary committee milestones. With the Parliament's mandate adopted, the legislative arena shifted to the closed trilogue process — a series of inter-institutional negotiating sessions between Parliament, Council, and Commission delegations whose working documents are not published and whose outcomes are determined by a negotiated compromise, not a parliamentary vote. The July 2023 statement was the coalition's primary public-facing instrument at that threshold: a coordinated demand addressed to all three institutions, published at the moment the trilogue opened, and intended to establish the civil-society floor below which negotiators should not fall.

The statement organised its demands across three headlined pillars: empower affected people; limit harmful surveillance; and counter Big Tech lobbying. Each pillar carried its own legislative demand set.

The three pillars

"Empower affected people by upholding a framework of accountability, transparency, accessibility and redress." This pillar reprised the coalition's foundational user-side demand from the November 2021 statement — that the Commission's original proposal had concentrated regulatory obligations on AI system providers while leaving affected individuals with no meaningful access to information, challenge mechanisms, or redress. The trilogue-stage demand sharpened the 2021 framing into concrete legislative outcomes: mandatory fundamental-rights impact assessments by AI system users (not only providers); a public register of high-risk AI system deployments; real rights for affected individuals to seek representation and remedies when systems were applied to them; transparency requirements across the AI lifecycle; and accessibility obligations ensuring individuals and communities with disabilities could access the same rights and redress pathways.

"Limit harmful and discriminatory surveillance by national security, law enforcement and migration authorities." This pillar reprised the coalition's seven-prohibition demand — the list that had anchored the November 2021 statement and run through the campaign's Parliamentary briefing cycle. The trilogue-stage version organised the demand around the specific threat that the Council of the European Union's working-group amendments were threatening to introduce: expanded law-enforcement, national-security, and migration-context exemptions from the biometric-identification, predictive-policing, and emotion-recognition restrictions the Parliament's mandate included. The demand was a prohibition on remote biometric identification enabling mass surveillance; predictive policing systems and individual-risk assessments predicting future criminal activity; predictive analytics in migration contexts; and national-security exemptions broad enough to gut the prohibitions the Parliament had backed.

"Push back on Big Tech lobbying and remove loopholes that undermine the regulation." This pillar addressed the architecture of the Act's high-risk classification system, which the Commission's original proposal had structured around a largely provider-determined list and which emerging Council amendments were weakening further by proposing to allow providers to self-classify whether their own systems qualified as high-risk under the regulation. The demand was an objective, impact-based risk classification that did not permit AI developers to determine for themselves whether their systems warranted regulatory scrutiny — ensuring the classification regime would capture harm-producing systems regardless of whether their developers chose to describe them as high-risk.

The co-drafting coalition

The statement was co-drafted by a thirteen-organisation nucleus: EDRi as convening secretariat; Access Now; AlgorithmWatch; Amnesty International; Bits of Freedom; Elektronisk Forpost Norge (EFN), the Norwegian digital-rights organisation; the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL); the European Disability Forum; Fair Trials; Homo Digitalis; the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL); the Panoptykon Foundation; and PICUM (the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants). The co-drafting group was an expansion of the 2021 statement's ten-organisation nucleus — adding Amnesty International, EFN, ECNL, Homo Digitalis, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties as co-authors at the trilogue stage — and the 150 signatory pool was a 30-percent growth from the 115 organisations at the 2021 founding statement.

The co-drafting roster at the trilogue stage reflected the specific demands the coalition was working: the Disability Forum on accessibility; Fair Trials on predictive policing and risk-assessment in criminal-justice contexts; PICUM on migration-context profiling; the ICCL on national-security exemptions and Irish enforcement implementation. The ECNL's inclusion reflected growing attention to civil-society and non-profit organisations as a distinct affected category under the Act's high-risk classification regime.

Position in the campaign arc

The 12 July 2023 statement is the campaign's first event-level entry and the event that anchors the corpus's representation of the European civil-society AI Act campaign at its most consequential legislative moment — the trilogue phase in which the Act's substantive content was finally determined. The trilogue ran from July to December 2023, closing with a political agreement on 9 December 2023. The coalition's December 2023 "Don't Trade Away Our Rights!" open letter, which arrived in the trilogue's closing days as negotiators converged on the final political agreement, was the same coalition's next major public intervention after this statement — a closing-days warning directed at the same three institutions, bookending the trilogue period between two coordinated public statements.

In the corpus's EU digital-rights event arc, this statement's closest structural counterpart is the Reclaim Your Face ECI launch of 17 February 2021 — the earlier event at which the same EDRi-anchored coalition's parallel European Citizens' Initiative turned its November 2020 coalition formation into a public-facing mobilisation vehicle. The July 2023 statement is on the legislative-advocacy track (addressed directly to trilogue negotiators) where the ECI launch was on the public-mobilisation track (addressed to European citizens and the European Commission's formal citizen-participation channel); both rest on the same coalition nucleus and the same substantive demand set.