European Digital Rights is the Brussels-headquartered pan-European network of civil-society organisations defending rights and freedoms in the digital environment, and the principal civil-society coordination point through which European digital-rights NGOs work the European Commission, Parliament, and Council on AI, biometric surveillance, data protection, content moderation, and copyright. Its self-description frames it as "the biggest European network defending rights and freedoms online" — "a dynamic and resilient collective of NGOs, experts, advocates and academics working to defend and advance digital rights across the continent" — and the network's claim, captured in its 20th-anniversary retrospective, that "for over two decades, it has served as the backbone of the digital rights movement in Europe" is a fair summary of how the European civil-society field uses it: as the convening table at which national digital-rights organisations agree common positions and take them into the EU institutions.
Founding and structure
EDRi was founded in June 2002 by ten non-profit organisations from seven European countries, originally with a Berlin coordination point, in response to the growing recognition that European-level rule-making — passenger-name records, data retention, copyright enforcement, and surveillance-related directives then taking shape — required a European civil-society interlocutor capable of working the Commission, the Parliament, and member-state legislatures in concert. Its founding board was Maurice Wessling of Bits of Freedom (the Netherlands), Andy Müller-Maguhn of the Chaos Computer Club (Germany), and Meryem Marzouki of Imaginons un Réseau Internet Solidaire (France); the ten founding organisations were Bits of Freedom (Netherlands), Chaos Computer Club (Germany), Digital Rights (Denmark), EFFi (Finland), the Foundation for Information Policy Research (United Kingdom), Fitug (Germany), Imaginons un Réseau Internet Solidaire (France), Privacy International (United Kingdom), Quintessenz (Austria), and VIBE!AT (Austria). The network has grown steadily — to 34 organisations across 19 countries by October 2014, to 44 NGOs by March 2021, and to its current 50+ member organisations — and its Brussels office, opened to put the secretariat physically next to the European institutions, has expanded over the past decade to a roughly 22-person staff team.
EDRi is registered as a Brussels AISBL (association internationale sans but lucratif, the Belgian legal form for international non-profit associations) and recently obtained Dutch Public Benefit Institution (ANBI) status alongside its Belgian incorporation. It is governed by an annual General Assembly of the member organisations, which elects a board whose members serve as individuals — not as representatives of their home organisations — for a maximum of two three-year terms. The current board is Andrej Petrovski (President; Director of Tech at the SHARE Foundation in Belgrade), Alyna Smith (formerly Deputy Director at PICUM), Isabela Fernandes (Executive Director of the Tor Project since 2018), Karolina Iwańska (Digital Rights Advisor at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law), Paige Collings (Senior Speech and Privacy Activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation), and Jürgen Bering (Center for User Rights at Germany's Society for Civil Rights). The Brussels staff team is organised into four departments — Policy, Community & Events, Finance & Administration, and Communications & Campaigns — under heads Ella Jakubowska (Policy), Vanessa Buvens (Membership and Community), and Andreea Belu (Campaigns and Communications). The December 2024 departure of Executive Director Claire Fernandez marked a leadership transition: Amber Sinha, previously Executive Director of the Centre of Internet and Society in India and a researcher in privacy, AI, and cybersecurity, joined as the new Executive Director in late 2025, overseeing a new 2025–2030 strategic framework validated by the May 2026 General Assembly.
Programme structure
The organisation's published programme structure is built around three "pillars" — Information Democracy, Privacy and Data Protection, and Open Internet & Inclusive Tech — that map onto the Brussels secretariat's policy work on the EU's AI Act, Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, ePrivacy Regulation, Data Act, GDPR enforcement, copyright, and net-neutrality files. Across the three pillars the secretariat plays a recognisable convening function: it drafts and circulates joint civil-society statements, runs sustained working groups across member organisations during EU legislative processes, supplies common briefings and amendment language to MEPs and member-state delegations, runs the long-running EDRi-gram bi-weekly newsletter, and hosts the network's annual General Assembly and members-only working spaces. A fourth strand — the Decolonising Digital Rights initiative — is a deliberate critical reflection on the field's own composition and assumptions, undertaken in partnership with member organisations and external advocates, and is one of the few examples in European digital-rights work of an established advocacy network turning a programme inward in this way.
Reclaim Your Face
EDRi's signature campaign in the corpus's terms is the Reclaim Your Face movement against biometric mass surveillance in European public space, launched in October 2020 by an EDRi-coordinated coalition of twelve civil-society organisations — including Access Now, ARTICLE 19, Bits of Freedom, and Privacy International — under the campaign tagline "Reclaim our public space. Ban biometric mass surveillance!" The campaign demanded a comprehensive European-level prohibition on the use of facial recognition and other biometric identification technologies for mass surveillance in publicly accessible spaces. Its central organising vehicle was a European Citizens' Initiative — the EU's only formal mechanism for citizens to compel the European Commission to consider a legislative proposal — registered on 7 January 2021, with signature collection opening on 17 February 2021 and running, after a COVID-19 extension, until 1 August 2022. The ECI ultimately gathered nearly 80,000 verified signatures, well short of the 1-million threshold required to compel a Commission response, but its political impact on the parallel AI Act process was substantial: the campaign's own framing is that the words "ban" and "remote biometric identification" entered the AI Act proposal text as a direct consequence of the mobilisation, and the ECI is widely cited in European civil-society circles as one of the most politically consequential ECIs of the 2020s despite not crossing the formal threshold. Reclaim Your Face remains active as a coalition vehicle into the AI Act implementation phase.
EU AI Act civil-society coordination
EDRi has been the principal civil-society coordination point on the EU AI Act since the European Commission's April 2021 proposal, and the AI Act track is the most consequential single line of EDRi's work in the corpus's terms. Two named statements anchor the public record. The first is the 30 November 2021 joint civil-society statement titled "An EU Artificial Intelligence Act for Fundamental Rights", coordinated by EDRi and signed by 115 organisations at publication (the figure subsequently grew, and is referenced as 123 in the corpus's AlgorithmWatch entry), demanding a more flexible risk-based architecture, a comprehensive list of prohibitions on high-risk uses (social scoring; remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces; emotion recognition; discriminatory biometric categorisation; AI physiognomy; predictive-policing systems; profiling and risk-assessment in migration contexts), mandatory user-side fundamental-rights impact assessments for high-risk systems, public registration of high-risk deployments, individual rights to explanation and judicial remedy, and environmental-impact disclosure obligations. The second is the 12 July 2023 trilogue-stage joint civil-society statement coordinated by EDRi as the legislation entered final negotiations between the European Parliament, Council, and Commission, signed by 150 civil-society organisations and co-drafted with AlgorithmWatch, Access Now, Amnesty International, Bits of Freedom, EFN, the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law, the European Disability Forum, Fair Trials, Homo Digitalis, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, the Panoptykon Foundation, and PICUM. The trilogue statement organised the coalition's position around three pillars — accountability frameworks built on fundamental-rights impact assessments and public registers of high-risk systems and complaint and redress mechanisms; restrictions on harmful surveillance by law-enforcement and migration authorities including bans on remote biometric identification and predictive policing; and the elimination of regulatory loopholes that would have allowed providers to self-classify high-risk systems as lower-risk — and remained the operating civil-society reference for the trilogue endgame and the implementation phase that followed adoption of the AI Act in 2024.
AI Act enforcement and GPAI (2025–2026)
The adoption of the EU AI Act in 2024 was a beginning, not an endpoint, for EDRi's AI policy work. The Act's provisions for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models — transparency documentation, training-data summaries, EU copyright compliance, and information-sharing obligations — came into force on 2 August 2025, making GPAI providers formally subject to compliance obligations for the first time. The European Commission published its final GPAI Code of Practice on 10 July 2025 — a voluntary compliance instrument whose signatories receive a presumption of conformity in enforcement proceedings — while the Commission's full supervisory and enforcement powers (investigations, documentation requests, fines, and recall orders) are scheduled to apply from 2 August 2026. EDRi's 2025 annual report records that the network's recommendations were incorporated into the Commission's guidelines on prohibited AI systems — one of the first concrete legislative outputs of the implementation phase. EDRi has also partnered with the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, and Liberties to challenge AI-powered facial recognition targeting LGBTQI+ communities in Hungary, prompting a European Commission response — a worked illustration of how national digital-rights organisations route concerns through EDRi's network into EU-level enforcement channels.
Countering deregulation: 2025–2026 campaigns
The November 2024 arrival of a new European Commission committed to a deregulation agenda — streamlining or rolling back existing digital-rights legislation including the GDPR, DSA, and AI Act — became the defining frame for EDRi's work in 2025 and 2026. EDRi led the EU's broadest civil-society coalition against this agenda — approximately 500 civil-society organisations, trade unions, and public-interest groups — and in October 2025 hosted a two-day summit drawing over 100 delegates from across Europe. A Brussels billboard campaign launched on 19 November 2025, coinciding with the Digital Omnibus legislative package, called on EU institutions to prioritise people's rights over Big Tech interests. In a significant lobbying win, the EU Council in November 2025 adopted a formal position aligned with EDRi's demands on the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, rejecting mandatory message scanning and encryption-breaking measures — a proposal European civil society had campaigned against for years under the "Chat Control" banner.
On platform accountability, EDRi filed DSA complaints against X (formerly Twitter) for abusing personal data in targeted advertising and for breaching obligations to Trusted Flaggers, and against Meta for toxic profiling in its algorithmic feeds. In June 2025, EDRi published a spyware position paper calling for an EU-wide principled ban on the technology; the paper influenced EU lawmakers and contributed to the formation of a European Parliament spyware interest group. In April 2025, EDRi launched the Civic Journalism Coalition with the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law and Lighthouse Reports, bringing together journalists and digital-rights organisations for joint investigations. The network also left the X platform in January 2025, committing fully to the Fediverse.
The culminating statement of this phase is Make It Real: Calls to Action for a Flourishing and Just Digital Europe, a manifesto published on 23 June 2026 by 13 civil-society organisations including EDRi, ARTICLE 19, Ada Lovelace Institute, BEUC, CDT Europe, Greenpeace, and others. The launch took place at a summit featuring surveillance-capitalism scholar Shoshana Zuboff and MEP Brando Benifei, and was timed to follow a visual protest co-organised by EDRi at the European Council meeting of 18–19 June 2026. The manifesto framed its demands as "digital civil society's answer to the Antwerp declaration" — the Big Tech-aligned business competitiveness statement — explicitly casting the debate as a contest between people-centred and corporate-centred visions of EU digital governance.
Other campaigns and policy lines
Beyond the AI Act and biometric surveillance, EDRi's campaign history is the longest single record of European digital-rights advocacy. The network coordinated European civil society against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement during the 2010–2012 ACTA controversy that culminated in protests in more than 200 European cities and the European Parliament's July 2012 rejection of the agreement, an episode EDRi's own retrospective describes as "a digital rights turning point". It worked the European-level negotiation of the General Data Protection Regulation through the 2012–2018 cycle and supplied amendment text and coalition coordination that the network claims left its "fingerprints all over" the regulation, and has subsequently tracked enforcement-deficit complaints filed by member organisations. It mobilised against the 2005 Data Retention Directive (eventually struck down by the Court of Justice of the EU in 2014) and against the 2003 and 2011 EU passenger-name-records arrangements. It worked the 2010s copyright-reform cycle and the more recent Digital Services Act on the question of "the right balance of protection of rights and prevention of illegality". On UK live facial recognition, EDRi co-signed the 6 October 2023 cross-party joint statement coordinated by Big Brother Watch, placing the European network's name alongside Foxglove, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Human Rights Watch, Liberty, Privacy International, Open Rights Group, Amnesty International, Access Now, Article 19, and 21 other rights and race-equality organisations on the demand for an immediate halt to UK police and private-business live facial-recognition deployments.
Funding and independence
EDRi's funding statement names its current foundation funders as the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Adessium Foundation, Luminate, the MacArthur Foundation, Stiftung Mercator, and the European AI & Society Fund, alongside corporate donors including Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, CERM, and Sørensen Consulting, EU operating-grant support, member-organisation membership fees, and individual donations. The network publishes a strict funding-ethics policy capping corporate donations at 30% of EDRi's yearly budget overall and any single corporate donation at 7.5% of total income, and explicitly notes that "receiving funding from corporations or donors from the private sector does not imply endorsement of a donor's policies and record". The deliberate diversification — across foundations, corporate donors, EU institutional grants, and member fees — is one of EDRi's structural answers to the field-wide concern that European civil-society advocacy on AI and platform regulation can be captured by the very industries it is regulating.
Posture in the movement
EDRi's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is the convening function: it is the place at which European national digital-rights organisations agree common positions on AI, biometric surveillance, content moderation, and platform regulation, and the secretariat through which those positions are taken into the EU institutions. Its working theory of change is that effective European rule-making on AI requires civil-society inputs to arrive coordinated rather than fragmented across 27 national debates, and that the EU's three-institution co-decision process is the lever at which a properly convened pan-European coalition can substantively shape rules that then bind on national governments and on the platform companies operating in Europe. In the corpus's terms it is the coordinating coalition behind the European civil-society wing of the AI Act process — the trilogue-stage statement co-drafted with AlgorithmWatch is the single most-cited civil-society reference document for the AI Act endgame — and the principal European-level vehicle through which national organisations like AlgorithmWatch in Germany and Switzerland, Big Brother Watch in the UK, and Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands convert their domestic campaigning into European-level law and policy positions. Its Brussels base, AISBL legal form, and individual-member board structure together produce an organisational form — pan-European NGO network with a small Brussels secretariat and an annual General Assembly of the membership — that is itself the template for the way the broader European civil-society field organises around EU-level technology rule-making.
The 2025–2026 deregulation conjuncture has clarified and tested this role. Under new executive leadership with a 2025–2030 strategic framework, EDRi has simultaneously coordinated a defensive coalition of ~500 organisations against the EU deregulation agenda, filed parallel DSA enforcement complaints against major platforms, anchored the civil-society position on AI Act enforcement in its opening GPAI phase, and published the Make It Real manifesto as an explicit counter-statement to Big Tech influence in EU digital governance — demonstrating that the network's convening function operates at full capacity in an adversarial political environment as well as a constructive legislative one.