The EESC is the first EU body to offer concrete recommendations on using digital tools to improve law-making – an area still plagued by complexity and opacity

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has issued a set of recommendations to EU institutions on the responsible use of digital tools in law-making.

In an opinion adopted at its July plenary, the EESC called for the benefits of technologies such as AI and automation to be harnessed to improve transparency and efficiency, while putting strong safeguards in place to prevent discrimination, bias and inaccuracies in the legislative process.

This could significantly enhance legal consistency, reduce single market barriers and administrative burdens and, most importantly, improve compliance and increase trust in public institutions.

‘In the era of cloud computing and AI, it is paradoxical that Europe’s legislative machinery still operates with a mindset reminiscent of Napoleonic times’, said the rapporteur for the opinion, Alena Mastantuono.

Over the decades, laws have accumulated, creating unintended bureaucratic burdens and rendering the system increasingly opaque.

Figures show that the EU generates 18 000 pages of new binding legislation every year. It would take the average citizen about 720 hours a year to read all these legal texts – that’s equivalent to two hours per day. In 2022 alone, recurring administrative costs across the EU were estimated at €150 billion.

Ms Mastantuono highlighted that the EESC was the first EU institution to set out how digital tools should be used in making laws: ‘The EESC offers solutions and puts forward recommendations on how the EU’s law-making process should evolve – leveraging digital tools and mapping legal obligations more effectively.’

‘A general review of EU law should be citizen-focused and data-driven. We must ensure that laws remain fit for purpose – for citizens, SMEs and the environment,’ said the co-rapporteur Tymoteusz Zych.

The EESC recommended that all new legal acts – be it at EU, national, regional or local level – come with an easy-to-understand and concise summary of what they require. These summaries, written by regulators to ensure accuracy and clarity, would also be formatted to work with digital tools. This would allow artificial intelligence to step in – spotting overlaps, inconsistencies and gaps by connecting related rules and showing how different legal norms interact. The same should be done for existing legislation to make it more accessible to the public.

Another recommendation is to set up a unified, interoperable EU digital platform for law-making, which would centralise texts and metadata, enable real-time consistency checks and encourage the use of harmonised language. (ll)