Digital Omnibus meets the Charter of Fundamental Rights – a reality check

  • Panel
  • Grande Halle
  • Friday 22.05 — 11:50 - 13:05

Organising Institution

noyb

Austria

noyb is a non-profit organisation working to enforce data protection laws, in particular the GDPR. So far noyb has filed more than 800 complaints for wilful privacy violation against companies like Meta, Google and Amazon.
  • Academic 2
  • Business 1
  • Policy 3
Under the heading of simplification, competitiveness and burden reduction for business, the European Commission in November 2025 published its proposal for the "Digital Omnibus”. Legal analysis shows that several proposed changes to the GDPR would not only undermine its core principles and deviate from settled ECJ case law but conflict with the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. The panel will explore how Charter rights granted under Article 8 for personal data and Article 7 for privacy would be overturned and what the practical implications would be on data subjects, supervisory authorities and controllers. It will examine the limitations the Charter imposes on the EU legislator when establishing secondary EU law affecting fundamental rights through the principle of proportionality under Article 52 of the Charter, but also regarding the choice of regulatory techniques like Omnibus laws.

Questions to be answered

  1. Do proposed amendments to the GDPR in the Digital Omnibus conflict with the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and if so, why?
  2. What would be the impact of these changes regarding legal certainty and any potential subsequent annulment action?
  3. Does the Digital Omnibus meet the Charters' conditions and limitations for amending fundamental rights ?
  4. Should or can Omnibus-type law be used as regulatory tool to substantially amend EU legislation protecting fundamental rights?

Moderator

Jennifer Baker

journalist and presenter - Belgium

Better known as Brusselsgeek, Jennifer has been a journalist in print, radio and television for 20 years, the last 10+ specialising in EU policy. She has worked across a wide range of media, from editing a national daily paper in Malta, to reporting on European affairs for Middle Eastern television, and has a wealth of experience in navigating the political quagmire of the EU. Regularly listed as one of the top influencers in the EU bubble, Jennifer was awarded #1 Tech Influencer 2019 by ZN, was listed by Politico as one of the Top 20 Women Shaping Brussels in 2017 , and was named by Onalytica as one of the world's Top 100 Influencers on Data Security 2016. Jennifer regularly features as an EU expert on BBC radio, Euronews, SkyNews and others.

Speaker

Herwig Hofmann

University of Luxembourg - Luxembourg

Herwig C. H. Hofmann is Professor of European and Transnational Public Law at the University of Luxembourg. He has held visiting positions at various universities around the world, is the author of numerous books in the fields of EU and comparative public law and advises governments and EU institutions. Professor Hofmann has also gained a reputation as litigator before the CJEU in high-profile cases (including the Schrems cases in 2015, 2018 and 2020), developing European and international standards of fundamental rights protection as well as defining the conditions of the right to an effective judicial remedy. Hofmann is also the author of commentaries on Article 47 of the Charter of the European Union as well as a study on ‘"Accountability in the EU – The Role of the European Ombudsman”.

Speaker

Alexandra Jaspar

Data Protection Authority of Belgium, Director of the Authorization and Opinion Service, member of the Executive Committee - Belgium

Alexandra Jaspar is the Director of the Authorization and Opinion Service and a member of the Executive Committee. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Law of the ULB (Brussels) and Northwestern University (Chicago). Alexandra Jaspar has been an expert in personal data protection for 25 years. She was a lawyer at the law firm Linklaters and then a legal advisor and director of the Compliance Department (anti-money laundering and privacy) at bpost. She has also held the position of Director of the Data Protection & Privacy division at Deloitte and head of the Legal & Compliance department at Utiq. She regularly gives lectures and presentations and has been a lecturer at the Solvay Business School (Programme in EU data protection).

Speaker

Max Schrems

noyb - Austria

Max Schrems is an Austrian lawyer, author, and public speaker on data protection issues. Based on his lawsuits against Facebook, the European Court of Justice declared the EU-US data protection agreements “Safe Harbor” and “Privacy Shield” invalid. He is the founder and honorary executive director of noyb, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enforcing EU data protection law. noyb has published and regularly updates an in-depth legal analyses of the proposed Digital Omnibus regarding GDPR and e-privacy changes, with specific focus on potential conflicts with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Speaker

Rosalia Anna D’Agostino

Spirit Legal - Netherlands

Rosalia Anna D'Agostino is an AI and Data Privacy Expert at Spirit Legal. She is part of the IT and Technology Law team, where she mainly works in support of the international clients of the law firm, while carrying out important research on topics as social media and platform liability,  AI risk assessment and data processing in the IoT.  In 2024, she founded Legal4Tech - the Podcast, a platform where top experts in tech governance are invited to share their opinions and discuss important tech-regulation-related challenges.