Passengers Name Records and Security
The EU Passenger Name Records Directive is based on the logic of preventive security. Th CJEU ruling, Ligue des droits humains, offers an opportunity for national judges to question more radically the idea of generalised preventive security that seeks to anticipate human behaviour through the creation of risk profiles and statistical correlations (instead of causality).
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Tackling Discrimination in Targeted Advertising
On 21 June Meta and the US Department for Housing and Urban Development released a legal settlement that will restrict Meta’s ability to offer those clients some of its core ad-targeting products. It resolves (for now) a long-running case over discriminatory targeting of housing adverts. Meta is now prohibited from using certain targeting tools in this context, and has promised new tools to ensure more representative targeting. This US lawsuit should be a wake-up call for European regulators, reminding them that taking systemic discrimination seriously requires proactive regulatory reform and enforcement. The relevant provisions of the Digital Services Act (DSA) are largely symbolic.
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A Bold Defence of Parliamentarism
At midnight on 10 April 2022, Pakistan’s National Assembly voted to pass a motion of no-confidence in Prime Minister Imran Khan, ousting his populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party from power three and a half years after its controversial election. The civilian government went to great lengths to stay in power, using allies in nominally impartial state offices to unconstitutionally dismiss the no-confidence motion and call snap elections. This attempt, however, failed - largely due to the country’s Supreme Court, which in a ruling on 7 April 2022 intervened decisively to protect the National Assembly from dissolution and order the vote to go ahead.
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Rethinking Rights in Social Media Governance
In the context of the broader ‘techlash’ against the power and exploitative practices of major platforms, EU lawmakers are increasingly emphasising ‘European values’ and fundamental rights protection. But relying only on human rights to guide both social media law and academic criticism thereof is excluding other normative perspectives that place greater emphasis on collective and social interests. This is deeply limiting – especially for critical scholarship and activism that calls for the law to redress structural inequality.
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