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EUMANS

EUMANS

EUMANS, as a pan-European Movement of popular and nonviolent initiatives, has among its objectives the defense of human rights and fundamental freedoms, the affirmation of the rule of law and democracy, the protection, conservation and restoration of the ecosystem and sustainable development as well as the promotion of science-based debates and institutional decisions.

Lobbying Activity

Meeting with Valentina Palmisano (Member of the European Parliament)

19 Nov 2025 · Artificial Intelligence

Meeting with Lena Schilling (Member of the European Parliament)

3 Nov 2025 · COP30

Response to European Data Union Strategy

18 Jul 2025

EUmans believes that Europes data strategy must be democratically accountable and serve citizen interests, not just economic competitiveness. While we support strategic European AI capabilities, data governance decisions affecting entire sectors and societies require meaningful citizen participation and transparent oversight. Currently, the European Data Union Strategys (EDUS) call for feedback emphasizes the need for European business organizations to reach global competitiveness by (i) facilitating access to data and (ii) simplifying the legal framework for data pooling and governance. Yet, major data access arrangements should have public oversight, even when the data in question does not seem to directly concern private individuals. The reasons behind this are twofold. First, the use of industrial data, just like that of personal data, can seriously affect the lives of private citizens in ways that citizens might not fully understand. Consider, for instance, how industrial data related to energy consumption or transportation patterns, while seemingly impersonal, can be used to inform policies that disproportionately impact certain communities or lead to biased resource allocation. Secondly, data access for re-use strategies should demonstrably serve public interest, not just corporate profits. The enhancement of the EU's competitiveness in the AI global market must not come at the expense of citizens rights, data misuse, or even data abuse. Thus, the EDUS needs a data governance framework that ensures that: Citizens know what and how data is collected and managed by private companies, and be able to determine what use cases should be prioritized (digital self determination); Private companies collect and manage data according to (or without conflicting with) communities preferences - i.e. reflecting a social license for data re-use; Collected data are readily, responsibly and equitably accessible to private citizens, research institutions and other entities that make a positive impact on society. An effective and actionable way to meet challenges 1-3 is to build a governance and operational framework based on the concept of a data commons. Through community engagement practices, data commons stewards learn about citizens and communities preferences and expectations, and then incorporate these in data collection and access practices. This ensures that citizens input is considered from the outset of data and information practices (challenges 1-2). After data is collected, data commons may regulate access to it by private companies based on a social license approach, with a tiered access system. Before companies have access to data, they need to explain why they need access to it, who will have access to it, and how data will be used, and by when. These layers of security are aimed at not only preventing data misuse (challenge 2) but also ensuring that data use furthers the public good (challenge 3). A third component of this governance framework is an effective monitoring system whereby the EU ensures that data is responsibly used by companies and communities are reliably and transparently updated on major data movements (challenge 1). This data commons approach harbors numerous other benefits. It would promote data self-determination, in that (especially high-value) data sets would remain within the EU. Also, it would foster the objectives of data altruism - as already introduced by the EU Data Governance Act - by facilitating access to data for entities that serve the public good. A unified and sovereign data infrastructure is needed to support participatory and deliberative democracy software. Fragmented or extra-EU held datasets risk undermining transparency, accountability, and long-term democratic resilience. Ensuring that both the data and the code remain within an open-source, common, accessible, and publicly governed repository is essential for safeguarding democratic processes.
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Meeting with César Luena (Member of the European Parliament, Rapporteur)

14 Jul 2025 · Protection of polar bears

Meeting with Lynn Boylan (Member of the European Parliament)

14 Jul 2025 · Conservation status of the polar bear

Meeting with Sergey Lagodinsky (Member of the European Parliament) and Microsoft Corporation and ARD-Verbindungsbüro Brüssel

8 Jul 2025 · Exchange of Views

Response to A European Strategy for AI in science – paving the way for a European AI research council

3 Jun 2025

Citizen Science for a European sovereign AI With the Choose Europe for Research plan, President Ursula von der Leyen reaffirmed the EUs strategic commitment to free, open, and cross-border research as a cornerstone of European competitiveness, unity, and democratic resilience. Enshrining freedom of research in the upcoming European Research Area (ERA) Act, the plan underscores that scienceunbounded by nationality, gender, or politicsmust connect people and shape a human-centred digital future. Within this framework, citizen science plays a vital role in promoting open science practices, data equity, and public engagement. By actively involving citizens in defining research questions, collecting and interpreting data, and contributing to policymaking, citizen science transforms research into a collaborative, transparent, and inclusive process, essential for tackling challenges in high-value scientific fields such as health, climate change, and biodiversity. At the same time, the AI in Science Strategy sets a clear political direction: to accelerate the responsible use of AI and enable researchers to conduct more impactful, productive, and ethical research. With the upcoming launch of the Resource for AI Science in Europe (RAISE)a precursor to a potential European AI Research Councilthe EU aims to provide dedicated AI tools, shared datasets, and public infrastructure (e.g., cloud, HPC, and data lakes) to support AI-enabled research workflows across disciplines. This effort supports the goals of the European Research Area, helping to close the innovation gap, empower people and businesses, and ensure technological sovereignty in science. The integration of AI and science is already being demonstrated in EU-funded projects such as EITHOS (identity protection), KT4D (AI for participatory democracy), and FERMI/VIGILANT (AI to combat disinformation). These initiatives, aligned with the values of research integrity, transparency, and data protection, exemplify how AI can enhance both scientific excellence and democratic governance. Indeed, to counter disinformation, AI systems should be designed to detect, prioritize, and amplify verifiable, trustworthy information (such as academic production), rather than inadvertently spreading outdated or false content. This requires both technical design choicessuch as the use of curated training datasets, retrieval mechanisms, and output filteringand institutional measures like the implementation of an electronic seal to certify the authenticity and status of public information, including legislation and research. To consolidate this vision, proposals for a CERN for AIor its policy equivalent, RAISErepresent a critical infrastructure milestone. Inspired by CERNs legacy, such an initiative must be governed by scientists, for scientists, free from political influence, and grounded in EU values of trustworthiness, openness, and international collaboration. It should support interdisciplinary research centres, attract and retain AI talent, and embed ethical considerations, including human autonomy, fairness, and explainability. By anchoring AI for science within a shared European framework, the EU can lead in building a future where innovation and democracy thrive together.
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Response to Cloud and AI Development Act

3 Jun 2025

Eumans advocates for the development of Civic Artificial Intelligence systems, but building such infrastructures for democratic participation requires computational environments that are not yet adequately supported by existing public or commercial offerings. A core need is access to modular, safe, interoperable, and legally compliant compute resourcesspecifically tailored for civic tech and other high-value public uses, rather than commercial optimization alone. Current infrastructures, including EuroHPC and major cloud providers, are not optimized for low-latency, multilingual AI systems or for federated deployment across local, national, and EU-level institutions. Rather than continuous access to large-scale HPC, what Civic AI systems demand are flexible, cost-efficient, and auditable resources that can scale on demand. These resources must support natural language processing, deliberation tools, multilingual corpus management, and real-time participatory platforms. Environments must also offer fine-grained access control, semantic interoperability with institutional datasets, and full traceability of AI outputs and decisions. Critically, they must ensure compliance with EU lawparticularly the GDPR, the AI Act, and accessibility regulationsto ensure safe and inclusive deployment across Member States. To guarantee public trust, institutional adoption, and long-term accountability, public-purpose AI must operate within transparent, energy-efficient, and sovereign compute environmentsequipped with logging, auditing, and data protection mechanisms by design. These resources must be made accessible not only to major enterprises but also to civil society consortia, public institutions, and academic researchers, to prevent exclusion from Europes AI innovation ecosystem and to enable a pluralistic, citizen-driven approach to development. The Common European Cloud for AI should adopt a decentralized and contributive model, not only offering access to shared resources, but enabling public institutions, municipalities, and academic centers to actively contribute with their own computing nodes. By allowing local and regional actors to integrate their existing infrastructures into a federated ecosystem, the EU can expand available capacity while reinforcing democratic governance and operational resilience. This approach would promote energy efficiency through geographic proximity, reduce latency for localized applications, and enhance institutional trust by ensuring data remains under public control. Decentralization in this sense is not merely technical, it is a structural choice for pluralism, sovereignty, and civic participation. Additionally, there remains a significant gap in pre-configured environments that support open-source civic tooling, multilingual interaction, and rights-based governance modelselements essential to achieving Europe's goal of data sovereignty and ethical AI leadership. In short, the EU should invest in a dedicated civic compute stack, embedded within the Common European Cloud for AI, to power AI applications where public valuenot profitis the guiding principle. Such an initiative would position the EU as a global leader in trustworthy, safe, and democratic AI, while aligning its compute infrastructure with the Unions fundamental values and strategic priorities.
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Response to Apply AI Strategy

3 Jun 2025

Eumans frames democracy and popular participation as a strategic application area for AIoffering high-impact solutions that build digital sovereignty and democratic resilience. Despite significant investments in tools like the ECI and public consultations, access remains fragmented, feedback loops are weak, and multilingual usability is limited. A Civic AI infrastructurefeaturing a Civic Assistant, Deliberation Engine, Participation Dashboard, and Democracy Data Commonswould integrate with existing EU systems (e.g. eIDAS 2.0, EUR-Lex), making civic tools more discoverable, interoperable, and human-centered. Civic AI should not be limited to public or private interest, but framed as a shared, open-source societal infrastructure that will ensure transparency, ethical use, and democratic accountability. Europe will, thus, become the AI continent by demonstrating how trustworthy, rights-based AI can create public value, not just commercial profit, as it was shown by Taiwans participatory platforms, and the Finnish AuroraAI initiative. This is a timely opportunity for the EU to lead by example and scale public-interest AI that amplifies, rather than automates, democracy.
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Meeting with Brando Benifei (Member of the European Parliament, Delegation chair)

6 Mar 2025 · Participation to EUMANS Congress with a speech

Meeting with Annalisa Corrado (Member of the European Parliament)

6 Feb 2025 · European Democracy

Meeting with Brando Benifei (Member of the European Parliament)

3 Oct 2024 · Meeting on the EU digital policies and on the priorities of the new mandate

Meeting with Benedetta Scuderi (Member of the European Parliament)

2 Oct 2024 · European Citizens' > Initiatives (ECIs)

Meeting with Helmut Geuking (Member of the European Parliament)

7 Jun 2023 · Eumans - human rights and fundamental freedoms Mr Mineo/Smith

Meeting with Dietmar Köster (Member of the European Parliament)

7 Jun 2023 · Presentation of the Organization

Meeting with Brando Benifei (Member of the European Parliament)

6 Jun 2023 · EUMANS's programme and activities towards 2024 EU Elections (meeting held by assistant)

Meeting with Victor Negrescu (Member of the European Parliament) and Lifelong Learning Platform and Foundation on European Citizens’ Rights, Involvement and Trust

22 Mar 2023 · Citizenship education