Ms Vra Jourov?:

I am not sure where to start. Deputy Costello has triggered a lot of ideas of a more conceptual character. I will restrict myself to saying that the longer I work in this field of protecting democracy, the more I am convinced that active citizenship is the key thing. Without having people who care, who are demanding and who push governments to be transparent and accountable and to deliver, we cannot have better and more robust democracy. The Deputy referred to the cases which collapsed in the process. These are exactly the moments when the trust of people goes down, and we do not see much space for the dropping of trust in democratic institutions in Europe. In Ireland, of course, the situation is much better than in some other member states. However, we see that more and more citizens in different surveys are announcing doubts as to whether democracy is delivering for their lives, their security and their perspectives, and it will be even worse now when we are all under the new and horrible threat of the war and its consequences for Europe.

Active citizenship means that the individual citizens, who have and should be aware their rights, will not be transposed into some kind of crowd which is easy to manipulate. Here comes the influence of digital media: there is this idea of making the people the crowd for them to be more easily handled. That is why in GDPR we came back to old, good respect for individual rights - it is still early - and we gave the citizens many rights which they should use as informed people.

We have to work on what was mentioned about enforcement and gaps in enforcement. At the same time, people are still missing the knowledge that GDPR is protecting them and that they have rights which they should have enforced. They should complain. That is active citizenship. We cannot invent magical legislation which will protect the people from the top down. There has always been bottom-up care and this is still missing, but here I am more focused on digital and media literacy and this is the long distance around.

GDPR had a brilliant idea of one continent, one law, one method of implementation and equally strong enforcement. That was the theory at the beginning. Over time, after five years of implementation of GDPR, we see that there are still gaps in some member states. We have a very demanding task for the Data Protection Commission with regard to the magnitude and all those big fish.

I spoke yesterday to Helen Dixon who showed me the statistics and all the Data Protection Commission is doing together with other data protection authorities, because there are an incredibly high number of cross-border cases which have to be tackled in co-operation with others. Our problem is that in the member states we do not have comparably favourable legislation which enables speedy processes. However, we are aware of that. Enforcement is key and we are in constant dialogue with the European Data Protection Board about how to improve the overall situation in the EU. There is always the same set of problems for individual states, that is, underestimated staffing, low budgets and slow procedures. It has to be difficult on the member state level.

With regard to strategic lawsuits against public participation, SLAPP, we proposed legislation which would make it more difficult to sue somebody in another state and not just a member state but a third state. I have in mind mainly the UK because it is a big fashion to go the UK courts. We proposed a cross-border regime where the judges should look into the case first to make an assessment of whether the case is real or purely "a case for the case" and whether the nature of the litigation behind it is abusive. We had also recommended the member states adapt the internal system of litigation in order that it should not be that easy to sue somebody for defamation or some wrongdoing. We mean "somebody" to be journalists and human rights defenders. That is how we define the targets in our legislation.

The ministers of justice gave me the first feedback on this proposal. A big number of them are for the legislation, including the domestic legislation. However, they always tell me we must be cautious not to create some kind of impunity because, even when somebody is rich and powerful, they should have the right of access to the court when somehow harmed by the unprofessional performance of a journalist. We created a balanced proposal which is now in the legislative process. I wonder when we can expect a result because a big number of the member states said it is useful but there are some member states who said they did not have any cases like that. I will have to act mainly in that direction.