Legal Developments on Smart Public Governance and Fundamental Rights in the Digital Age

As the title itself suggests, this chapter proposes to reflect on two of the most important challenges which are being faced by public governance over the last years: (i) at one hand, the call for public administrations to explore digital tools in the performance of their administrative functions, contributing to the smartification of public governance; (ii) at the other hand, the need for the State and other public legal persons to strictly respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of individual citizens, assuring that the introduction of new technologies in the administrative action is not at the expense of their legal guarantees. Even though they seem irreconcilable, this text tries to prove the opposite, confirming the idea put forward by the European Commission, according to which it is possible to find legal—and technical—solutions capable of “balancing the flow and wide use of data, while preserving high privacy, security, safety and ethical standards”.