E-Government and Digitalization

In order to address the relationship between e-democracy, technique and politics, the meaning of each term must be identified. E-democracy only partly carries with it the essential core of the notion of democracy. Technique is the environment within which e-democracy unfolds. Its purpose is to appropriate technology. Politics are sets of particular aims at which the organised action of groups of individuals and interests tends. There are irreconcilable contradictions between e-democracy, technique and politics; and obvious dangers of e-democracy seen in the interactions between the three. These include manipulation of individuals; stratification between web users; exclusion of 'unable' users; the illusion of the spread of higher rates of democracy.

This contribution outlines the provision of preliminary assistance in administration as seen in recent legislation and case law. First, the key elements of preliminary assistance are described. Then, the analysis addresses the jurisprudential orientations related to its application in the context of digitalized administrative action. The authors propose that, on the one hand, preliminary assistance is an essential means of overcoming technological problems and the digital divide between citizens and government administration, and, on the other, it is a tool for implementing the principles of simplification by helping to reduce the burdens on private individuals who participate in the administrative procedure.

This essay deals with the impact of new technologies in the provision of public service. The analysis focuses specifically on urban mobility, stressing out the new mobility concept that technologies has brought and its compatibility with public service principles.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications based on big data have sparked a huge debate among lawyers. The debate has focused on how new interactions mediated by data-driven AI affect different legal principles, challenge existing rules, and require changes in the legal framework. Many traditional fields of law were covered: data protection law, consumer protection law, intellectual property law, etc. This article provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities that lie at the intersection of AI applications and the domain of taxation and tax law. In the first part, the paper examines how current AI-powered economic models reshape the traditional value chain and influence legal concepts in direct and indirect taxation. The second part discusses how AI is applied in different areas of voluntary tax compliance and tax administrations' controls, and how these developments generate new challenges for (tax) law.

In order for the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Italy to be a success it is necessary to overcome the slowness and inefficiencies of the Italian Public Administration system. At the same time, the Recovery and Resilience Plan can play a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of Public Administration; something that is badly needed in Italy. To achieve this goal it is necessary, however, to first of all complete the process of full “dematerialisation” and of digital archiving of Public Administration documents, as well as to overcome the lack of interoperability of public digital services. What is needed is a solid “human resources strategy” in order to trigger a transformational change for Italian Public Administration.

The contribution addresses the issue of access to justice, in the perspective of the sustainable development goal 16 of the United Nations. After a brief analysis of the territorial organization of Italian administrative justice, the author focuses on the innovations of the electronic administrative trial to assess to what extent it has facilitated access to justice. The contribution therefore evaluates what limits still exist in the electronic administrative trial in the perspective of reducing distances and, on the basis of these considerations, makes some proposals to mitigate the problem of excessive length of the trials.

Within the development of artificial intelligence, a first sanding role is played by autonomous vehicles; these are supposed to revolutionize transports, with material economical, industrial and even social consequences. Several juridical issues are involved in this process, with particular reference to the allocation of liability, in order to provide a sufficient level of legal protection to the relevant interests at stake. This essay intends to focus the potential criminal risk related to programming, manufacturing and manning this kind of vehicles.

The French Council of State rules that the existing threat to national security currently justifies the generalized retention of data. It affirms also that the possibility of accessing connection data in order to fight serious crime allows, at the present time, the constitutional requirements of preventing breaches of law and order, and the tracking down of authors of criminal offences to be ensured. However, after examining the conformity with EU law of French rules on the retention of connection data, and verifying that the implementation of EU law (as interpreted by the European Court of Justice) does not jeopardize the requirements of the French Constitution, the French Council of State orders the Government to reassess regularly the threat that exists in France so as to justify the generalized retention of data, and to submit the use of these same data by the intelligence services to clearance provided by an independent authority.

Since the adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, in the context of the European Union the so-called “good administration” has emerged as a new fundamental right: the right to good administration, as written and detailed in Article 41 of the EU Charter. As for its specific contents, there is a clear correspondence with the provisions of Article 97 of the Italian Constitution with respect to the need for impartiality and good performance/efficiency of the Public Administration: two principles of which the best expression is found in Law 241 of 1990 on administrative procedure. It is precisely in this perspective that modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can play a fundamental role in the context of public administration, especially in as far as the possibility to carry out an adequate and prompt investigation process during the administrative procedure is concerned.

Self-certification is one of the main tools aimed at administrative simplification and, in particular, at de-bureaucratization of the relationship between the Public Administration and citizens, as it is aimed at reducing the burdens on citizens. Self-certification, which over the years has been the subject of many legislative changes, in Italy has recently been profoundly innovated by the measures adopted following the emergency situation caused by the Coronavirus, which have also extended the scope of application of the principle to relations between private individuals. Despite the many regulatory changes, however, the potential simplification that should result from self-certification is still severely limited in Italy. It will therefore be seen how self-certification – a tool created to relieve the bureaucratic burden on citizens – instead of representing the balance between guarantee, control and simplification, in some case produced new and heavy bureaucratic burdens to the detriment of private individuals, thus totally deviating from the purpose for which the institute itself should be intended.