VIGILIA

Pro Bono to Navigate the Frontiers of DSA Enforcement

Pro Publico connected Vigilia with a pro bono legal team for advice on Article 21 of the Digital Services Act – an area of law with no clear precedent. Here’s what happened next.

The EU Digital Services Act 

When the Digital Services Act entered into force, it introduced a new toolkit for users and civil society to challenge the content moderation decisions of Online Platforms. Among its most consequential (and least explored) provisions is Article 21, which governs out-of-court dispute settlement and, crucially, enables users who prevail in such proceedings to recover their reasonable costs from the platform.

For Vigilia, a non-profit dedicated to enforcing EU tech regulation and ensuring that digital platforms operating in the EU comply with the law, this provision represented both an opportunity and a puzzle. The organisation had already built effective working relationships with certified out-of-court dispute settlement bodies and secured favourable rulings. The question was how to operationalise Article 21 to make it work for users at scale – including how to structure coordinated enforcement mechanisms and recover the costs of that enforcement from platforms when an independent body found they had wrongly moderated content.

A New Area of Law Requires Deep Research

Pro Publico matched Vigilia with a Brussels-based team of lawyers specialised in EU digital law. The brief was straightforward in its ambition if not its difficulty: understand what Article 21 allows, identify the most effective legal pathways to enforce those rights, and anticipate where resistance (including litigation) might arise.

Because this is genuinely new law, with limited precedent and ongoing legal debate, the legal team did not treat the engagement as a routine advisory exercise. They invested real research effort into the question, mapping the legal landscape and developing a set of concrete, practical recommendations tailored to Vigilia’s operational context.

Bastien Carniel, who leads Vigilia, describes the result: “Pro Publico has once again stepped up to the plate, connecting Vigilia with world-class lawyers specialised in EU digital law. Our request was very niche and little relevant precedent exists; the team took the time to dive into it and come up with a set of very practical recommendations, which we are currently carrying out.”

From Advice to Action

The impact of the collaboration has been immediate and concrete. On the basis of the legal advice received, Vigilia has already initiated three lawsuits, with a fourth in preparation. These proceedings are part of a broader strategy to close what Vigilia describes as the “enforcement loop” – enabling users civil society to systematically challenge mistaken moderation decisions and, when platforms are found in breach, to have the platforms fund the process of holding them accountable, thereby incentivizing them to make less mistakes.

It is an ambitious model, and one that hinges on getting the legal architecture right from the outset. That is precisely what this pro bono engagement helped achieve.

Why This Collaboration Matters

The DSA is only as effective as its enforcement. Provisions like Article 21 exist not merely as legal text but as mechanisms – and mechanisms only work if someone activates them, tests their limits, and builds the institutional knowledge to use them reliably.

Vigilia is doing exactly that work. And by connecting them with the right legal expertise, Pro Publico helped ensure that the work rests on solid legal foundations.

This case also illustrates something important about the value of pro bono collaboration in cutting-edge regulatory fields: when the law is new, when precedent is thin, and when the stakes are high, access to genuinely expert legal advice is not a luxury. It is what makes strategic action possible at all.

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