Abstract
<p>Fundamental rights discourse remains too attached to the figure of the autonomous, self-directing individual who asserts rights against interference. Digital technology reveals the inadequacy of that figure. In networked environments, the exercise of one person’s rights can expose, limit, chill, profile, manipulate or empower others. A relational approach would not abandon individuality, nor collapse rights into collective welfare. It would ask how rights are constituted, exercised, limited and protected through relationships, infrastructures, groups, dependencies and design.This article develops that claim through EU and ECHR digital rights law. It distinguishes formal relationality, in which rights correlate with duties; constitutive relationality, in which social conditions shape autonomy; distributive relationality, in which technical architectures allocate visibility, opportunity and risk; and institutional relationality, in which legal regimes and public authorities divide responsibility for those effects. Privacy, data protection, expression, dignity and AI governance become distorted when law reduces those relations to a possessive grammar of my data, my privacy, my speech, my consent and my control. That grammar remains indispensable against domination. It becomes inadequate when inference, aggregation, platform design, predictive grouping and automated decision-making produce rights-effects that no individual act of choice can settle.The article therefore criticises informational self-determination when it becomes a complete theory of digital governance, and it rejects the elevation of consent from a limited legal technique into a general source of legitimacy. Consent can authorise a discrete, intelligible and reversible choice. It cannot govern an ecosystem on behalf of absent persons and emergent groups. The alternative is institutional justification: lawfully assigned purposes, necessity, rights-sensitive design, safeguards, representative participation where practicable, audit, contestability and review. Relational fundamental rights use those disciplines to improve proportionality, allocate responsibility across the EU digital rulebook and support rights-preserving innovation. The central claim is not less rights, but better rights: a move from the sovereign user clicking alone to a legal order capable of asking how one person’s exercise of rights shapes the conditions under which others can exercise theirs.</p>