Transferability of the European Union due-diligence model for the protection of digital rights beyond its borders: legal indicators, institutional limits, and enforcement conditions

Abstract

The article addresses a legal uncertainty in digital-rights regulation: whether the European Union’s due-diligence model can provide legally transferable indicators for the protection of digital human rights beyond the EU, without being treated as a fully exportable global code. The methodology combines comparative doctrinal analysis, institutional analysis and limited conceptual modelling. The comparison covers the European Union, the United States and China because these jurisdictions represent the most influential contemporary regulatory poles in the governance of platforms, data and artificial intelligence: a rights-based due-diligence model, a market- and speech-centred model with strong intermediary protections, and a sovereignty-centred model of administrative control. The sources analysed include primary legal instruments, selected case law, enforcement decisions and specialised scholarly literature. The article identifies five transferable legal indicators: clear rights anchoring, legally defined platform and AI-system duties, risk-based transparency and auditability, independent institutional oversight, and accessible remedies. The findings show that the EU model is the most developed prototype for such indicators, particularly through the GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act.