Research on BeLibre - Belgian independent knowledge and policy platform

Analysis Government Requests for Customer Data

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:00:00 +0100

An analysis of US extraterritorial laws (FISA 702, the CLOUD Act, and Executive Order 12333) and their impact on Belgian and EU data sovereignty.

Five years of Digisprong: how the Flemish government quietly built an open digital learning infrastructure and is now shifting into a higher gear

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the past five years, the Flemish government has been quietly building an open digital learning infrastructure for its two million people in education: on open source, on European servers, with public money. This article tells the story of how it grew, why it matters, and what the new Digisprong procurement adds to it.

It was the summer of 2014. In schools across Flanders, teachers sat behind their computers, armed with export buttons and download files, trying to salvage what they could. EloV, the electronic learning environment that the VVKSO had been offering to more than 140 Catholic secondary schools since 2005, was taken offline on 1 September for good. The Blackboard licence had become too expensive. The collaboration with KU Leuven was over. That was that.

What Academia Now Tells Governments About Digital Dependency

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things are starting to shift in the field of digital dependency. The conversation in the public sector has moved from civil society warnings to parliamentary reports, from IT conferences to cabinet agendas. Academia was tracking this before it became a policy priority: Paul van Vulpen began researching digital sovereignty and decentralised IT governance when neither was high on anyone’s agenda. He defended his dissertation Debating Digital Dominance: Decentralized Technology Governance For Strategic Autonomy at Utrecht University in January 2026.

Beyond the Marketing: Measuring Microsoft’s Cloud Sovereignty in Europe

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:00:00 +0100

Digital sovereignty in Europe will not be decided in press releases, but in procurement choices and legal detail.

BeLibre has applied the European Commission’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework to Microsoft’s cloud stack and produced a full SEAL‑based assessment across all eight sovereignty objectives. The focus on Microsoft is deliberate: on multiple occasions, people at Microsoft were asked, but did not answer how its services perform against this framework, while an estimated 90–95% of Belgian government services currently depend on Microsoft infrastructure.

BeLibre Sovereignty Map

Mon, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interactive map where you can discover digital sovereignty in municipalities, schools, emergency services or other critical infrastructure in our country and beyond.