The constitutional foundation of explanation rights in EU digital regulation: An integrated approach

EU digital regulation increasingly requires organisations to explain automated decisions affecting individuals. Yet explanation rights across instruments such as the GDPR, DSA, and AI Act have developed without systematic attention to their shared constitutional foundations or their relationship to parallel rights. This creates fragmentation along two dimensions. The first arises where a single actor holds obligations under multiple instruments, leaving it unclear which requirements apply and how they interact (‘inter-instrumental fragmentation’). The second arises where, within a single regulatory regime, explanation duties are distributed across actors and stages of the decision-making process, separating legal responsibility from the information and expertise needed to discharge it (‘intra-instrumental fragmentation’). Both dimensions generate legal uncertainty and represent a missed opportunity for mutual reinforcement. This Article develops an integrated approach that grounds sectoral explanation rights in the constitutional duty to state reasons, combining a contextual reading, which locates sectoral rights within the constitutional ‘family’ to which they belong, with a purposive reading of their open-textured requirements in light of the broader values that duty serves. The approach operates at three levels, guiding the actors giving practical effect to explanation rights (implementation), courts interpreting fragmented rights through a constitutional lens (adjudication), and future legislative reform (legislative design). Through two scenarios, one illustrating an organisation occupying overlapping regulatory roles (inter-instrumental fragmentation), the other illustrating an AI-assisted decision-making chain across which explanation duties are distributed (intra-instrumental fragmentation), the Article explores how the integrated approach could work in practice. Sectoral provisions extend constitutional values to private actors, while constitutional principles fill gaps where sectoral legislation does not apply and provide substantive standards that give concrete meaning to open-textured concepts. While interpretation can mitigate practical challenges and create coherence, the integrated approach demonstrates why future explanation requirements must be grounded in constitutional reasoning principles and coordinated with parallel sectoral provisions from the outset.