At the seminar, three main aspects of the enforcement of EU privacy rights in the light of the Schrems rulings regarding the EU-US “Safe Harbour” and “Privacy Shield” will be addressed.
Much has been said about the annulment of the two adequacy decisions issued by the European Commission on the US system for data protection and overseas legal remedies for EU data subjects. However, the discussion that is centred on concerns with a perceived overreach of EU data protection standards has often been somewhat siloed and artificially abstracted from its legal context. At the seminar, three main aspects of the enforcement of EU privacy rights in the light of the preliminary rulings regarding the EU-US “Safe Harbour” and “Privacy Shield” will be addressed. First of all, why should a data protection authority in an EU Member State assess the validity of an adequacy decision when an EU data subject lodges a complaint against an EU establishment? Secondly, what competence does the Commission have to take measures to prevent onward transfers and unwarranted interceptions of data for primarily national security purposes? Thirdly, can an EU data subject rely on her or his procedural rights as a consumer in the Member State in which he or she is domiciled instead of filing a complaint with one or more data protection authorities in the Member State(s) where the controller or processor has an establishment?
Claes Granmar is associate professor in European Law at Stockholm University and the talk is based on his article ‘A reality check of the Schrems saga’ that was published 2021-12-30 in the Nordic Journal of European Law (Vol. 4 No. 2, 2021). It forms part of the project ‘Global e-commerce and EU privacy safeguards’ that he commenced as a research fellow at the IECL, Oxford University.
Commentators:
Prof. Xavier Groussot, Lund University
Prof. Megan Richardson, University of Melbourne (to be confirmed)
Please register by Sunday 23 January 2022.
A Zoom link will be sent out to registered participants on the morning of Tuesday, 25 January 2022.
Welcome!
Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of European Law, Björn Lundqvist