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Berlin, 26 March 2020 The containment of infections with the novel coronavirus is an unprecedented challenge for democratic societies in terms of its scale and globality. They must face the pandemic and its consequences with determination while preserving their fundamental values. Another cause for concern, however, is the uncertainty in the application of data protection rules. ...
by Peter Schaar (6. 3. 2020) These days we are witnessing how carelessly fundamental and human rights are being treated in the face of supposedly existential threats. While Greece reacts to the increase in the number of refugees on the European external borders provoked by Turkey by "suspending" the human right to asylum, in Germany, in view of the increasing number of people infected with the Covid19 virus, there ...
By Peter Schaar, 15 January 2020 The current constitutional complaint against the Federal Intelligence Service Act before the Federal Constitutional Court is about more than the constitutionality of a federal law. The central question is rather whether German authorities are bound by the fundamental rights guaranteed by the German Basic Law even when they are active abroad. The focus here is on the fundamental ...
"Go back to Baltic Avenue!" - this command doesn't create a good mood in the Monopoly game. The same applies to the EU Member States' telecommunications and transport ministers who gathered in Brussels on December 3, 2019 for a Council meeting when the new Internal Market Commissioner, Thierry Breton, noted the temporary failure of the governments' almost three-year efforts to reach a consensus on the draft ...
By Peter Schaar Today (10 December 2019) is International Human Rights Day. It recalls that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) exactly 71 years ago. Its first article reads:  "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and ...
After the House of Commons rejected the text of the treaty negotiated between the European Commission and the British Government on the withdrawal of Great Britain from the European Union (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/draft_withdrawal_agreement_0.pdf), a "hard brexit" - the dissolution of the relationship without a divorce contract - has become more likely. This also has serious implications for data protection and the companies subject to it. In its statement ...
The European Academy for Freedom of Information and Data Protection (EAID) has endorsed the Universal Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence (UGAI) presented by the Civil Rights Coalition "The Public Voice" on 23 October 2018. The guidelines are now supported by more than 50 civil society organisations. In order to enable the UGAI to be better disseminated to the German-speaking public, we have translated the text. We do not claim any copyrights for the German-language translation - ...
The idea is old, but the concrete proposal is rather new: Whereas goods flow freely in the EU internal market and digital services are offered across borders, the competence of law enforcement authorities ends at national borders. A police authority that wants to access data in the course of its investigations - for example in a fraud case - needs to contact the authorities of the state where the data are processed. How the foreign authority deal with such a request depends on the law of ...
On January 17th, 2017 US President Barack Obama published a report on digital privacy. Minutes after the transition to Trump on January 20th this report vanished from the White House Website. Nevertheless those who are interested, may read the full text of the report here, because we managed to get a copy (thanks to IAPP!)   https://www.eaid-berlin.de/?attachment_id=1575
Translation - German version see here. The European Court of Justice has made a Christmas present to more than 500 million EU citizens. With its new judgment on data retention (C-203/15 of 21 December 2016) - the highest court of the European Union stresses the importance of fundamental rights. All Member States are required to respect the rights represented in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights in their national ...