Proposal for a new legal framework

Vivien Reding - European Commission Vice President and EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, announced on 25 January 2012 in Brussels a new legal framework for the protection of personal data, whose ambition is uniform legislation of this agenda for more than 490 million Europeans and a huge number of different legal entities. This point represents the official start of the current process of expert review and re-evaluation of the new legal framework proposal, in which the Office for Personal Data Protection of the Slovak Republic (Office) actively participates.

The new European legislation or new legal framework for data protection constitutes two suggestions:

• Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on the protection of personal entity in the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (General Regulation on the conservation of data). This regulation is intended to replace the old Directive of the European Parliament and Council 95/46/EC of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data;
• Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by competent authorities for the purposes of prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, and the free movement of such data. This Directive should replace Council Framework Decision 2008/977/JHA of 27 November 2008 on the protection of personal data processed in the framework of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.

As a means of legal relations regulation in the field of personal data protection, the European Commission has chosen regulation. Such a decision could be expected, forasmuch just the rate of the free use which allows the old Directive is a cause fragmentation of relevant national legislation of Member States, which distorts internal market environment as well as the consistency of the application practise of supervisory authorities. The Office therefore supports the idea and need for harmonized and comprehensive framework to allow the same interpretation and the same level of protection throughout the EU.

For more information, reasoning and justification of the need for a new legal framework for the protection of personal data see for example theCommission Staff Working Paper Executive Summary of the Impact Assessment. A quality analytical evaluation of the new framework can be found in the opinion 1/2012 of the Article 29 Working Party, as well as in the opinion of the European Data Protection Supervisor on the data protection package.