Brussels. 03/03/2015 (Agence Europe) - EU justice ministers are expected to agree in principle on 13 March on a key pillar of the general regulation on personal data protection: the so-called one-stop-shop mechanism.
The JHA Council will reach a political agreement in principle on this strand of the reform and on chapter 2 of the draft regulation setting out the most important principles on data handling (transparency, consent of users, and overall responsibility of the controller). Anonymisation of the data, a process which could in some instances aid controllers meet their obligations and help protect individuals, is also covered.
This progress will bring the Council closer to achieving its goal of reaching a general agreement by June on the reform, which also contains a directive on data processing in judicial and criminal matters.
The aim of the one-stop-shop mechanism is to simplify things for companies which will have to refer only to the data protection authority of the country in which they have their headquarters. Complaints by users will also be dealt with more efficiently, the Commission's initial idea being to allow decisions to be taken on uniform sanctions for all of the countries concerned by a dispute. Very quickly, however, some countries saw in this a loss of power and a distancing from users. They feared, for example, that the regulatory authority of Ireland (where Facebook and Google are headquartered) could make decisions for all the other national authorities and for all other users. According to a recently agreed compromise, the national authorities directly concerned by a dispute would also have input into the decision reached by the main authority and, in the event of disagreement between regulatory authorities, the decision should be referred to the European data protection board, which brings together the 28 authorities and the European Commission to settle the matter. Nor would the “numerical threshold” need to be reached before triggering recourse to the board.
The national ambassadors to the EU, Coreper, will discuss the one-stop-shop on 5 March. The European Parliament (in particular the S&D and ALDE Groups) has made its support for the European PNR proposals conditional on progress on personal data protection rules. (Solenn Paulic)