Brussels, 25/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 24 February, the American President, Barack Obama, signed a law, the Judicial Redress Act, which was adopted by the American Senate in early February and extends the protection of privacy in the United States to EU citizens and which will give Europeans rights of recourse on American soil when their data have been misused.
This signature also concretises the transatlantic framework agreement on the protection of personal data, which has been under negotiation since the end of 2010 between the EU and Washington. When signing this law, the American President said that it would ensure that everybody's data would be protected as well possible by the US laws on privacy - not just American citizens, but also foreign nationals.
The European Commissioner for Justice, Vera Jourova, welcomed this signature on Thursday 25 February, referring to it as an “historic stage in our efforts to restore confidence in the flows of transatlantic data”. The new law will guarantee that “all Europeans will be entitled to assert their rights to the protection of their data before the American courts”, the European official said in a press release. She reiterated the fact that these efforts would exist in parallel to those carried out in the framework of the revision of the Safe Harbour mechanism on personal data transferred for commercial purposes. This revision has given rise to a new agreement, known as the 'EU/US privacy shield'.
At a meeting on 15 February, the MEPs of the committee on civil liberties of the EP cast serious doubts on this transatlantic agreement, which is brought into being with the signature of the Judicial Redress Act. The legal services of the Parliament and the MEPs felt that the framework agreement concluded with the United States does not comply with European law and that there is even a gap between what European law requires and the data protection guarantees offered by the framework agreement, according to an opinion of the legal services of the EP. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)