The President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Rik Daems, has warned Council of Europe member states about the risk of widespread surveillance that methods of tracing and locating individuals could entail in order to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
The President recalls that any measures decided must have a solid legal basis and remain “necessary and proportionate to their objective”.
Automated data collection, processing and storage must meet the standards of the recently modernised Convention 108, the president said, and “States must ensure that these requirements are met before introducing tracking and tracing measures and must build public confidence from the outset”.
The Council of Europe’s Data Protection Convention (108), modernised in 2018, is the only binding international instrument on the protection of the right to privacy and personal data.
With its new protocol, it makes it compulsory to notify data breaches, consolidates the proportionality requirement for data processing and enshrines the principle of data minimisation. It also reinforces the responsibility of those in charge of data processing. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)