The members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (‘JURI’) began work on Monday 5 September on the Data Act (see EUROPE 13009/7), after lengthy internal negotiations on the committee’s exclusive powers.
In detail, the rapporteur for the JURI committee - associated with this dossier - Iban García del Blanco (S&D, Spanish), insisted that more work should be done on definitions, as a number of them are “sources of uncertainty”.
In addition, the JURI Committee will focus on the protection of business secrecy without this being an obstacle to future data legislation. On this point, the Commission warned, there is no question of going back on the directive on business secrecy. However, it acknowledged, care will have to be taken to avoid a legal loophole when business secrecy can be invoked unilaterally by a company.
Furthermore, future work will also address the responsibility of the actors and the governance model, taking into account the size of the actors involved. Data exchange with governments will also be discussed in depth.
From the other political groups in the European Parliament, some MEPs called for work to be done on the issue of data portability as well, especially when it comes to ‘cloud computing’. This is also one of the European Commission’s priorities.
Finally - and this is perhaps one of the main concerns of the members of the JURI Committee - a solution will have to be found regarding the timetable.
“The secretariat needs to reach agreement with the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, which has been impossible so far. The schedule is very tight. In order to vote on the report in February, we would have to work extremely fast in order to vote in January in JURI. It would still be possible to submit amendments in plenary, but this would be in contradiction with ensuring consensus”, concluded García del Blanco. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)