MEPs on the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) on Thursday 14 April adopted a resolution calling on the European Commission to reconsider its adequacy decision on data transfers based on the EU-US data protection framework (37 votes in favour, none against, 21 abstentions) (see EUROPE 13083/20).
“The new framework is certainly an improvement compared to previous mechanisms. However, we are not there yet. We are not convinced that this new framework sufficiently protects personal data of our citizens, and therefore we doubt it will survive the test of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU)”, said rapporteur Juan Fernando López Aguilar (S&D, Spanish).
In particular, MEPs believe that the rules on bulk data collection are not clear enough and that, in the absence of an independent prior authorisation requirement, there are not enough safeguards.
MEPs also criticise the secrecy of the decisions of the Data Protection Review Court, which is responsible for providing redress to data subjects in the EU. According to a majority of the LIBE Committee, this process would violate the rights of citizens to access and rectify their data.
MEPs also point to the lack of independence of the Data Protection Review Court, where the judges who make up the Court could be dismissed by the US President and the President could also overrule its decisions.
While two legal frameworks authorising the transfer of data between the EU and the US have already been overturned by the CJEU through the ‘Schrems’ (see EUROPE 11404/1) and ‘Schrems 2’ (see EUROPE 12529/2) rulings, the resolution adopted by the LIBE Committee members insists on the need for a final decision that is “future-proof” and can “withstand legal challenges”.
The resolution will be put to the vote in the European Parliament at the next plenary session, which starts in Strasbourg on 17 April. The European Commission, for its part, launched the process for the adoption of this adequacy decision on 13 December. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)