European Data Protection and Privacy Law

Volledige vakbeschrijving

Privacy and data protection are the fundamental rights that have gained salience not only as values protected within the European multi-level human rights protection system, but also as rights and obligations that provide framework for activities of entities using data as a basis for their economic activities (as if it were, in a slightly dated and over-used terms, ‘new oil’). This means that data protection as a discipline is complementary to data management and lies at the intersection with other major disciplines of law, both applying to private and public actors. What is more, it seems that the regulatory paradigm underlying GDPR has become a blueprint not only for data protection laws worldwide, but also for the legislative attempts to ensure ethical and fundamental rights compliant development of new technologies. The Digital Services Act or the proposal for the future AI Regulation only herald European Union’s ‘Digital Decade’ (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-compass) importance of which has been underlined by the radical change of our work-and lifestyles during the past years’ Covid-19 pandemics and through the employment of cyberwarfare in the course of 2022 Russian-Ukrainian war.

With the above in mind, during European Privacy and Data Protection Law course we will explore the European privacy and data protection system presenting it against the inter-disciplinary background and, subsequently, in the context of international and comparative law.

The course will begin with exploration of the GDPR-based architecture of data protection from three perspectives:

• that of data controllers, which are tasked with principle-compliant data processing, with assessing and mitigating risks emerging from data processing operations and with ensuring the rights of data subjects;
• that of data subjects, who derive rights and protection from the European Union data protection framework; and, finally,
• that of supervisory authorities who oversee the compliance with data protection principles. Subsequently, the optics will be expanded taking a comparative (ECHR, other jurisdictions) and intra-disciplinary (data retention, law enforcement, etc.) perspective.
• In preparation for the course students are offered a brief introductory module on Canvas providing the background information on the intersection of law, technology and economics.

Method

The course is based on the mix of lectures and tutorials delivered in the spirit of problem-based methodology.

Lectures offered by course coordinator will be complemented by guest lectures delivered by University of Maastricht and European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity (ECPC) scholars offering a variety of perspectives on the topic of the course.