The Court of Justice of the European Union has yet another data protection case on its docket, this time involving the transfer of data by Facebook from the EU to the US. Christopher Kuner Brussels-based Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and Visiting Fellow in LSE’s Department of Law, explains what is at stake. He argues that, since invalidating the EU’s Data Retention Directive earlier this year, the Court seems increasingly to consider data protection a “super-right” and should not forget the need to balance with freedom of expression.

On April 8 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) announced its judgment in the case C-293/12 and C-594/12 Digital Rights Ireland. Based on EU fundamental rights law, the Court invalidated the EU Data Retention Directive, which obliged telecommunications service providers and Internet service providers in the EU to retain telecommunications metadata and make it available to European law enforcement authorities under certain circumstances.

The case illustrates both the key role that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights plays in EU data protection law, and the CJEU’s apparent disinterest in the impact of its recent data protection rulings on other fundamental rights. In addition, the recent referral to the CJEU by an Irish court of a case involving data transfers by Facebook under the EU-US Safe Harbor holds the potential to further tighten EU rules for data transfers.

European data protection authorities and jurisdiction over transfers

I would like to focus on a passage occurring towards the end of the judgment, where the Court criticizes the Data Retention Directive as follows (paragraph 68):

“[I]t should be added that that directive does not require the data in question to be retained within the European Union, with the result that it cannot be held that the control, explicitly required by Article 8(3) of the Charter, by an independent authority of compliance with the requirements of protection and security, as referred to in the two previous paragraphs, is fully ensured. Such a control, carried out on the basis of EU law, is an essential component of the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data…”

EU data protection law is based on constitutional provisions protecting fundamental rights (e.g., Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights), and the CJEU has emphasized in cases involving the independence of the data protection authorities (DPAs) in Austria, Germany, and Hungary that control of data processing by an independent DPA is an essential element of the fundamental right to data protection. In light of those previous cases, the logical consequence of the Court’s statement in Digital Rights Ireland would seem to be that fundamental rights law requires oversight of data processing by the DPAs also with regard to the data of EU individuals that are transferred to other regions.

This conclusion raises a number of questions. For example, how can it be reconciled with the fact that the enforcement jurisdiction of the DPAs ends at the borders of their respective EU Member States (see Article 28 of the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46)? If supervision by the EU DPAs extends already by operation of law to the storage of EU data in other regions, then why do certain EU legal mechanisms in addition force the parties to data transfers to explicitly accept the extraterritorial regulatory authority of the DPAs (e.g., Clause 5(e) of the EU standard contractual clauses of 2010)? And how does the Court’s statement fit with its 2003 Lindqvist judgment, in which it held that EU data protection law should not be interpreted to apply to the entire Internet (see paragraph 69 of that judgment)?

What about Safe Harbor?

On June 18 the Irish High Court referred a case to the CJEU that may develop further its line of thought in the Digital Rights Ireland judgment. The High Court’s judgment in Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner involved a challenge by Austrian student Max Schrems to the transfer of personal data to the US by Facebook under the Safe Harbor.

The High Court announced that it would refer to the CJEU the questions of whether the European Commission’s adequacy decision of 2000 creating the Safe Harbor should be re-evaluated in light of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and widespread access to data by US law enforcement, and of whether the individual DPAs should be allowed to determine whether the Safe Harbor provides adequate protection (see paragraphs 71 and 84). The High Court criticized the Safe Harbor and the system of oversight of law enforcement data access in the US as failing to provide oversight “carried out on European soil” (paragraph 62), which seems inspired by paragraph 68 of the Digital Rights Ireland judgment.

Data protection as a “super-right”

The referral by the Irish High Court raises the question (which the High Court did not address) of how other important fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and the right to communicate internationally (meaning, in essence, the freedom to communicate on the Internet), should be balanced with the right to data protection. In its recent jurisprudence, the CJEU seems to regard data protection as a “super right” that has preference over other ones; thus, in its recent judgment in the case C-131/12 Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja Gonzalez involving the “right to be forgotten”, the Court never even refers to Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights that protects freedom of expression and the right to “receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers”.

In its zeal to protect personal data transferred outside the EU, it is important that the CJEU not forget that, as it has stated in the past, data protection is not an absolute right, and must be considered in relation to its function in society (see, for example, Joined Cases C-92/09 and C-93/09 Volker und Markus Schecke, paragraph 48), and that there must be some territorial limit to EU data protection law, if it is not to become a system of universal application that applies to the entire world (as the Court held in Lindqvist). Thus, there is an urgent need for an authoritative and dispassionate analysis of the territorial limits to EU data protection law, and of how a balance can be struck between data protection and other fundamental rights, guidance which unfortunately the CJEU seems unwilling to provide.

This post is a based on a longer version originally published on 19 June on the legal blog Concurring Opinions. This article gives the views of the author and does not represent the position of the LSE Media Policy Project blog, nor of the London School of Economics.