Just what we need—a state media arm dedicated to promoting nationalism. The Columbia Journalism review has an article about recent moves by Poland’s governing Law and Justice party to consolidate its control of Poland’s public institutions. Charges of rising nativism in Poland’s press come just two months after the country’s rightist Law and Justice party, which took power in a…
Posts published in “Politics”
On Monday I summarized the reasons that the European Court of Justice struck down the European Commission decision that permitted the transfer of personal data from the European Union to the United States. And yesterday I heard the plaintiff in that case, Maximilian Schrems, speak at NYU’s journalism school. He and Professor Ira Rubinstein (NYU Law) highlighted a critical portion of the ECJ’s judgment, but came to conflicting conclusions. The court decided that the protection of EU citizens’ privacy rights, as laid out in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, could not be compromised. Merely “adequate” protection of personal data, as required by the Data Protection Directive, is not enough; the level of protection must be “essentially equivalent” to that provided by EU law.
Max Schrems, the 20-something law student whose lawsuit triggered the end of the “safe harbor” data transfer agreement between the European Union and the United States, is scheduled to speak tomorrow at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Yesterday I scanned the opinion of the European Court of Justice in Maximilian Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner in an effort to prepare myself for his talk. This was a labor for which I was not fully prepared. Nevertheless, here’s some detail on the decision that you won’t get in the news coverage—understandably because its complicated. Take a deep breath.
Schrems brought his lawsuit against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, a national regulatory body that had been charged with overseeing the handling of personal data by companies based in Ireland. The EU member states were all obliged to create national bodies like the Data Protection Commissioner by a 1995 European Council directive (the so-called Data Protection Directive). These data oversight bodies are meant to protect EU citizen’s privacy and data rights. Unlike in the US, EU law grants basic rights of personal data protection under the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Anthony Teasdale, the director general of the European Parliamentary Research Service, gave a talk February 8 at Deutsches Haus NYU, replacing Klaus Welle, who had been scheduled to speak. Welle, secretary-general of the European Parliament, was called back to Brussels on short notice to for the build-up to negotiations over David Cameron’s proposed European reforms.
It’s fitting that Teasdale should step in at precisely this moment—when the apparent shortcomings of the European Union seem to widen the Channel every day—to offer an optimistic view. In his estimation, the European Union does not get nearly enough credit for the efficiency with which it completes its routine tasks and is therefore unfairly cast as a doomed polity.
“I am basically allergic to the defeatist or declinist assumptions and philosophy which we very often find in public discussion about the European Union,” he said. “I have been surprised and encouraged by the ability of the member states to work together. This is not a Panglossian view about how the EU operates, don’t get me wrong, but we should always bear in mind the underlying resilience that the system seems to have established.”