EDPS 2024 in Brussels

At the “European Data Protection Summit: Rethinking Data in a Democratic Society” in Brussels, Thorsten Wetzling takes part in a panel discussion on democracy and the rule of law. The summit facilitates a broader debate on the role of States at a time of ever-growing collection of information about citizens, and the part that data protection should play in modern democracies. The panel discussion, in particular, addresses the question of how to build a functioning democratic oversight.

When discussing public authorities’ impact on individuals’ privacy, specific attention should be paid to the area of law enforcement and, more broadly, the States’ functions in the field of national security. Being outside of the scope of  EU law, national security poses not only a number of legal questions - i.a. the interplay with police and law enforcement area; data retention; government access to data; the applicability of the CJEU jurisprudence - but also shows that data protection alone may not be sufficient when prescribing to the set of safeguards in terms of data processing for national security purposes. Considering the ever-growing amount of data created by our digital society coupled with the use of new technologies used both by criminals and against the criminals, data protection may need to be seen in the broader context of democratic oversight.

This panel discusses the following leading questions: What is it that may make data protection not enough to achieve in terms of mature reflection on the position of the individual in times of threats to national security? Equally, what can data protection bring when building a complex and efficient democratic oversight?