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The Communication of the European Commission (Commission) on completing a trusted Digital Single Market (DSM) takes stock of the work done on the implementation of the European DSM Strategy, which was published on 6 May 2015 (see IRIS 2015-6/3). In the Communication, the Commission provides an overview of the legislative proposals it has made over the last three years, reviews the progress of their adoption and implementation, and calls on its co-legislators - the European Parliament and the Council - to accelerate their work in order to meet the European Council’s goal of concluding the...

On 23 April 2018, the European Commission published a proposed Directive on the protection of persons reporting on breaches of Union law. The purpose of the Directive is to lay down common minimum standards for the protection of whistleblowers - i.e. persons who report (within the organisation concerned or to an outside authority) or disclose (to the public) information on a wrongdoing obtained within a work-related context. The Directive’s Explanatory Memorandum states that whistleblowers are often discouraged from reporting their concerns for fear of retaliation; the importance of providing effective...

On 18 May 2018, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a Protocol amending the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (“Convention 108”) (see IRIS 2012-2/6). The purpose of the Protocol is to modernise Convention 108 in order to better address emerging privacy challenges resulting from the increasing use of new information and communication technologies, the globalisation of processing operations and the ever-greater flows of personal data, and to strengthen the Convention’s evaluation and follow-up...

On 2 May 2018, in the light of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May, a Joint Declaration on Media Independence and Diversity in the Digital Age was adopted by the four special mandates for protecting the right to freedom of expression (the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, the Organization of American States Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, and the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights). The Declaration starts by recalling the...

On 13 April 2018, the English High Court made its first de-listing order against Google LLC. The Court gave judgment after the trial of two claims based on the right to have personal information “de-listed” or “de-indexed” by the operators of Internet Search Engines (for the pre-trial hearing, see IRIS 2018-3/16). The two unrelated claimants, NT1 and NT2, who were anonymised, received convictions many years ago in relation to their business activities. The convictions in these cases are now “spent”, that is to say, can be effectively ignored after a certain amount of time under the terms of the...