'Reality and illusion in EU data protection law post Schrems' - Christopher Kuner: CIPIL Seminar

Christopher Kuner Professor of Law and Co-Chairman (with Prof. Paul De Hert) of the Brussels Privacy Research Hub at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, gave an evening seminar entitled "Reality and illusion in EU data protection law post Schrems" on Monday 25 January 2016 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law). BACKGOUND TO THE TALK: The path-breaking Grand Chamber judgment of the European Court of Justice in the Schrems case (2015) declared invalid the Commission's Safe Harbour Decision - which had been a principal mechanism for ensuring the transfer of personal information between the EU and US for well over a decade - on the basis that it failed to ensure "adequate" protection. The Court also stated that, irrespective of any Commission Decision, Data Protection Authorities were in fact responsible for investigating whether "adequacy" had in fact been achieved and suggested that "adequate" had the stringent meaning of "essentially equivalent" to the EU regime. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Christopher Kuner is Professor of Law and Co-Chairman (with Prof. Paul De Hert) of the Brussels Privacy Research Hub at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB or Free University of Brussels, a major research university located in central Brussels). He is also an associate professor in the Law Faculty of the University of Copenhagen, an affiliated lecturer and Honorary Fellow of the Centre for European Legal Studies of the University of Cambridge, a Visiting Professor in the Department of Law in the London School of Economics and Political Science and Senior Privacy Counsel in the Brussels office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He is also editor-in-chief of the periodical 'International Data Privacy Law' published by Oxford University Press. He previously founded and led the European data protection practice at Hunton & Williams in Brussels, and also worked at the law firms of Morrison & Foerster (Brussels) and Gleiss Lutz (Stuttgart and Frankfurt). For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk