Schrems II , from Snowden to China: Toward a new alignment on transatlantic data protection (original) (raw)

2020, European Law Journal

When the Court of Justice announced the judgment in Schrems I, commentators described the outcome as an "earthquake" that tossed aside the fragile legal framework for transatlantic data flows known as the "Safe Harbor". The judgment of the Court in Schrems II has now toppled the second framework, the "Privacy Shield". In this article, I restate recommendations to the US Congress following the first Schrems judgment: (1) enact a comprehensive privacy law, (2) establish an independent data protection agency, and (3) ratify Council of Europe Convention 108. But I also explain that the United States and Europe are more aligned today in the common enterprise of data protection than they were five years ago, as the backdrop has shifted from the disclosures of Edward Snowden to the surveillance ambitions of the Chinese government. A common approach is therefore in the interests of these two key trading partners. There is also today shared urgency in strengthening the foundations of democratic institutions. 1 | SCHREMS I I testified before the United States Congress in 2015 after the first Schrems judgment. 1 In my statement I explained that the judgment of the Court of Justice was not surprising. For many years, scholars, members of the European Parliament and consumer groups on both sides of the Atlantic had expressed concern about the Safe Harbor framework, the legal basis for the transfer of personal data of Europeans to the United States. From the perspective of Europeans, the data transfer agreement failed to provide the protections otherwise afforded by the EU Data Protection Directive (which would become the General Data Protection Regulation). 2 The shortcoming of Safe Harbor

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