TILT seminar: prof. Christopher Kuner

Legal protection of the personal data of EU individuals that are transferred or processed outside its territorial boundaries has been strengthened in recent years, both in the GDPR and by judgments of the Court of Justice. The main mechanisms for guarding against data protection threats originating from outside the EU’s borders have been rules on the territorial scope of EU data protection law, which allow its application to data processing by non-EU parties, and data transfer restrictions, which protect personal data that are transferred to third countries. Proposals or initiatives to address the interaction of these two sets of rules have been considered, and in some cases adopted, by the European Data Protection Board, the European Commission, and third countries, but with little transparency about them or explanation of their rationale. For the protection of EU data against external threats to be both legally sound and effective in practice, it is necessary to examine the nature and interaction of rules on territorial scope and data transfers, in order to determine how the GDPR’s and the Court’s vision of cross-border data protection can be realised.

Speaker: Christopher Kuner

Christopher Kuner received his PhD in law from Tilburg University. He is professor of law and co-director of the Brussels Privacy Hub at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and a Visiting Professor at Maastricht University. He has taught courses at the University of Cambridge, the European University Institute, and the Hague Academy of International law. Dr. Kuner is founder and editor-in-chief of the law journal International Data Privacy Law; one of the principal editors of the GDPR commentary published by Oxford University Press; and Senior Privacy Counsel in the Brussels office of the international law firm Wilson Sonsini.

Host: Bo Zhao