EDPS takes legal action against Europol’s new regulation
ON June 28th 2022, two new provisions of the amended Europol regulation came into force. These changes are considered worrying by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), as they have a direct impact on the data processing of individuals in the European Union: based on these provisions, the new regulation allows the Europol to retroactively process large volumes of data, even of individuals with no links to criminal activity.
Specifically, before these new provisions were passed, individuals could expect that if their data was gathered by Europol it would be processed within six months in order to establish whether the individual was involved in illicit activities or not, and if the former was the case, that the data related to that person would be deleted. With these modifications, Europol would be allowed to store and process these data even if the individual was found not part of any wrongdoing.
In an effort to stop these changes to effectively come into force, the EDPS issued an order on January 3rd 2022 to amend the new provisions including a precisely determined deletion period for data related to individuals not connected to unlawful activities. Seen as the order was ignored by Europol, on September 16th the EDPS requested that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) annuls these two provisions. The authorities stated that this proceeding by Europol is a clear violation of the individual’s fundamental rights.
Furthermore, it is clear that by overriding a direct order by the European data protection watchdogs and by introducing such amendments the independent controlling power of the supervising authority is undermined: this could set a dangerous precedent by which authorities in the European Union could foresee possible counter – reactions of the legislative power to override their supervising activities depending on political will. This would result in a clear violation of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, since there would be a concrete risk of undermining the independence of a controlling authority by making it subject to undue political pressure or interference.
