Adoption of the EU General Data Protection Regulation

After more than 4 years of negotiation and roughly 4,000 amendments, the General Data Protection Regulation has finally been adopted yesterday by the European Parliament.

The regulation will come into force two years after its publication in the Official Journal. Companies will have to implement a series of measures in order to make themselves compliant with the new data protection rules, especially taking into account the fact that all data protection authorities will in the future have the power to impose heavy financial sanctions in the event of infringements.

At the same time, the European Parliament has also adopted the Data Protection Directive for the police and criminal justice sector and the Directive regulating the use of Passenger Name Record (PNR).