by João Marques, member of the Portuguese Data Protection National Commission and member of CEDU
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Although merely advisory in its nature, the Article 29 Working Party (WP 29) has been a major force in guaranteeing a minimum of consistency in the application of the Directive 95/46/CE, allowing member states’ public and private sectors to know what to expect from their supervisory authorities perspectives on various data protection subjects. Its independence has played a major role in the definition of its views and opinions, focusing on the fundamental rights at stake and delivering qualified feedback to the difficult issues it has faced.
The new European legal framework on data protection has produced a step forward on this regard by instituting a new formal EU Body – the European Data Protection Board – EDPB (Art. 68 of the General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR). This will represent a significant step forward in the European institutional landscape concerning data protection but it does not mean that the WP 29 is already dead and buried, quite the opposite.
As it is already known, the EDPB will have far reaching powers designed to guarantee consistency and effectiveness to the rules of the regulation across the EU. One of the said powers translates into the issuance of guidelines in several matters [Art. 70 (1)(d), (f), (g), (h), (i), (j), (k), (m) of the GDPR].
The problem is, of course, that this new EU Body will only exist from May 2018 onwards, leaving a gap of two years (from May 2016, when the regulation entered into force) to be filled by the current legal and institutional frameworks. As such the WP29 took it into its hands to materialize these particular tasks of the EDPB during this transitional phase, fully aware that the guidelines it may issue for the time being could still be rebutted by the EDPB members. Nevertheless this is a calculated risk as the members currently sitting in the WP 29 will almost certainly be the ones who’ll be sitting in the EDPB.