The European Union and the Search for an International Data Protection Framework

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has supported the growing calls for the creation of an international legal framework to safeguard data protection rights. At the same time, it has worked to spread its data protection law to other regions, and recent judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have reaffirmed the autonomous nature of EU law and the primacy of EU fundamental rights law. The tension between initiatives to create a global data protection framework and the assertion of EU data protection law raises questions about how the EU can best promote data protection on a global level, and about the EU’s responsibilities to third countries that have adopted its system of data protection.