The Materialisation of Data Protection in International Instruments

Abstract

AbstractBy the end of the 1970s, two important international organisations started to prepare international instruments on the processing of information about individuals: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Council of Europe. This chapter considers their early involvement, and examines in detail how OECD’s 1980 Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, on the one hand, and Council of Europe’s 1981 Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (Convention 108), on the other, marked crucial steps in the evolution of the terms ‘data protection’ and ‘privacy’ in Europe. It shows that this institutionalised international cooperation resulted in the labelling of all existing and upcoming European rules on the processing of data as concerned with ‘data protection’, as well as in their progressive linkage with the word ‘privacy’. The embroilment between these expressions was later transferred into European Union (EU) law, and is instrumental to understand the emergence of the EU fundamental right to the protection of personal data.KeywordsData protectionPrivacyOECDCouncil of EuropeConvention 108Transborder data flows