Proposal on personal data protection will be nonfunctional

The proposed modification will reduce the ability of Europe to do business, innovate and invest.

In a joint statement addressed to the EU commissioner Věra Jourová as well to the prime ministers and cabinet members of their countries on Tuesday 15th December, the employers‘ and entrepreneurs‘ associations from the Central and Eastern Europe have expressed a deep concern about the development of the negotiations on the new European directive on the personal data protection.

The Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic as well as the partner associations from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Slovenia and Slovakia made an appeal to the European legislators to foster, during the final phases of the negotiations, the approval of the directive that will enable further development of digital innovations, investment in new technologies and new job creation.

The employers‘ and entrepreneurs‘ associations pointed out that the bureaucratic barriers would circumscribe the processing of large data volumes and thus reduce the European potential for innovation. The vaguely formulated rules on shared responsibility for damages would hamper the accessibility of cloud computing, especially for the small and medium-sized entreprises. The disproportionately high sanctions in relation to unclearly defined regulation breaching (in certain proposals up to 5 percent of the global turnover of the company) would discourage the companies to invest in the digital economy.

In the Confederation of Industry’s opinion, the point of the negotiations is to produce a high-quality directive that will defend effectively the citizens‘ right to protection of personal data and create an appropriate framework for the development based on digital innovations and not only to finish these negotiations in a given and artificially created deadline, namely before the end of 2015.

The employers‘ and entrepreneurs‘ association indicated in the joint statement that the actual very pressing and serious challenge for Europe's digital economy stems from the recent judgement of ‘Safe Harbor’ by the European Court of Justice ("ECJ"). In their opinion, the immediate invalidation of Safe Harbor by the ECJ renders data flows between the EU and the US and the whole business across the Atlantic very burdensome.

Position paper of the Central and Eastern European employers' and entrepreneurs' associations