EDPB issues opinion on UK draft adequacy decisions



Yesterday, the EU data protection authorities issued their opinion on the European Commission’s draft adequacy decisions on the UK’s data protection regime for personal data transferred from the European Economic Area (EEA).

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) says that there are key areas of strong alignment between the EU and the UK data protection frameworks on certain core provisions such as: grounds for lawful and fair processing for legitimate purposes; purpose limitation; data quality and proportionality; data retention, security and confidentiality; transparency; special categories of data; and on automated decision making and profiling.

EDPB Chair, Andrea Jelinek said: "The UK data protection framework is largely based on the EU data protection framework. The UK Data Protection Act 2018 further specifies the application of the GDPR in UK law, in addition to transposing the Law Enforcement Directive (LED), as well as granting powers and imposing duties on the national data protection supervisory authority, the ICO. Therefore, the EDPB recognises that the UK has mirrored, for the most part, the GDPR and LED in its data protection framework and when analysing its law and practice, the EDPB identified many aspects to be essentially equivalent. However, whilst laws can evolve, this alignment should be maintained. So we welcome the Commission's decision to limit the granted adequacy in time and the intention to closely monitor developments in the UK.”

The EDPB underlines that several items should be further assessed and/or closely monitored by the European Commission in its decision based on the GDPR, such as:

  • the Immigration Exemption and its consequences on restrictions on data subject rights;
  • the application of restrictions to onward transfers of EEA personal data transferred to the UK, on the basis of, for instance, future adequacy decisions adopted by the UK, international agreements concluded between the UK and third countries, or derogations.

The text will be made available on the EDPB website subject to linguistic checks.

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