Uruguay's accession to CoE DP Convention paves way for it to become a wider international treaty

On 12 April 2013 the Council of Europe announced that Uruguay's accession to Convention 108 (and to its Additional Protocol) was complete. It will enter into force regarding Uruguay on 1 August 2013, making it the 45th state to become a party, and the first non-European party, to the Convention.

The Council said of the Convention: '"Being open to signature by any country, it is the only binding standard which has the potential to be applied worldwide, providing legal certainty and predictability in international relations".

Professor Graham Greenleaf, PL&B's Asia Pacific Editor, points out that other international agreements concerning data privacy are:

1. unenforceable guidelines (the OECD guidelines and the APEC framework), or

2. only regional in potential scope (the EU framework as between EU members, and the Supplementary Act on Personal Data Protection within the Economic Community Of West African States - ECOWAS), or

3. unilateral conditions (the "adequacy" aspect of the EU Data Protection Directive).

Read a full article by Professor Graham Greenleaf about these developments in the April edition of PL&B's International Report, to be published on 19th April.

There will be a session at PL&B 26th Annual International Conference on "The Council of Europe's role in giving data protection legal force in Europe and around the world" led by Sophie Kwasny, Head, Data Protection Unit, Human Rights and Rule of Law, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, together with Noris Ismail, a consultant from Malaysia and Angela Xu, Manager, Policy, the Personal Data Protection Commission, Singapore.