Burkert on the Changing Role of Data Protection in Our Society
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My colleague Professor Herbert Burkert, President of our St. Gallen Reserach Center for Information Law and ISP Yale International Fellow, has just released a paper he presented at the CIAJ 2005 Annual Conference on Technology, Privacy and Justice in Toronto, Ontario. The paper is entitled “Changing Patterns – Supplementary Approaches to Improving Data Protection: A European Perspective” and identifies, analyzes, and evaluates several approaches aimed at improving data protection legislation. Burkert argues that current approaches – broken down into three schools of thought: the renovators, the reformist and the engineers – are insufficient, because they do not sufficiently address “the phenomenon that the deep changes of data protection’s role in our information societies do not result from administrations and private sector organizations applying data protection laws insufficiently or from applying insufficient data protection laws but from parliaments continuously restricting by special sector legislation what had been granted by the general data protection laws.” Vis-a-vis the new threat model, Burkert proposes a supplementary approach that relies on independent data protection agencies and addresses parliaments’ role in information law making more directly.
