Greenleaf, Graham --- "Uruguay Starts Convention 108's Global Journey with Accession: Toward a Global Privacy Treaty?" [2013] UNSWLRS 38

Last Updated: 2 July 2013

Uruguay Starts Convention 108's Global Journey with Accession: Toward a Global Privacy Treaty?

Graham Greenleaf, University of New South Wales

Yijun Tian, University of Technology, Sydney

This paper is available for download at Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2280121

Citation

This paper was published in Privacy Laws & Business International Report, Issue 122, 20-23, April 2013. This paper may also be referenced as [2013] UNSWLRS 38.

Abstract

The Council of Europe has started in Uruguay data protection Convention 108’s long march toward becoming the world’s only data privacy treaty. On 12 April 2013 it announced that Uruguay's accession to Convention 108 (and to its Additional Protocol) was complete, and will enter into force in respect of Uruguay on 1 August 2013, making it the 45th state to become a party to the convention, and the first non-European party. Morocco has also been invited to accede.

This article analyses how much we know – and still do not know – about the accession process following the Uruguay accession, and the steps taken so far in the Morocco accession. It concludes that fourteen implications can be drawn to date, while the accession process is still evolving. Some problems are inherent in the lack of a complete fit between the Convention and its Additional Protocol, and ambiguities inherent in Article 23 dealing with non-European accessions. But no obviously faulty decisions have yet been made which would lower the standards of the Convention, and thus endanger its future.