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May 26 2016

EU Poised to Formally Adopt New Data Protection Laws, Amended Texts Published

After three months of legal-linguistic checks and translations, the EU is poised to formally adopt the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its sister law, the EU Policing and Criminal Justice Data Protection Directive (PCJ DPD). Documents recently released by the Council of the EU suggest that the Council will vote to endorse these final texts before passing them on for approval by the European Parliament. The GDPR will take effect twenty days from its post-vote publication in the Official Journal, triggering a two-year transition period before its full entry into force. At that point, it will sweep away the current EU Data Protection Directive (95|46|EU), which has served as the main instrument of EU privacy law for almost two decades. Unlike the Directive, the GDPR will for the most part have direct effect throughout the EU, without requiring implementation into national laws. Nevertheless, the next two years are likely to see substantial further legislative and rulemaking activity at EU and national level.