In a March 30, 2017 opinion piece, “Don’t trade away data protection,” two leading Members of the European Parliament, Viviane Reding and Jan-Phillip Albrecht, suggest “strengthening data protection safeguards in the General Exception (known as GATS XIV) and E-Commerce chapters, and removing necessity and consistency tests.”  The idea behind the proposal is to make absolutely certain that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and perhaps other parts of the EU privacy acquis could not be successfully challenged as inconsistent with an affirmative cross-border data flow obligation.  This is a topic SIIA will comment on again in the coming months, likely in a longer form Issue Brief.  This blog discusses the proposal to remove the necessity test.

“I fully agree with that,” was the response by Antonio de Lecea, Minister of the EU Delegation to the United States.  IBM’s Steve Stewart had just expressed the view that an EU –US trade agreement resulting from the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would be an effective place to create a good template for binding rules on cross border data flows.