Council of Europe’s Actions Belie its Pledges to Involve Civil Society in Development of Cross Border Police Powers Treaty
As the Council of Europe’s flawed cross border surveillance treaty moves through its final phases of approval, time is running out to ensure cross-border investigations occur with robust privacy and human rights safeguards in place. The treaty’s drafting process has been deeply flawed, with civil society groups, defense attorneys, and even data protection regulators largely sidelined.
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Council of Europe’s Actions Belie its Pledges to Involve Civil Society in Development of Cross Border Police Powers Treaty
As the Council of Europe’s flawed cross border surveillance treaty moves through its final phases of approval, time is running out to ensure cross-border investigations occur with robust privacy and human rights safeguards in place. The treaty’s drafting process has been deeply flawed, with civil society groups, defense attorneys, and even data protection regulators largely sidelined.
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Fear and loathing in the UK adequacy decision
The Council of the European Union unanimously approved the United Kingdom (UK) draft adequacy decision. In an ideal world, this would indicate that the UK offers an adequate level of protection for personal data, and would signal their willingness to retain those standards. Unfortunately, reality tells a different story, that should be worrying for human rights advocates on both sides of the channel.
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“E-evidence” negotiations: a call to protect media freedoms and democratic rights from abusive cross-border orders
Together with a coalition of 25 organisations and companies, European Digital Rights (EDRi) urges the European Parliament and the Council to uphold a high level of procedural safeguards in their negotiations on the so-called “e-evidence Regulation”.
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New Cybercrime Protocol: weak safeguards against big risks of abuse
In 2017, the Council of Europe (CoE) and its Cybercrime Committee started preparing an additional protocol to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime – a new tool for law enforcement authorities (LEAs) to have access to data held by private companies in the context of criminal investigations.
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EDRi challenges expansion of police surveillance via Prüm
The Prüm framework permits police forces of EU Member States to exchange DNA files, fingerprints, vehicle data via a decentralised system. The European Commission and the Council are pushing for a “Next Generation Prüm” in which facial images, firearms data, driving licenses, extracts of police records, data about third-country nationals and many additional types of data could be shared via the system.
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Eurodac database repurposed to surveil migrants
Eurodac is the EU database used to store asylum seekers’ and refugees’ data, as well as certain categories of “irregular” migrants. By the end of 2019, the EU stored almost 6 million peoples’ fingerprint sets in the database. Research show how legislative developments transform the Eurodac database into “a powerful tool for mass surveillance”, endangering migrants' fundamental human rights.
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New Cybercrime Protocol: More overreach, still no data protection safeguards
In the context of the fifth round of consultation with civil society, data protection authorities and industry, EDRi and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) coordinated a civil society submission to provide feedback on the new draft provisions relating to joint investigations, request for domain name registration information and expedited disclosure of stored computer data in an emergency.
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“E-evidence”: Mixed results in the European Parliament
The European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) agreed on a final text for the Regulation on cross border access to data (so-called “e-evidence” proposal). Despite some improvements designed to better protect people against law enforcement overreach across jurisdictions, the Committee’s majority has unfortunately also made major compromises that will put the rights of journalists, lawyers, doctors, social workers and individuals in general at risk.
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WTO trade talks must respect privacy
Together with over 40 consumer and digital rights groups, EDRi calls on global governments to place people’s fundamental rights to data protection and privacy at the centre of digital trade negotiations.
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EDRi with 25 organisations urge Parliament to protect journalists, doctors, lawyers, social services
Together with a coalition of 25 organisations and companies, EDRi urges members of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) to include strong procedural safeguards in the so called “E-Evidence Regulation”.
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Technology, migration, and illness in the times of COVID-19
In our ongoing work on technology and migration, we examine the impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic on the rights of people on the move and the increasingly worrying use of surveillance technology and AI at the border and beyond.
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Open letter: Civil society urges Member States to respect the principles of the law in Terrorist Content Online Regulation
On 27 March 2020, European Digital Rights (EDRi) and 12 of its member organisations sent an open letter to representatives of Member States in the Council of the EU. In the letter, we voice our deep concern over the proposed legislation on the regulation of terrorist content online and what we view as serious potential threats to fundamental rights of privacy, freedom of expression, etc.
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