PUBLICATION: Analysis
What is the EU Law Enforcement Directive? How Law Enforcement Authorities (Should) Protect Personal Data
The aim of this backgrounder is to present the new EU legislation on the protection of personal data in law enforcement in a concise and clear manner.
The legislative act is known as the EU Law Enforcement Directive (LED) (known also as the EU Police Directive), a twin sister to the far more widely known General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR). Both GDPR and LED are part of a new EU legislative package that has significantly improved personal data protection standards. They were adopted in the spring of 2016 and have been in force since May 2018. While the General Regulation has garnered most of the attention from the expert community, governmental and non-governmental sector, the business world and the broader public concerned with individual privacy, the Law Enforcement Directive is rather specific – for both the circumstances in which it applies and from the approaches it adopts.
This backgrounder does not cover either the General Data Protection Regulation nor the Serbia’s 2018 Law on Personal Data Protection, as they have been covered and analysed elsewhere. However, the backgrounder does make use of official terminology used in the Law and does, for illustrative purposes, use examples from Serbia.
The production of this backgrounder was supported financially by the Open Society Foundation, Serbia as part of the project ‘Defending the Right to Access to Information in Serbia’. The views expressed in this publication are exclusively those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Foundation.
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