The European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee is holding a series of meetings this week to go through a number of aspects concerning the introduction of the new General Data Protection Requirement on May 25.
The meeting are planned to look at the details regarding the implementation of the package with law enforcement authorities, intergovernmental organisations, enterprises and IT specialists.
These sessions come at the end of a two-year period given to EU Member States to prepare for the introduction of the new legislation. It is expected that some time will be spent reviewing how the preparations for GDPR have gone.
The main aim of GDPR is to establish a set of standardised data protection laws across all the EU Member States. In doing so it is hoped that EU citizens will have a better understanding as to how their private and personal data is being used. It will make clear to people how they can complain regarding how their private data is being used, even if they are not in the country where its located.
Following an official ‘Trilogue’ period from June 24 2015 to December 15 2015 the draft legislation was approved and signed in January 2016.
From May 25 2018, companies and organizations that store personal information will be subjected to a number of strict penalties if they are found to be in breach of GDPR. This involves a tiered-penalty structure aimed at eliminating potential breached as it will encourage companies/organization to ensure that they are compliant. The higher end of GDPR infringements will see a penalty of up to 4% of a company’s global revenue or a fine of €20m, whichever figure is higher.
Most large companies have already addressed their internal processes and procedure to ensure that they are compliant with GDPR and EU Member States have amended their legislation to allow for the articles of GDPR to be applied with no constitutional interruption.