The Council of Europe has appointed Professor Joe Cannataci as its Lead Expert to guide work on the interpretation of Convention 108 – the Council of Europe’s international treaty that deals with privacy and data protection. Cannataci will chair the first meeting of the group of experts on Tuesday 3 May 2022.
Convention 108 is the world’s largest and only international treaty protecting privacy in the information age. More than 55 countries have already ratified this treaty, including all EU states. Seventy states, including observer states, participate in the Council of Europe’s Consultative Committee for Convention 108 (T-PD) which is responsible for producing detailed interpretation of the convention. Although Convention 108 has been in force for nearly forty years it has undergone a comprehensive modernisation programme which was completed in October 2018. The Council of Europe in April 2022 appointed Professor Joe Cannataci as the Lead Expert to guide work on interpreting the treaty’s provisions on privacy and data protection in the police and intelligence services sectors. He is tasked with guiding the work of all other experts engaged by the T-PD to draft the interpretative document before it is considered for adoption by the T-PD and then the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.
As the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) does not cover areas such as national security and defence, EU states are also reliant for guidance in this sector on Convention 108. The first meeting of the group of experts on Tuesday is scheduled to discuss Cannataci’s outline strategy for the drafting of the new interpretative document. It is expected that he will present the result of the Working Party’s deliberations to the plenary session of the T-PD in June 2022 as the first part of a process which is expected to take a number of years.
This new responsibility for Prof Cannataci follows that of being the UN’s first-ever Special rapporteur on the Right to Privacy from which he stepped down in August 2021 after having served the maximum of two successive three year-terms in the post. In the period 2015-2021, Prof Cannataci carried out several country visits on behalf of the UN inspecting amongst others the use of personal data and surveillance by the police and intelligence services of several countries including the USA, the UK, France, Germany, Argentina and South Korea.
Professor Cannataci is Head of Department of Information Policy & Governance and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences at the University of Malta. He also has a host of academic and honorary appointments internationally including Full Professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands where he holds the Chair of European Information Policy & Technology Law.
