SRP-Onderzoekszwaartepunt: Articulating Law, Technology, Ethics and Politics: Issues of Enforcement and Jurisdiction of EU Data Protection Law under and beyond the General Data Protection Regulation (ALTEP-DP)

The research program inquiries into the continuously evolving articulations of law, technology, ethics and politics, searching for a better understanding of the boundaries that separate them, and that they create and sustain. EU data protection law is taken as a starting point, more concretely the landscape delineated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This forms the common focus of three intersecting Research Lines (RL), and a transversal Research Line. The first RL investigates the nature of automation as a matter of compliance with the GDPR, focusing on legal provisions that lend themselves to automation and to issues of both technical and legal interpretability. The second RL develops a conceptual framework to address cross-border flows of personal data, especially in international humanitarian action. The third RL explores the increasing role of ethics in European privacy and data protection, and how this affects the complex articulations of law and other practices in democratic constitutional states. Based on these three research lines, a fourth transversal RL will study the role of law, and the way it transforms and evolves, in relation to technology (RL1), politics (RL2) and ethics (RL3). This demands thorough reflection on what characterizes such respective practices as ‘modes of co-existence’, defining society’s capacity to constantly re-constitute itself (RL4).