Council of Europe

This chapter discusses the role of the Council of Europe in data protection law, which is a set of legal provisions anchored in many global, regional, and national hard law or soft law texts. It begins by describing the main features of the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to automatic processing of personal data, known as the Convention 108. Convention 108 laid down basic principles of data protection, which remained cornerstones of European data protection law until the present day. The chapter then compares its principles and provisions on data subject rights with the EU Law Enforcement Directive (LED). It also considers the rules on personal data transfers and on supervisory authorities. Finally, the chapter analyses a series of Council of Europe soft law instruments. These include the 1987 Council of Europe Police Recommendation; the 1992 Council of Europe Recommendation on the use of the DNA analysis by the criminal justice system; the 2018 Practical Guide on the use of personal data by police; and the 2001 Council of Europe Cybercrime (Budapest Convention).