Session
Council of Europe
• Albina Ovcearenco, Council of Europe, Head of the Data Protection Unit • Peter Kimpian, Council of Europe, Secretary to the Committee of Convention 108 • Moritz Taylor, Council of Europe, Senior Project Manager at the Data Protection Unit • Octavian Sofransky, Council of Europe, Digital Governance Advisor
Chawki Gaddes - Expert on Data Protection Issues in the Southern Mediterranean Region Peter Kimpian, Council of Europe, Secretary to the Committee of Convention 108 Moritz Taylor, Council of Europe, Senior Project Manager
Moritz Taylor
Octavian Sofransky
3. Good Health and Well-Being
4. Quality Education
9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
17. Partnerships for the Goals
Targets: SDG 17 focuses on strengthening global partnerships to support the achievement of all the other SDGs. Data sharing and collaboration, while ensuring data protection and privacy, are essential for effective partnerships between governments, businesses, and civil society organizations. Further, achieving a common understanding of definitions and concepts can only improve the efficiency of said sharing and collaboration. SDG 16: Data governance plays a crucial role in ensuring accountability and transparency within institutions, while protecting individual rights to privacy and data security. SDG 9: Data protection and governance are essential for promoting innovation while safeguarding privacy and security. SDG 4: Data protection and privacy are critical in educational settings, ensuring that student information is kept confidential and secure. Additionally, data governance frameworks can help improve the quality of education by facilitating data-driven decision-making and monitoring progress towards educational goals. SDG 3: In the context of healthcare, data protection is crucial for maintaining patient confidentiality and trust. Effective data governance can also facilitate the use of health data for research and public health purposes while protecting individual privacy rights.
The session will commence with a short introduction to the Council of Europe's key definitions and standards (through Convention 108+ and others) and how the organisation works with member States, the Convention's additional States Parties and other key stakeholders to maintain or, if required, changes them. In particular, as the Council of Europe's standards spread beyond the borders of its member States to the Southern Mediterranean region, this highlights the need for agreement on the various definitions to enhance multi-stakeholder cooperation to ensure data and privacy are protected adequately, without restricting and indeed enabling the international flow of data. This in turn would enhance the protection of human rights on the internet, allow for a an open, transparent, and inclusive internet, with personal data handled safely.
It is of the utmost importance that the main concepts and definitions regarding privacy and data protection are commonly understood among internet governance community. A lightning session could be a great opportunity to discuss some of the definitions that are defined in Council of Europe instruments and used by several countries already, and whether they are commonly understood the same way in an internet governance setting. How do the various jurisdictions and stakeholders define who is a data subject on the internet or who is a data controller and processor? This can have significant impact on public policy. The discussion around WHOIS data showed how difficult it could be to have a common understanding across all jurisdiction and stakeholders. These definitions can open up other field for discussion such as forced data localisation, data security and access rights in a cloud based service, just to name a few.
The online moderator will facilitate the online chat session and raise comments in the in-situ meeting or invite online participants to take the floor if technically feasible.