Raegan MacDonald

New leaked documents show that European Union Member States, led by Germany, are systematically working to destroy the fabric of European privacy legislation.

In an open letter sent today to Commissioner Malmström, Access requests the Commissioner-designate for Trade for immediate feedback on the aspersions she placed on the validity of the acquired document during yesterday’s hearing in the European Parliament.

The former Home Affairs Commissioner has been systematically undermining the work of her own commission, and would be unfit to defend EU citizens’ interests as Trade Commissioner.

On April 8, 2014, Europe’s highest court, the ECJ, released a long-awaited decision on the controversial Data Retention Directive, confirming what we all knew: the blanket surveillance mandated by the Data Retention Directive is neither necessary nor proportionate.

On September 9, Access, together with a coalition of 10 European and international digital rights groups submitted a letter to the Google Advisory Council to set the record straight about the so-called “right to be forgotten” and to address misrepresentations of a recent European Court of Justice ruling.

This month, the European Commission responded to a letter sent on behalf of 21 digital rights organisations – including Access, Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), EDRi, Initiative für Netzfreiheit, AKVorrat, and EFF – outlining several violations of E.U. law in the passage of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIP) in the United Kingdom.

Wikipedia’s vision is “a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” It’s a value that we at Access share. So we were shocked last week when the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports and hosts Wikipedia, turned its back on the greatest driver of open access to information the world has ever known, the open internet.

Today Access, together with 20 digital and civil rights organisations, sent the following letter (linked here and below) to E.U. Commissioners Michel Barnier and Cecilia Malmström to bring their attention to an infringement of E.U. law by the United Kingdom through the adoption of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (“DRIP”).

On May 13th, the European Court of Justice ruled on the case between the Spanish citizen, Mario Costeja González and Google Spain, regarding the Spanish Data Protection Authority requests for the search engine to withdraw personal data relating to Mr Costeja González from its index and to prevent access to the data in the future.

Yesterday, in a sweeping and dangerous judgement the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Google should de-index a lawfully published newspaper article about a Spanish citizen. Access believes the Court erred in increasing liability for intermediaries online, unnecessarily and wrongly pitting privacy against access to information, with an unfavorable result.