Dear Colleagues,
Turkish legal landscape has a very busy agenda in the following days regarding legislative efforts on data protection. Here is brief background information and update for you.
Draft Law on the Protection of Personal Data (“Draft Law”) was first introduced to the Turkish Grand National Assembly by the government in April 2003 as a part of Turkey’s Accession Partnership Document signed between the Council of Europe and Turkey. Ratification of Draft Law was set out as a goal under various sections (i.e. justice and internal affairs, telecoms, free flow of services) of the document.
Since then, Draft Law has been mentioned various times by several members of the cabinet as a law “soon to be ratified”. After years, Draft Law was presented to the Presidency of the Turkish Grand National Assembly by the Office of the Prime Minister on December 26, 2014 again.
Draft Law is based on the current European Data Protection Directive (1995/46/EC) on protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and regulates the principles and procedures to be complied with by the individuals and legal entities that are processing personal data whether automatically or manually in a data file. However, the European Union is taking pertinent and concrete steps for a data protection reform due to rapid technological developments and globalization, such as social networking sites, cloud computing, location-based services, smart cards, wearable technologies and Internet of Things within the last 10 years, which resulted in us leaving digital traces with every move we make.
On January 14, 2015 Draft Law was debated at Turkish Grand National Assembly Presidency’s Committee on European Union Harmonization’s meeting. Representatives from Ministry of Justice, Ministry of EU Affairs as well as Turkey’s leading business associations, and individual businesses attended this meeting. The recent developments on European legislative landscape for data protection were also emphasized by Turkish Grand National Assembly Presidency’s Committee on European Union Harmonization’s report following the meeting. The report states that the Draft Law is generally in compliance with EU legislation on data protection with spaces for improvement regarding several provisions and reflects the government’s, representatives’ and commission’s view on the Draft Law.
Although the report indicates a general compliance in its final section, the commission’s take on the Draft Law does not only stress a space for improvement but elaborates serious issues which may arise if the Draft Law comes into force as is. The commission states that the Draft Law is based on an outdated legislation and is centered on the state rather than individuals. The commission further elaborates that the Draft Law does not protect individuals from the state as it does from businesses and regulates the data collector’s power over individuals rather than regulating how data owners can be protected along with other provision-specific criticism towards the Draft Law.
Please let us know any question you may have on the matter.
Best regards,
Ilay