Moving Beyond the Special Rapporteur on Privacy with the Establishment of a New, Specialised United Nations Agency: Addressing the Deficit in Global Cooperation for the Protection of Data Privacy

Abstract

In July 2015, the UN Human Rights Council appointed Professor Joseph Cannataci as its first-ever Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. His mandate is, among others, to gather information, identify obstacles, take part in global initiatives and raise awareness.

In order to address this global deficit in cooperation, the authors believe that a new, specialised UN agency for the protection of data privacy needs to be established. We believe that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) could serve as useful inspiration to this end. The role of the global regulatory text of reference for data privacy, corresponding to the Paris and Berne Conventions within the global system for intellectual property protection, could be held by the UN Guidelines for the Regulation of Computerized Personal Data Files. Despite their age, we believe that, if modernized, they could achieve global consensus and attain the basic data privacy purposes, constituting the global common lowest denominator. In the first section of this chapter, we briefly outline the deficit in global cooperation to the detriment of the level of data protection afforded to individuals (section 1). Then the UN initiatives for the global protection of data privacy are discussed (section 2). In the next section, we suggest that a new, specialised UN agency for data privacy be established, and we identify its potential benefits (section 3). Finally, we compare such an initiative with the WIPO and global intellectual property protection model that, to our mind, could serve as a useful role model for the development of a similar, global UN system for the protection of data privacy (section 4).