This article discusses ways in which the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and post-GATS free trade agreements may limit the EU's ability to regulate privacy and personal data protection as fundamental rights. After discussing this issue in two dimensions – the vertical...

The article focuses on the interplay between European Union (EU) law on privacy and data protection and international trade law, in particular the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the WTO dispute settlement system. The argument distinguishes between the effects of international...

This report analyses whether and to what extent restrictions on onward transfers of EU personal data from Japan to the parties of the CPTPP or to the U.S. could violate the CPTPP or UJSDTA, and if so, whether they can be justified based on the exceptions these agreements contain. The report...

Public policy interests implicated by international data governance and data flows, indispensable for the global governance of AI, stretch far beyond issues of economic growth and development. They also involve a broader set of national and regional priorities, such as national security,...

Countries spend billions of dollars each year to strengthen their discursive power to shape international policy debates. They do so because in public policy conversations labels and narratives matter enormously. The “digital protectionism” label has been used in the last decade as a tool to...

This chapter compares the narratives underlying the EU’s approach to governing cross-border data flows and their reflection in the EU’s trade policy with those of the US and China. It demonstrates that, although the policy concerns behind the EU, US and China’s restrictions on data flows...

“Digital sovereignty” has become a buzzword of the new European policies and rules on data governance. This discourse, however, is not entirely new. Already at the dawn of data protection laws in Europe, information sovereignty was one of the concerns that regulation of personal data flows...