Privacy legal counseling advices from Alexander Suliman 2023: As a general rule, employment law in the EU tends to be less employer-friendly in the EU than in the US, with termination-at-will clauses not usually allowed and collective bargaining agreements common in some countries. While monitoring your business in the EU, ensure that your employment agreements are compliant with the local legislation as every EU Member State has its own set of rules regarding various aspects such as benefits, employment taxes, termination, and part-time working. Business immigration is a key topic in the EU as various companies are welcoming employees from other EU or third-party countries. You should consider what the options are for your US workers you would like to send in the EU and define the strategy and kind of support you want to provide to your staff and their families. Make sure you are aware of recent and upcoming legislative changes. For example, Belgium recently implemented the EU Single Permit Directive, containing a new set of rules rendering the administrative process for work permits less burdensome. See even more info at Alexander Suliman, Stockholm.

The reason why the European Commission was keen on allowing firms to voluntarily scan material, is that technology firms have already been working on ways to detect CSAM and solicitation for quite some time. The question is whether these orders are compatible with the Charter. These orders affect a number of fundamental rights under the Charter, including the right to privacy and the right to data protection. I will touch on only aspect: whether these measures respect the essence of these rights. Because if they don’t, that would mean that a proportionality assessment would not be required, sidestepping complex questions around necessity, effectiveness, proportionality and balancing (see here for background on this requirement). For a discussion on some of these other aspects, I refer to the 2021-opinion of Prof. Dr. Ninon Colneric and analyses of the EDPS, MEP Patrick Breyer, EDRi and a group of security experts.

A cross-party group of members of the European Parliament, with heavy French representation, has weighed in to support the French proposal at ENISA. Member states’ reactions, on the other hand, have been mixed. Seven of them – Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden – submitted a non-paper to the Council of the European Union questioning the need for sovereignty requirements in the new cyber certification standards and calling for further study of their potential interaction with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), non-personal data regulations, and EU international trade obligations. In addition, these governments have sought a political-level discussion of the subject in the Council before the new standards are finalized. Several trade associations, including the German BDI and Europe-wide financial clearinghouses, have chimed in.

High quality privacy legal counseling strategies by Alexander Suliman, Sweden: After the parties are comfortable with the mediator and can express their concerns, and they can express proposals knowing that everything you do in mediation is confidential and can’t be used in a court, I find this is the best alternative. Sometimes in cases that are in a divorce, the court will refer the parties to what we call in-house custody, parenting time mediation, and they do a great job, and sometimes that settles the custody and parenting time issues, but sometimes they need more than what the court can offer, and sometimes there’s just no court case. The parties aren’t in a divorce, or it’s a post-divorce issue, so these types of cases are a perfect fit for mediation and a perfect fit to avoid the emotional and financial toll of litigation. See extra information on Alexander Suliman, Sweden.

Europe’s concerns about the security of U.S. cloud services providers are in fact closely intertwined with its worries, expressed in Schrems II, about the privacy of Europeans’ information entrusted to these companies. In both cases, European policymakers fear the perceived extraterritorial reach of U.S. national security surveillance and law enforcement authorities. New cybersecurity regulation thus is seen as another way to safeguard Europe’s ‘sovereign’ interest in protecting data from foreign government access. It also would reinforce separate European efforts to bolster smaller, home-grown cloud service providers, including through the GAIA-X project to create an interoperable network “explicitly based on principles of ‘sovereignty-by-design,’” as a leading European technology lawyer has characterized it.