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22nd Annual Meeting of the Central and Eastern Europe Data Protection Authorities
The 22nd Annual Meeting of the Central and Eastern Europe Data Protection Authorities (CEEDPA), organised by the Georgian data protection authority, took place from 29 February to 1 March 2024. The conference, which was held physically in Tbilisi for the first time since the pandemic 2021, was attended, in addition to CEEDPA members, by representatives of the EDPB, EDPS, Council of Europe, EUROPOL, EUROJUST and data protection authorities from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Israel.
The President of the Personal Data Protection Office, Mirosław Wróblewski, gave a speech in which he first thanked the organisers and drew attention to the role of the Polish Data Protection Authority as the Secretariat and initiator of the CEEDPA and emphasised that the conference, by bringing together both EU member states and those that are not EU member states yet, provides an important forum for the exchange of experiences in the field of personal data protection and the right privacy.
In this context, the President of the Personal Data Protection Office congratulated the representatives of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, emphasising the exceptional nature of this year’s meeting, which is the first one after the mentioned countries became official EU candidates, and expressed the hope that the meetings organised within CEEDPA will support them during the accession process.
The President of the Personal Data Protection Office also expressed his solidarity with Ukraine in relation to the ongoing war and his satisfaction with the increasingly close cooperation between the European Union and Ukraine, inter alia under the EU4DigitalUA programme, which aims to develop the digitalisation of Ukraine, including support in the adaptation of Ukrainian personal data protection legislation to the EU legal framework. The President of the Personal Data Protection Office also congratulated the organisers of this year’s meeting on the adoption by the Parliament of Georgia of a new Law on the Protection of Personal Data, which comes into force on 1 March 2024.
Mirosław Wróblewski emphasised that thanks to the CEEDPA meeting in such a wide, international group, exchange of information, good practices, and thus progressive harmonisation of personal data protection law is possible. CEEDPA members can benefit from the rich experience and knowledge of European institutions and organisations, as well as from the rich experience of supervisory authorities also from outside the CEEDPA. In this way, a bridge is a being built that allows the flow of knowledge on legislation ensuring global protection of personal data.
The assumptions underlying CEEDPA not only remain valid, but also become increasingly important in the era of dynamic development of a new technologies influencing the development of personal data protection law. Therefore, the President of the Polish supervisory authority will continue and develop the ideas that guided the founders of CEEDPA, while the Personal Data Protection Office will continue to the act as CEEDPA’s Secretariat.
The Personal Data Protection Office’s expert, counsellor Piotr Drobek, also attended the CEEDPA meeting.