The EU data protection reform package adopted in 2016 introduced two main legal instruments regulating the processing of personal data, namely the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applicable to all data processing operations carried out in both private and public sector with a few explicitly enumerated exceptions, and the Law Enforcement Directive (LED) limited to the processing of personal data "by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties". Since these two legal acts constitute separate legal regimes with different thresholds for the protection of personal data, it is crucial to draw precise borderlines between the scopes of their application. With the assumption that where the specific rules of the LED are not applicable, the general rules of the GDPR should apply, this chapter focuses on the former instrument and aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of the material scope of its application. In doing so, it identifies some areas of uncertainty, which if not hamper, then at least, bring into question the process of harmonization of the rules for data processing in the law enforcement context.
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Front Matter
