The Conservative Party’s pledge to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – mirroring Reform UK’s policy – is likely to blow the UK’s data adequacy agreement out of the water, leaving a £161bn black hole in the UK economy.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch revealed the plans at the weekend, following a review by the party’s lead lawyer, Lord Wolfson KC, which claims that staying in the ECHR blocks migration reform and leads to the persecution of military veterans.
Badenoch admitted that Lord Wolfson had warned her that withdrawal from the convention would not be a “silver bullet” and would provide the European Union with a ground for terminating co-operation on cross-border criminal law enforcement.
However, she has argued the move is necessary to “protect our borders, our veterans, and our citizens”.
Even so, his legal opinion, which runs to 185 pages including 454 footnotes, has sparked the debate.
Mishcon de Reya senior data protection specialist Jon Baines wrote on LinkedIn: “Whilst [Lord Wolfson’s advice] covers the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, it doesn’t go into the sort of level of detail of addressing the likelihood that leaving the ECHR would result in removal of data protection adequacy.
“But it would certainly put it at risk: the EU-UK Adequacy Agreement expressly identifies the UK’s accession to the ECHR as being a ‘particular important element of the legal framework’ of the Agreement.”
Others have long argued that losing data adequacy would cause major disruption and significant costs for the UK.
For instance, UK businesses would be forced to implement costly alternative legal mechanisms to continue receiving personal data from the EU, loss of trusted data-sharing arrangements could undermine cooperation on a range of important issues, including scientific research and tackling cross-border crime.
The European Court of Justice (CJEU) could strike down the Adequacy Decisions if the EU’s high-level human rights standards are not met. This precedent was set in the Schrems judgments concerning the EU-US data-sharing arrangement.
The EU Commission adopted the UK’s adequacy decisions in 2021 despite concerns from the European Parliament and European Data Protection Board (EDPB) about the UK’s surveillance regime.
The recent Data (Use & Access) Act has reignited these concerns over privacy erosion, leading the EU to implement a six-month adequacy extension to allow time to fully assess its impact.
The current agreement expires in December 2025.
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