Theodore Christakis

In the Monday, December 20th Lawfare article titled Towards OECD Principles for Government Access to Data: Can Democracies Show the Way?, Theodore Christakis, Kenneth Propp and Peter Swire discuss the role that democracies can play in establishing trusted international standards for cross-border data flows.  Drawing upon documents made available by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as well as interviews conducted by the team with governments, institutions, corporate bodies and academic thought leaders in the field, the authors [...]

Part 1: Countering the U.S. Arguments As the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) “intensify” negotiations to reach a new adequacy decision following the invalidation of Privacy Shield by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in its July 16, 2020 Schrems II judgment (discussed here, here and here), one pressing question is what should be included and what should be excluded from the scope of the negotiations. It went unnoticed, but the US submissions to two [...]

‘EU–US negotiations on law enforcement access to data: divergences, challenges and EU law procedures and options’, by Theodore Christakis and Fabien Terpan, is the first article to present the context and the numerous challenges surrounding the EU and the US’ negotiations aimed at concluding an agreement on cross-border access to electronic evidence (e-evidence) for judicial cooperation in criminal matters. [...]

In this article ‘How Europe’s Intelligence Services Aim to Avoid the EU’s Highest Court—and What It Means for the United States’, Theodore Christakis and Kenneth Propp explore the ongoing struggle within the European Union to delimit the national security exception in its data protection law for the activities of EU Member State intelligence services, and the corresponding impact this Brussels debate could have on the ongoing transatlantic negotiations to restore a secure basis for commercial data transfers from the European [...]