Procedural rights through the lenses of data protection

Abstract

The Chapter explores how the different legal frameworks related to the Directive 2012/13 on the right to information in criminal and eaw proceedings and the Directive (EU) 2016/680 (Data Protection Law Enforcement Directive, hereinafter “led”) intertwine, with special focus to data subjects’ rights. It aims to investigate whether the level of protection granted to suspects and accused persons can be increased or be shrunk by the trigger of data protection safeguards. Although the rationales of procedural safeguards and data protection are apparently different in scope, the Chapter argues that both affect the level of individual rights’ protection depending on how data is used for combating crimes, and that data protection may have an impact on some procedural rights as a standard setter for access to justice. This paper in fact does not argue that data protection acts as a duplication of some of the procedural rights laid down by the Directive 2013/12, such as the right to information and the right to access to the materials of the case, rather that it may be a trigger to activate a better protection for suspects, because an indirect violation of data subjects’ rights may imply a violation of procedural rights. The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in police work and Big Data Analytics as well as smart surveillance and predictive policing techniques put at the forefront the concern of this paper, moving from the idea that if evidence is based on data, data usage itself plays a key role in depicting the destiny of people who happen to be involved in a criminal proceeding. The purpose limitation principle in the field of law enforcement is extraordinarily large in scope and the main priority for someone whose data is processed for preventing crimes and possibly to build up the accusation is to know which data has been processed and for what specific purposes and regarding the scope.