Data Protection

Addressing the issues of data protection legislation, confidentiality and protection of intellectual property rights is a legitimate concern for all researchers, but most particularly those carrying out cross-national comparative research.  NESSIE has approached this issue from a number of directions.  Most recently, NESSIE organised a Roundtable on the topic “Data Protection and Data Access Regulations and Guidelines”.  Here, invited researchers described the new European Data Directive and its differential implementation across the European Union.  Others looked at the Research Ethics Committees which are required to assess the ethical implications, and confidentiality aspects, of all proposed research undertakings.  These Roundtable presentations, although concentrating primarily (although not entirely) on medical research, offer much needed information for social science researchers which can be easily applied to their own type of research. 

Many of those presenting papers at the Roundtable were members of the PRIVIREAL project and their website is the best source of information on the Data Directive and its implications.  PRIVIREAL is a European Commission funded project examining the implementation of the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC in relation to medical research and the role of ethics committees. One of the major objectives of this project is, mainly in the context of medical research, to describe and evaluate ways the Directive has been implemented (or intended to be implemented). To this end, the site contains links to four major information sources:

• International And European Instruments In The Field Of Data Protection
• Data Protection Laws (by country) for EU, EEA and NAS countries as well as many others
• Information on Medical Research and the Directive, together with European Commission information on its implementation
• Bibliography

Also, see European Data Protection Legislation on target. The full text of a report on the Data Directive, a technical analysis of implementation in the Member States and full details of an international conference on the Directive and the results of the on-line survey. More general information about Data Protection in the EU is available on the Commission's website on data protection.