Personal data protection under the EU law: special categories of data ; Защита персональных данных в праве ЕС: специальные категории данных ; Asmens duomenų apsauga ES teisėje: specialios duomenų kategorijos
In: http://oai.elaba.lt/documents/93913726.pdf
The object of this master thesis is the European Union legal regime for the protection of special categories of personal data. The goal of the thesis is to explore the existing European Union data protection law with a particular focus on special categories of personal data, the rules and principles governing the processing of such kinds of information. The main tasks of the thesis are: to define the key stages in the evolution of the European Union data protection law in order to understand its initial interrelatedness with privacy and track down the emergence of special categories of data; to detect and describe the current legal standards applying to the processing of special categories of data; and to discern the process of the implementation of these legal standards in practice of the Member States using the examples of two most relevant types of data, namely biometric data and data related to health. The usage of such methods as doctrinal research, retrospective and legal historical method, comparative method, monitoring and analysis of the case law led to a conclusion that the protection of the special categories of personal data in the European Union can be deemed highly effective in light of how the applicable legal standards are flexible enough to meet all the relevant challenges. However, the degree of its effectiveness is nowhere near absolute, since there are evident discrepancies when it comes to the practical implementation of these standards in the Member States, which inevitably results in a lack of legal certainty. The proposed solution to this problem is the adoption of an additional legal act focusing solely on the special categories of data, introducing stricter standards for its retention and processing.