Study On The Extraterritorial Effect Of European Personal Data Protection Directive

European Personal Data Protection Directive is currently the world’s landmark law for protection of personal data. Because of the nature of extraterritorial effect of the European Personal Data Protection Directive and the European Union’s great economic power, the Directive play an important role in the law-making or non-binding documents’making process of many other countries and international organizations and has a wide range of influence in the world. Based on the mentioned above, this dissertation takes the extraterritorial effect of the Directive as the object of study and makes an exploratory research on that. The achievement of the dissertation mainly comes from two resources:Firstly, the careful thinking of the Directive and the working documents issued by European Union’s competent body; Secondly, the research on related literature of Europe and the United States about personal data protection. Apart from the abstract and the introduction part, the dissertation is divided into five parts:The first chapter makes a brief introduction to the history background of the law-making of European Personal Data Protection Directive. Firstly, this chapter is about the introduction of the early efforts of international organizations and some countries to protect personal data, involving the universal and international legal documents, regional conventions and domestic laws of European Economic Zone; then the chapter focuses on the efforts to protect personal data after1980,involving the content as hereunder mentioned:the impact of economic globalization and technology development on the protection of personal data; OECD’s guiding document on the protection of personal data; the world’s first binding international convention on personal data protection; and an introduction to the formulation of European Union’s data protection directive.The second chapter performs a text interpretation of the extraterritorial effect of the Directive and related provisions. The related provisions involving the legitimacy of the processing of personal data, the processing of sensitive data, the security and confidentiality of data processing, etc. The provisions of the extraterritorial effect of the Directive involve the law basis on the data transfer from the member states of European Union to third countries, it includes the following two circumstances. First, level of the protection which the transferred personal data receive should fulfill the requirement of "adequate protection", three approaches are included:the protection provided by the domestic rules fulfill the requirement of "adequate protection"; the data importer provides "adequate protection" to the data by the way of appropriate contract clauses; the data importer provides "adequate protection" to the data by the way of Binding Corporate Rules. Secondly, the data transfer belongs to the seven exceptional circumstances stipulated by the Directive.The third chapter specifies the three approaches to fulfill the requirement of "adequate protection" provided by Article26of the Directive. The first part is the introduction of the elements which should be taken into account in the assessment of "adequate protection". And then the second part is about the specification of the three approaches.The fourth chapter is about the differences between America’s legislation of personal data protection and Europe Union’s legislation of personal data protection, and then the introduction of the coordinating measures. The main measure is the "safe harbor" system, including its contents, the status of its implementation, the cost of its implementation, and the alternative approaches to fulfill the requirement of "adequate protection".The fifth chapter dwells on the guiding impact of the Directive on China’s legislation of personal data protection. It points out that the Directive is playing and will continue to play an important role in the process of China’s legislation. Beyond that, the chapter makes a study on the practice of how China’s enterprises conform to the Directive and gives some suggestions on that. The suggestions are:China enterprises can fulfill the requirements stipulated by the Directive by way of contracts; the eligible enterprises can formulate Binding Corporate Rules in good time; China’s enterprises can also make use of the Directive’s exceptional clauses.