Search

According to the General Data Protection Regulation (hereinafter GDPR), in each Member State of the European Union, one or more independent supervisory authorities of personal data processing must operate under conditions of full independence. Therefore, by this article we aim to achieve two main objectives. A first objective is to explain the notion of „full independence“ and the second objective is to find and analyze some of the essential elements for guaranteeing full independence. The methodology used has focused on the study of the European and national legislation (the European treaties, the GDPR, the Romanian Constitution, the Administrative Code), on the study of doctrine and on the analysis of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter CJEU) on the issue of full independence of the supervisory authorities. This paper concludes that the notion of the independence of the supervisory authorities is a fragile notion that requires the full attention of the Member States. The fundamental human rights and freedoms must survive any political movements or commercial interests. The Member States, by the national law, must ensure adequate safeguards to ensure full independence of the supervisory authorities and must establish effective rules on the sanctioning of those who infringe on their independent status. As the notion of independence is a fragile notion, in the future, the Member States' actions to safeguard the independence of the supervisory authorities must increase in direct proportion to the degree of risk of the new technologies to privacy and to the other fundamental rights and freedoms. Regarding the structure of the paper, in the Introduction, we discussed the necessity of existence of some national data protection authorities. In Section II, we briefly presented certain general considerations about supervisory authorities. In Section III, we set out certain general considerations about the legal regime of the autonomous administrative authorities in Romania. In Section IV.A we analyzed and defined the notion of „full independence“, and in Section IV.B we extracted from the legislation, doctrine and case law a part of the essential elements for guaranteeing a full independence and we briefly explained these elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]