Kiri

Dear Data Protection colleagues,

I hope you are doing well.

Iā€™m approaching you with a question relating to administrative fines under the GDPR. As some of you may know, our Ministry of Justice is carrying out an assessment of whether administrative fines under the GDPR should also apply to public authorities, and whether this would be feasible in the light of the Constitution of Finland. A decision on whether legislative work will be started has not been made yet, but will be made in the light of the outcome of the assessment. The assessment will include a comparative section covering a number of other Member States. A similar assessment is most likely made also in respect of the public authorities falling within the scope of LED.

My colleagues in MoJ already have access to your legislation. However, it is more difficult to track down preparatory work (such as explanatory reports), or find answers to certain questions. We would be grateful if you could briefly answer the following questions:

• For those of you who have extended administrative fines to apply to public authorities,

1. was there any constitutional analysis behind the decision to include public authorities?

2. were there any legal problems faced?

• For those of you who have excluded public authorities from the scope of administrative fines,

1. what were the main reasons for the decision to exclude public authorities?

2. in particular, were there constitutional reasons for it?

In addition, in case a constitutional analysis has been made as regards the possibility to apply administrative fines to public authorities, as part of the legislative work, we would be grateful for official documentation (or links to relevant websites), either in English or original language of the preparatory work.

My colleagues Virpi and Silja (in copy) would much appreciate your replies by 11 September at the latest.

Kind regards,

Laura

Laura MƤƤttƤnen
JHA Counsellor

+ 32 473 522 407

[email protected]

Permanent Representation of Finland to the European Union
Avenue de Cortenbergh 80 B-1000 Brussels

Twitter: @FinlandinEU

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