LET’S TALK ABOUT EUROPE ONCE AGAIN – FROM HISTORIC ANNIVERSARY TO STEPS IN PROTECTING HEALTH: MAY OVERVIEW

Welcome to another series of overviews of all the topics we shared with you last month.

We started our May communication by marking the anniversary of the historic Schuman Declaration, the one which laid the foundations of today's European Union.

Also, as the European Year of Youth 2022 focuses on European young people and the voices of citizens reinforced by the Conference on the Future of Europe, this 9 May was a good time to discuss the challenges Europeans face today and suggestions on how to deal with them. We continued to talk about your security as a customer or a consumer, so we wanted to remind you that there are several privacy rights that the GDPR determines and strictly controls. In most of them it is necessary to process the claim, and in any case it is necessary to verify the identity of the person making the claim. These are: the right to information, the right of access, the right to correction, the right to erasure, the right to limit processing, the right to data portability, the right to object, the right to automated decision-making and profiling.

We also stressed the importance of being aware of health security because, as we all know, national governments are primarily responsible for organizing and providing health and social care. On the other hand, the EU's role is to complement and support Member States in improving the health of Europeans, reducing health inequalities, and moving towards a social Europe.

Bearing that in mind, EU4Health program focuses on three priorities: protecting people from serious cross-border health threats, making medicines and medical supplies accessible and accessible, and strengthening health systems and the health workforce.

We all know that people rely more than ever on the global exchange of information in their daily lives. Everything from online shopping and travel to business operations and security,

depends on the flow of data across borders. In this regard, it is important to ensure data protection and privacy.

Last but not least, we shared that after more than a year of detailed negotiations, the European Commission and the United States announce that they have agreed in principle on the Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework, which will foster transatlantic data flows and address concerns raised by the Court of Justice in the July 2020 Schrems II decision. The key principles are: data will be able to flow freely and securely between the EU and US companies involved, a new set of rules and binding safeguards to restrict access to US intelligence data to what is necessary and proportionate to protect national security, a new two-tier a system of legal requirements for investigating and resolving Europeans' complaints about access to US intelligence data, which includes the Data Protection Audit Court, strong obligations for companies processing data transferred from the EU, special monitoring and review mechanisms, and translating the agreement in principle into legal documents.

Stay tuned!

Your AP