The European Commission announced today that it will launch accelerated infringement proceedings against Hungary, inter alia, due to the violation of independence of its data protection authority, since the new data protection legislation of Hungary prematurely terminated the Data Protection Commissioner’s term which should have originally ended only in 2014.

The respective press release is available here: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/12/24&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

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As of 1 January 2012 a new Agency (Data Protection and Freedom of Information Agency / NAIH) is responsible for the compliance with data protection and freedom of information laws in Hungary.

According to the information of the news portal origo.hu, the European Commission would very shortly launch infringement proceedings against Hungary due to the termination of the office of the Data Protection Commissioner who served as data protection supervisor until 31 December 2011. Origo.hu also reports that Ms Viviane Reding has informally already communicated to Hungarian Government officials the EU Commission’s opinion that the termination of the Commissioner’s position prior to the end of its term of office (until 2014 ) and appointment of an entirely new data protection supervisor most probably violates the independence of data protection authorities articulated by the European Data Protection Directive. We have already provided an overview of the complaint submitted by Hungarian NGO’s to the European Commission in our earlier blog post.

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