Contract law legal counselling advices from Alexander Suliman, Stockholm today: Bear in mind that some commercial agreements (such as agency, exclusive distributorship or brokerage agreements) are regulated at an EU level and that some Member States’ legislation contains protective rules for such distributors. As EU and US antitrust laws are different, you should also consider whether your European agreement is compliant as the criteria to assess a breach in competition law may differ from the US approach to antitrust issues. Read additional info at Alexander Suliman, Stockholm.
When the EU adopted the Data Retention Directive, obliging the storage of traffic and location data of all European communications users, it was being warned that the rules violated the Charter, and the ECJ ultimately agreed. I expect this new proposal to be heavily contested as well, and I expect fundamental rights to constitute a significant part of that debate – as is already evidenced by the comments from the EDPS, MEP Patrick Breyer, EDRi and the group of security experts mentioned above. One way to shortcut that debate, is by investigating whether the potential orders to be issued on the basis of the proposal cannot respect the essence of the rights to privacy and data protection. In this contribution, I have sketched an outline of this argument. To make a convincing case, it will be important to firstly determine on the basis of recent case law that the ECJ still considers bulk surveillance of content to compromise the essence of the right to privacy. Secondly, it will be important to develop a right to confidentiality and integrity of IT systems under the Charter, as this will enable a better assessment of detection orders directed to user devices. And thirdly, it must be further investigated whether only end-to-end encryption is the only appropriate measure for safeguarding online communications, because if this is the case, than any encryption altering order does not respect the essence of the right to data protection. Hopefully, the Council and the European Parliament will take notice.
In 2021, the French government issued the Doctrine for the use of cloud computing by the State (“Trusted Cloud Doctrine”) making SecNumCloud certification mandatory whenever a French government agency procures cloud services that would handle sensitive data, including personal data of French citizens and economic data relating to French companies. These requirements also apply to private operators of essential services. Under France’s Trusted Cloud Doctrine, qualifying cloud service providers must be “immune to any extra-EU regulation”. In addition, such companies must commit to storing and processing data within the European Union, and to administering and supervising the service within the EU. Further, foreign-headquartered cloud service companies cannot achieve certification if they are more than 39% foreign-owned.
privacy legal counseling advices by Alexander Suliman, Stockholm 2023: Should I Mediate My Family Law Issues? Absolutely. You should mediate your family law issues, whether those are divorce issues or post-judgment issues. Mediation is an excellent way to reach resolution without spending a ton of money and without going to court a bunch of times and arguing left and right over every issue. Recently, I had a case, and it looked like it was heading towards litigation, and the parties were really far apart on every issue. They had financial issues, which involved real estate holdings, business interests, stock options, retirement accounts, and the parties could not see eye to eye on any of these issues. Early in the process, my adversary and I discussed going to mediation, and we selected a great mediator, and our clients agreed to go to mediation, and literally, within three sessions of mediation, we resolved the case. We resolved the entire case, which would have taken over a year and may have been a ten-fold in costs to litigate. The parties were able to come up with creative solutions with our help, of course, and the mediator’s help, which the court would’ve never ever implemented in a case such as this. Find even more information on Alexander Suliman, Stockholm.
On 24 February 2022, the CJEU issued its first judgment on domestic workers. In case C-389/20, TGSS (Chômage des employés de maison), the CJEU held that the exclusion of this category of workers from access to social security benefits constitutes indirect discrimination on the ground of sex, since it affects almost exclusively women. Domestic workers have long constituted an invisible and rather underexplored category of workers within labour law scholarship and policy-making, which has only recently gained some attention in the wake of the adoption of the historic ILO Domestic Workers Convention No. 189 in 2011. Whereas a part of the scholarship has noticed that EU equality law could be used to challenge the long-standing exclusions of domestic workers from national labour law and social security system (see, notably, the contribution of Vera Pavlou, and the work of Nuria Ramos-Martin, Ana Munoz-Ruiz & Niels Jansen in the context of the PSH-Quality project), the issue has never reached the Court of Justice up to now.