Bill must reform Belgian privacy watchdog GBA after complaints about lack of independence | iHLN

This is apparent from a bill that news site Politico could view. The European Commission took steps against the Belgian government in June last year after complaints about the GBA. These were submitted to the competent European Commissioner Didier Reynders, responsible for Justice. According to the complaints, our privacy watchdog is not sufficiently independent.

At the end of last year, a top woman of the GBA also resigned. “I’ve done everything I can to prevent the conflict of interest and the lack of integrity, but everyone lets go. I don’t want to be complicit in this,” Alexandra Jaspar said at the time.

Frank Robben was one of the people who were the subject of the complaints. “I regret that the discussion in some media focuses mainly on my person and is conducted indiscriminately,” he said last year. “It is a pity that some people unjustly and wrongly attribute other intentions to me” than contribute in all independence to the proper functioning of the GBA, he also said.

Robben is the chief executive of the Crossroads Bank for Social Security. He is also head of Smals, a non-profit organization that provides IT services to governments. He is also administrator-general of the eHealth platform of the Belgian government. According to the European privacy law GDPR, privacy watchdogs must “remain free from external influence”. Robben was also discredited at the time of Qvax’s launch.

There was also a complaint against Bart Preneel, professor of cryptography at KU Leuven. He sat simultaneously for the privacy watchdog and the Information Security Committee of the Crossroads Bank for Social Security, but in the meantime resigned from the latter.

According to Michel’s bill, that Politico looked in, Robben and Preneel will be able to remain at the GBA, as members of an external panel of experts. They would then no longer be members of the privacy watchdog. Members of the privacy watchdog should no longer be members of parliament or work for the government in the future. In this way, both could no longer be members of the GBA, but could still issue advice.

Although our country had to provide a solution to the problem by the European Commission by last Wednesday, according to Politico it did not yet have access to the bill, but it did receive an answer. According to ‘The standardParliament and State Secretary Michel point at each other for not meeting the deadline. “Kristien Van Vaerenbergh (N-VA), chairman of the Justice Committee, thinks Michel has delayed unnecessarily long, Michel says that only parliament can appoint and dismiss members of the GBA,” the newspaper writes.