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« The Pursuit...or Not...of ISO 27001/ISMS/BS7799 Certification | Main | EU Data Protection Audits Active and Anticipated »

EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC: Member Countries

Multi-national organizations doing business in Europe must know and understand not only their obligations to protect personally identifiable information (PII) under the European Union (EU) Data Protection Directive 95/45/EC, but they must also know and understand the data protection laws within each of the EU member countries.

Did you know that there are now 27 EU member countries? I was recently speaking with a couple of lawyers from some multi-national financial organizations and they did not.

Do not assume your lawyers have all the current information; this woud be a good conversation starter for information security and privacy leaders in communicating with their legal counsel.

In case you haven't kept up with the countries that are a part of the EU, here is a very brief history of the member countries:


* 1957: 6 original members (initially called the European Economic Community) - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg

* 1973: 9 members- France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom

* 1981: 10 members - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece

* 1986: 12 members - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, Portugal, Spain

* 1995: 15 members - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Finland, Sweden

* 2004: 25 members - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Finland, Sweden, Cyprus, Czech Republic Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia

* 2007: 27 members - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Finland, Sweden, Cyprus, Czech Republic Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania

Currently Croatia and Turkey are in accession negotiations.

A candidate country is the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Potential candidate countries are Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia.

If you are a multi-national organization with customers, consumers or offices in these countries be sure you know their data protection (privacy) laws and regulations.

Here is a good site for you to bookmark to keep up with the EU member status.

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Posted by Rebecca Herold on August 22, 2007 11:31 AM |

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.