From: EUObserver.com

By Nikolaj Nielsen

BRUSSELS – After 18 months of intense negotiations, MEPs spearheading the European Data Protection regulation have reached a compromise.

The heavily lobbied draft bill, which included a record-breaking 4,000 amendments, is now set for a committee orientation vote in the next plenary session in Strasbourg.

“I think it is a huge success, I really think we achieved something that many people doubted we would be able to achieve,” German Green Jan Albrecht told reporters in Brussels on Thursday (17 October).

Albrecht is confident of a ‘Yes’ vote, scheduled for Monday (21 October) evening, after obtaining a broad consensus on the hundred or so compromises in the text.

All the political groups, he noted, have backed the version.

“It’s a win-win situation for European companies, for European citizens, for consumers of the digital market in Europe,” he said.

The MEPs are pushing to get an agreement before the May 2014 elections.

The document will bypass plenary debate and vote in order to kick start inter-institutional negotiations to reach a more timely agreement.

But Paris-based Internet campaign group La Quadrature du Net described the parliament’s tactic as an “obscure hijacking of the democratic debate” because of the closed-door nature of such meetings.

“The only objective of the negotiating team in this manoeuvre seems to be able to boast about this regulation being the best achievement ever reached in the field of data protection, even if that is yet far from the case and could even get worse,” noted the group in a statement.

The regulation, which aims to create a single set of binding data protection rules across the EU, will replace the 1995 EU directive currently in use.

Everything, with the exception of national security and police and justice cooperation, falls under its scope.

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