Too critical? MEPs vote out Data Protection Commissioner Wiewiórowski

It was a close race: The EU Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) selected Bruno Gencarelli as the preferred candidate for the role of European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) on Thursday following a hearing of the four candidates by secret ballot. The current head of international data flows and data protection in the EU Commission's Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers received 32 votes. Incumbent Wojciech Wiewiórowski, who over the past five years has repeatedly put his finger in the wounds when it comes to safeguarding privacy in the EU, was only able to convince 26 MEPs.

François Pellegrini, former Vice-President of the French data protection authority CNIL, is in between with 30 votes. Anna Pouliou, Data Protection Officer of the EU Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), received eleven votes in favour. The LIBE Committee still has to agree on the appointment with the Council of Ministers. Wiewiórowski and Gencarelli were initially seen as the most promising candidates.

Wiewiórowski: "Microsoft 365 illegal with authorities"

Wiewiórowski recently made headlines with his firm stance in the dispute over the use of Microsoft 365 by the Commission and its subordinate authorities. He classified the use of the cloud-based Office package as illegal in light of the European Court of Justice's "Schrems II ruling" and recently called on the Brussels-based government institution to immediately suspend all resulting data flows to third countries. Gencarelli is likely to be less critical of his current employer.

Wiewiórowski defended the principle of data minimization even in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and criticized serious shortcomings in the planned chat control. As recently as December, he rebuked the Commission for using particularly sensitive personal data to target advertising for the controversial surveillance tool. In 2020, the native Pole complained that Europol investigators had exceeded their powers and acted unlawfully by collecting and analyzing unmanageable amounts of data. In 2022, he filed a lawsuit against the EU police authority's license for mass surveillance and did not shy away from other legal disputes.

Left-liberal camp was in favor of Pellegrini

Wiewiórowski has recently been less well-liked in his own authority. According to reports, employees are said to have felt thwarted. MPs from the liberal and left-wing spectrum were also surprised that he was less committed to opposing potentially illegitimate surveillance on some issues, such as in his supportive submission on the new agreement on the transfer of passenger data between the EU and Canada. A camp ranging from the liberal Renew faction to the Greens and the left ultimately supported Pellegrini, whose reputation as an assertive advocate of fundamental rights at the CNIL preceded him. He was also able to score points with this group as a computer scientist.

The Group of the European People's Party (EPP), to which the CDU and CSU belong, was in favor of Gencarelli, who led the negotiations on the controversial successor agreement to the EU-US Privacy Shield on the Commission side. Apparently, the Conservatives were followed by MEPs further to the right. In answers to parliamentarians' questions, Gencarelli promised the "further development of a concrete and solution-oriented approach" to data protection. His position on data retention? Unclear: he wants to contribute responsively to data protection-compliant solutions for the EU's evolving legislative agenda, such as "access to and retention of data by law enforcement authorities".

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