As the Gazette briefly reported, the European Commission published its new data protection legislation last week, providing a fresh regulatory structure with which all lawyers and law firms will have to become familiar. I shall focus on that below.

But, first, the most important piece of legal gossip in Europe. The Liberal Democrat member of the European parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber, and former vice president of the European parliament, Diana Wallis, a solicitor who has been a great friend to the legal profession, has suddenly resigned. She had stood two days before for election as president of the European parliament as an independent, outside of the party groupings, and was pipped into third place by one vote (the winner was Martin Schultz, a German socialist). On losing, she almost immediately announced her resignation as MEP. Some British newspapers spitefully pointed out that her successor was likely to be her husband, Stewart Arnold, since he came second in the Liberal Democrat list in the last European elections. In her letter to her constituents, she said she wanted to turn a page and take a break from politics. She was the reporter on a number of significant issues for lawyers - all now being hastily reassigned - and will be greatly missed.

On to data protection. This has been mostly reported in the UK press around the right to be forgotten, which is a welcome addition to a citizen’s armoury. ‘Putting individuals in control of their personal data’ is how the Commission describes it. For a European story, it has been surprisingly positively reported, even if businesses keep saying that it is anti-business.

In summary, the Commission has published two draft legislative instruments: a regulation setting out a general EU framework for data protection (and replacing directive 95/46/EC, which is the current legislative instrument for the protection of personal data in Europe); and a directive on protecting personal data processed for the purposes of prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of criminal offences and related judicial activities.

I shall focus here mainly on the provision covering lawyers acting as lawyers. The need to take account of legal professional privilege and confidentiality (‘professional secrecy’ on the continent) has been given a boost. Article 84 of the draft regulation says that member states may - and it is a pity that it is not a ‘must’ - adopt specific rules covering the investigative powers of relevant competent authorities against ‘controllers or processors’, which includes lawyers, when we ‘are subject… to an obligation of professional secrecy or other equivalent obligations of secrecy’. In other words, in certain circumstances professional secrecy can be protected against the supervisory authority. The option to draw up specific rules kicks in only ‘where this is necessary and proportionate to reconcile the right of the protection of personal data with the obligation of secrecy’. The rules can also apply only to personal data, which we have received from or obtained in an activity covered by the secrecy obligation. It is a shame that professional secrecy cannot take absolute precedence over data protection, but must be subject to the test of necessity and proportionality - but it is better than nothing. We at the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe will now look at the wording of this and other draft articles to see what improvements can be made.

For all that businesses have complained about the burdens on them, the Commission partly sells the proposals on their contribution to economic growth. It says ‘concerns about privacy are amongthe most frequent reasons for people not buying goods and services online… trust in such services is vital to stimulate growth in the EU economy and the competitiveness of European industry’. It claims that the recent hacking of gaming industry client data would no longer happen under the new rules.

It also promotes the new consistency that the draft regulation will bring. It uses the different approaches to Google map photographs of people in the street - such photos are allowed in one member state, but not in another - to state that these inconsistencies would also disappear in the new EU-wide approach.

Will the European parliament in due course receive a call from Diana Wallis asking it to delete all the data it holds on her, so that she can be forgotten? (Rather let us hope will she one day make a triumphant return!)

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs