Patrick Penninckx, Head of the Information Society Department of the Council of Europe addressed as a keynote speaker the Digital Law, Technology and Data Protection Congress organised online by the Opice Blum Academy from Brazil on 21 July 2020. In his presentation entitled “Digital rights in a rapidly changing environment” Mr. Penninckx reflected on the challenges to human rights posed by the rapid spread of information technologies and the latest concerns related to the spread of COVID-19 pandemic and explained the Council of Europe guidance to states during the sanitary crisis. He further presented the relevant Council of Europe work on data protection, cybercrime, artificial intelligence and its partnership with business companies that address these challenges in an international multilateral framework.

In particular, he emphasised the advantages for Brazil of joining the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, to which the country is observer since 2018. He also acknowledged Brazil’s progress in acceding to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, initiated in 2019, which will allow the country, when accession completed, to cooperate effectively on cybercrime and electronic evidence with the continuously growing network of other Parties and develop capacity building programmes implemented by the Cybercrime Programme Office of the Council of Europe.

• Presentation “Digital rights in a rapidly changing environment”
• Data Protection website
• Cybercrime website