Flying from the EU to the US: necessary extraterritorial legal diffusion in the US-EU Passenger Name Record agreement

Abstract

The US-EU Passenger Name Record (PNR) agreement provides guidance on processing and transferring EU citizens’ airline passenger data to the US Department of Homeland Security for counterterrorism and security purposes. The US and the EU have struggled to conclude an agreement that satisfies all their concerns. Different conceptual approaches to security and counterterrorism, and privacy and data protection, have rendered the bilateral negotiations particularly onerous. To better safeguard the fundamental right to data protection for EU citizens, EU authorities should push for the PNR agreement to incorporate more EU data protection standards, especially in view of recent Court of Justice of the European Union developments. If incorporated into the agreement, this could be seen as a necessary form of legal diffusion of EU data protection standards beyond its borders.