ESOMAR, FEDMA, EFAMRO Joint statement on Guidelines 04/2021 on codes of conduct as tools for transfers by the EDPB
1 October 2021 – This statement is co-signed by ESOMAR, FEDMA and EFAMRO without prejudice to any additional individual statement that might be submitted by the respective organizations and which we recommend to keep into consideration.
As an initial remark, ESOMAR, FEDMA and EFAMRO wish to welcome and support EDPB’s intention of providing, through the Guidelines, practical guidance for code owners, for codes that are amended and/or expanded in their scope with a view to also being used as a tool for transfers.
We believe that the Guidelines have the potential to streamline the procedures involved in the assessment process, however further clarification is sought on the general validity mechanism and, on the criteria, to determine what supervisory authority will be competent to accredit the monitoring body, e.g. paragraph 19 of the Guidelines.
We wish to underline to the European Data Protection Board that currently many market players consider compliance to the GDPR as significantly impacting their business operations. They view Codes of Conducts often as additional burdens unless Code owners demonstrate business benefits to sign up to them. Many of our members have indicated, for example, that it is their ability to facilitate cross border work with other business partners that makes the Code useful and interesting for them to sign up to. For some sectors, and therefore some Code owners, the project is only viable when these aspects are reasonably certain to be approved provided, they meet the requirements established by the EDPB.
