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On the 7th August 2017, the UK’s Government Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport issued a Statement of Intent (the Statement) outlining its planned reforms of the UK’s data protection laws which are to be implemented by the Data Protection Bill (the Bill). The Statement anticipates the UK’s departure from the EU and makes it clear that following this, the Bill will transpose the General Data Protection Regulation (the GDPR) into domestic law, stressing the importance of continued efficiency of data flow between the UK and the EU in a post-Brexit world.

This week, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) ruled that the EU-US Safe Harbor Decision is invalid in Case C-362/14 (the “Schrems” case).  This followed a similar opinion from its Advocate General, which also sets out the facts of the case.

The decision will impact businesses that rely on the EU-US Safe Harbor to legitimize their storage in, or access from, the US of personal data that is subject to EU data protection rules. It could affect cloud service providers, companies that use cloud services, intragroup shared services and any other export flows to the US that rely on Safe Harbor for data transfer.

In this post we look at what the CJEU decided and on what grounds, and what affected businesses should do next.