Università Roma Tre

The course "Protection of personal data and fundamental rights – Privacy law clinic" (7 ECTS), within the scientific-disciplinary sector IUS/09 "Public law", aims at involving students (obviously in a limited number, for the best usability of the course) in carrying out practical activities, based on the theoretical notions that will be provided in the first part of the course, according to the "learning by doing" method.
What urges the activation of a Course on this topic - which is linked to the Postgraduate Master’s in "Data protection officer and Privacy expert", organised under the patronage of the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali - is the awareness that the fundamental rights of the person are now a consolidated heritage of the European legal tradition, both at the level of individual national systems, and the European Union as a whole. In fact, it deals with a multilevel protection of fundamental rights, made possible by the numerous constitutional clauses that allow the opening of individual national legal systems to international and EU law.
In this context, the right to the protection of personal data, codified at legislative level in the Personal Data Protection Code (Legislative Decree no. 196/2003), represents a fundamental right of the individual, as a direct expression of individual dignity, thanks also to the contribution coming from the European Union system and the system of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Therefore, the right to privacy, understood both as protection of confidentiality and as protection of personal data, has now reached a solid legal foundation. This is primarily thanks to the provision expressed in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Nice (respectively dedicated to the respect of private and family life, and to the protection of personal data), as well as to the valuable case law of both the Court of Justice of EU (most recently, the well-known ruling on Privacy Shield, the so-called Schrems II judgment), and the Court of Strasbourg. Secondly, by virtue of the interventions produced by the EU legislation starting from Directive 95/46/EC - implemented in Italy by Law no. 675/1996 and then by Legislative Decree no. 196/2003, the so-called Privacy Code - up to the Regulation EU 2016/679, which repealed the aforementioned Directive and carried out a significant work of standardisation of the regulatory landscape of the Member States on the subject.
The first part of the course will focus on the EU and national framework of the discipline, within which the individual issues will be addressed both from a theoretical point of view and through practical cases. In fact, students will be asked to answer real cases and questions - appropriately disguised - that are daily asked to the Office for Relations with the Public of the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali and to confront, also divided into teams, in simulations of process having as object, obviously, privacy issues or in the drafting and revision of the most recurrent documents such as privacy policy, notifications of violation of the processing of personal data, processes for the acquisition of consent.
This will provide students with the necessary tools to acquire specific skills in the field of personal data protection, functional to a possible future job, both in the public and private sectors.