Analyses of selected legal issues related to personal data security and the inter-relationship between personal data protection law in Africa and Europe

It has been well documented that the unprecedented use of computerized technology to process personal information in the 1960s in Europe and the US led to concerns about individual privacy, which resulted in the introduction of a branch of law regulating the processing of personal data, known today as personal data protection law. Over the years, this relatively new domain of law has introduced rights and obligations which appear to have the capacity to regulate a vast variety of domains of activity as long as they involve processing information about humans. This publication-based thesis regroups five published/accepted articles which generally seek to appreciate the significance of rights and obligations of this branch of law within the EU and Africa. The Chapters in this thesis focus on a limited variety of selected themes in data protection law. The first Chapter addresses the lack of clarification of the meaning of a breach of security in EU data protection law, and the second Chapter examines the level of personal data security protection guaranteed by African regional data protection instruments. The third and fourth Chapters both explore the potential effect of the transposition of EU data protection legal standards into African soil, respectively focusing on the processing of public examination results and on curtailing the prevalence of teacher-student abuses on university campuses. The fifth and final Chapter presents a comparative analysis between the EU GDPR, the Ghanaian Data Protection Act 2012 and Kenyan Data Protection Act 2019 in their approaches to consolidate the OECD data protection principles. The thesis conclusively finds that transposing EU data protection standards into Africa could help regulate some under-regulated domains of activity. But the continent's institutions still need to do a lot in terms of harmonising and promoting personal data protection law among its countries.