General
Holiday Arrangements
We wish all our clients and colleagues a peaceful and restful holiday break and a happy new year. We will reopen on the 8th January 2024.
How to Read the McAleese Report into the Magdalen Laundries
Preface The McAleese Report was published on 5th February 2013. It had been commissioned following a complaint to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) resulted in the then Secretary General of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Sean Alymard, attending in Switzerland in May 2011 to address specific claims of state involvement in an organised system of forced labour and mistreatment. The Irish State’s representative specifically denied the facts as they had been presented by the Justice for Magdalen’s research group. […]
Ireland’s role in Myanmar atrocities
The Government and military forces of Myanmar are the central focus of the UN Human Rights Council mission report on the plight of the Rohingya people of Myanmar. However, the report cites Facebook’s involvement and states:“The extent to which Facebook posts and messages have led to real-world discrimination and violence must be independently and thoroughly examined.” Ostensibly, it falls to Ireland to initiate an examination as suggested by the Human Rights Council mission because the Facebook accounts established for the […]
The UN Human Rights Council
Urgent questions for the Data Protection Commission. A) Do you know that the United Nations Human Rights Council has deplored the failures of “Facebook” in connection with the facilitation of genocide by the Myanmar military in Rakhine district in Myanmar? B) Do you not know that, under international criminal law, the commander of a military force is, in principal, responsible for the crimes of his forces? C) Do you know that General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander of the Myanmar […]
Google’s policeman
It is very nice to have a good infographic. See this infographic to understand (some of) the GDPR. It is worth examining the infographic and contrasting it with Google’s latest boo-boo. Sorry, that boo-boo is not recent; its old news. See it HERE and HERE. Significantly, that too, a belated recognition that the horse has bolted, was a feature of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. Every detail of that embroglio was long in the public domain before it was seen as […]
GDPR and Brexit (whatever that means)
There is probably a book yet to be written on the interplay between the General Data Protection Regulation and Brexit, but some elements can be seen now. Unusually, the GDPR permits the introduction of some national legislation on data protection issues. They include occasions where a legal obligation mandates the processing of personal data, or the processing relates to a public interest task, or the processing is carried out by a body with official authority. There are others. As a […]
GDPR; The Peril of holding data without good title
If you belong to some form of “circulating library” of personal data, less than one year from now you will encounter an excruciating dilemma. Under Article 14 of the GDPR you must notify the data subjects, whose data you have just received, of that fact and of your intentions with regard to the data. If you fail to do that you will be in breach of the Regulation. If you do it, the data subjects may direct you to delete […]
Phishing Fraud Warning
Phishing warning- People are apparently receiving these emails purporting to be relating to McGarr Solicitors from a domain called solicitors.ie. They’re not from us. Don’t click them- just delete.
One Year Plus One Month
There is a revolution coming; in fact it has arrived. The revolution is favourable to persons, to individuals. A person is, in principle, entitled to control of her data. If government or commercial interests wish to use that data they must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR is current law and comes into effect on 25th May 2018. That date represents a cliff-edge. That edge has been made more severe due to Brexit. Brexit, as the […]
Brexit
“Brexit” is a neologism and a portmanteau word. It is one we have become familiar with in recent months. I doubt it is in any dictionary, being too new. Nevertheless, looking things up in dictionaries can be useful, even though you can’t find the word you are searching for. In connection with Brexit, “nominalism” is worth a look, about which my dictionary commences – “… a denial of the existence of abstract entities of any kind…”. Brexit is surely an […]