The Layered Links Model

• Department of Law

The EUI Private Law Working Group hosts a presentation by Emmanouil (Manolis) Bougiakiotis, first year Researcher in Law at the EUI. In this hybrid event Bougiakiotis will be presenting his paper "The layered links model: an alternative approach to international privacy regulation", as well as a development of this work.

Abstract  

For a long time, governments, civil society, and scholars have called for the harmonisation of international rules on privacy to avoid conflicting obligations and make the most of the economic benefits of free data flows. Despite this wide consensus on the need for harmonisation, states have not made much progress. The reason for this is that although there might be widespread agreement on certain issues, states diverge on certain issues that they deem too sensitive to compromise. Since an international treaty on privacy would necessarily involve such a compromise, they refrain from it. However, this does not have to be the case. This presentation offers an alternative to traditional harmonisation using a hybrid between private and public international law called the layered links model. This model draws on the concept of connecting factors in private international law (links) and categorises them in terms of their importance to states. Based on this categorisation the model enables the creation of an international treaty that has different rules depending on the intensity of the interests of each contracting party in a certain dispute. Beyond presenting the work already published on the subject, we aim to foster a discussion on the relationship of this model with public and private international law and to examine its capacity to facilitate harmonisation in other fields.