Protection of Individuals in the light of EU Regulation 2016/679 on the Protection of Natural Persons with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of such Data

The process of establishing normative acts in the European Union does not occur out of nowhere, but in the context of specific social needs. That was the case of the genesis of establishing legal regulations regarding the protection of personal data in the European Union. Socio-economic integration, which resulted from the functioning of internal market in the European Union, has led to a significant increase in cross-border transfers of personal data. It led to situation in which various economic operators or state institutions of the Member States have increasingly processed the personal data of the EU citizens. Within time, these data have become an equally valuable commodity - not to say even more valuable – compared to goods and services (Costa-Cabral, and Lynskey Orla, 2017, p. 11). Making use of personal data on a large scale especially by public and private entities, associations and companies over time has posed a threat to the security of personal data. This has made it necessary to introduce legal protection measures for personal data in the European Union that would eliminate the negative effects of any form of personal data processing. The purpose of this article is to evaluate legal regulations regarding legislative protection of personal data in the European Union against the background of EU Regulation 2016/679 of the European Parliament and the Council with respect to the protection of individuals due to processing personal data, its free movement and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (hereinafter referred to as Regulation 2016/679). Due to initially adopted purpose of the considerations there arose a problem which was formulated in the form of a question: Do the legal measures introduced by the Regulation constitute an effective tool for the protection of personal data in the event of a violation of the law by personal data administrators and entities while processing such data? The presented purpose of the considerations and the research problem determined the order of the analysis.