Launch of the EU funded PACE project (Creating Privacy Awareness in Civil Enforcement Project)

On 18th October, in Athens, Greece, we had the launch of the PACE Project. The project PACE aims to contribute to the effective and coherent application of EU data protection rules in civil enforcement. In specific, the project aims to:

1. Create a solid evidence base on data protection challenges in civil enforcement proceedings, and on the training needs of bailiffs in this area.
2. Train 52 trainers from 26 Member States (Denmark is exempted) and EU candidate countries from the Western Balkan region.
3. Train 300 bailiffs in the 26 Member States and the EU candidate countries from the Western Balkan region on EU data protection in civil enforcement.
4. Create e-courses on data protection
5. Strengthen the activities in the field of data protection and civil enforcement with the key stakeholders across the EU and the EU candidate countries from the Western Balkan region.

The project is organised by UIHJ in close cooperation with the Centre for European Constitutional Law (CECL). It is the third project that is organised together with CECL , after the ENABLE project and the Enforcement atlas Project.

The project responds to needs that emanate from these projects. There will be three key target groups: first the enforcement agents and their national professional associations in the 26 Member States; secondly the International and European Union of Judicial Officers and thirdly the training providers at national and EU level.

As a first step, the Training Needs Assessment (TNA), through an EU wide survey and expert interviews, will give an overview of the training needs of enforcement agents in data protection. Based on this TNA, the project, through a Training Committee with experts in training and enforcement, a project training strategy for trainers and enforcement agents will be developed. As a next step, transnational trainings and e-courses are to be developed. After these first steps, the project intends to design and deliver a training to trainers (ToT program), of three 3-days transnational workshops for in total 52 trainers; the design and delivery of training to enforcement agents through ten 2-day transnational webinars (in total we plan to have 300 judicial officers across the EU trained; the delivery of asynchronous training through a minimum of 3 e-courses for in total 60-80 participants. UIHJ and CECL both are of opinion that this training is also of interest for the colleagues from the EU candidate member states. For that reason, in addition to the enforcement agents of the EU member states, also the enforcement agents of EU candidate member states from the Western Balkan region are invited.