Interests
EU and global data protection law; EU law; fundamental rights law; public international law; private international law
CV / Biography
I live in Brussels, Belgium. I am professor of law and co-chair of the Brussels Privacy Hub at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Brussels. I am also an associate professor in the Law Faculty of the University of Copenhagen, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Law of the London School of Economics.
I am also Senior Privacy Counsel in the Brussels office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. I previously founded and led the European data protection law practice at Hunton & Williams in Brussels, and also worked at the law firms of Morrison & Foerster (Brussels) and Gleiss Lutz (Stuttgart and Frankfurt).
I am editor-in-chief of the law journal 'International Data Privacy Law' published by Oxford University Press. My writings have been cited by leading international courts, including the Court of Justice of the European Union, the German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof), and a leading US federal district court.
I hold a doctorate in law from Tilburg University (the Netherlands), an LL.M. from New York University (NYU), a US law degree (J.D.) from Notre Dame Law School, and a B.A. from Lawrence University. I have been a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Legal Studies and at Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge, and at the Oxford Internet Institute.
In July 2016 I taught a specialized course at the summer school on the law of the European Union of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute in Florence. The course was entitled "The Future of the Internet and the Global Reach of EU Law in the Context of Online Data Protection and Internet Governance". The text of the course will be published in the Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law.
In July 2015 I taught a special course in the private international law section of the summer session of the Hague Academy of International Law. The course was entitled "Data Protection Law and International Commercial Arbitration", and was presented together with Daniel Cooper. The text of the course will be published in the Recueil des Cours/Collected Courses of the Hague Academy.
I have been active in international organizations such as the Council of Europe, the OECD, and UNCITRAL, and in various expert groups of the European Commission. I was chair for ten years of the Task Force on Privacy and the Protection of Personal Data of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).
On 26 June, 2015 I was awarded the "Best Consumer Supporter" award and medal by the Consumer Affairs Agency of the government of Japan. In June 2010 I was awarded the Burton Award for Excellence in Legal Writing of the Burton Foundation for my article "Onward Transfer of Personal Data Under the U.S. Safe Harbor Framework," Bloomberg BNA's Privacy & Security Law Report, August 17, 2009.
I am also a member of the EU-US Privacy Bridges Group; the Data Privacy Advisory Group of UN Global Pulse; the Advisory Board of BNA's Privacy and Security Law Report; the editorial board of the German legal journal "Multimedia und Recht" (Verlag C.H. Beck); the academic advisory board of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Datenschutz und Datensicherheit (German Society for Data Protection and Data Security); and the editorial board of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology (Oxford University Press).
Further information is available at my personal web site www.kuner.com.
