This chapter analyses how the concept of personal data protection has evolved in Japan and its current legal regime. Data protection in Japan is assessed from a European perspective as that is the region with the highest level of protection worldwide. Japan lags behind the European standard because during WWII, organised neighbourhood associations encouraged community members surveying each other. However, the digitisation of citizens’ information, scandals of massive data breach and expectations from the European Union prompted Japan to enforce data privacy protection. The chapter then compares the Japanese approach with that of its neighbouring country South Korea as both countries are democracies that decided to enhance their personal data protection regime in order to be recognised by the European Commission as having an equivalent level of protection as the European Union, but they chose different paths to do it. South Korea is more aggressive in safeguarding data privacy than Japan; it has established an independence governing body to enforce and supervise data protection laws even though it does not strictly enforce it.

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This paper describes the different solutions used by China, the United States and the European Union to access electronic evidence for criminal investigations and the problems raised by their different approaches. The unstoppable trend to create mechanisms that allow authorities from one State to request data directly from a service provider located in another State is assessed together with the human rights challenges it poses and the need for the inclusion of certain safeguards in this kind of initiatives. The Second Protocol to the Budapest Convention is also analyzed as a recently negotiated multilateral solution to tackle this issue.

This paper analyzes the repercussions for the States of the non-enforcement of the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union in environmental matters. The mechanism of article 260 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union is examined, that is, the sanctions (penalty payments and lump sums) that can be dictated when a judgment of an infringement proceeding is not respected. The possibility of imposing periodic penalty payments when a State does not comply with interim measures ordered by the Court (as it happened for the first time in the Białowieża case) is also studied.

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