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Personal Data Protection under Turkish and
European Legislation*
Att. Eda Uludere
Introduction and General Legislative Framework
Protection of personal data has become increasingly important in
the second half of the 20th century onwards, and more strikingly so in
the last decade. In European context, such protection is realized
through a twofold system; namely, the Council of Europe (“CoE”) pro-
tection of personal data scheme, and the protection enshrined in the
European Union’s (“EU”) acquis communautaire. The CoE’s system is
comprised of Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights
(“ECHR”) on one hand, and the Convention for the Protection of
Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data
(“Convention No. 108”) on the other. Although all 47 of the CoE
Member States, including Turkey, are parties to the ECHR, Turkey is
not a State Party to Convention No. 108 as of the date of this article,
although Turkey signed it on 28.01.1981. As for the EU framework,
adopted in 1985, Directive 95/46/EC (“Directive”) is the primary piece
of legislation that governs the protection of personal data 1. However, a
new regulation referred to as the General Data Protection Regulation
(“GDPR”) is on its way to include the impacts of technological inno-
vations such as social media and cloud computing2 .
396 NEWSLETTER 2015
* Article of December 2015
1 Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the
protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free move-
ment of such data, for the full text please see:
content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:31995L0046&from=EN (date of access: 30.12.2015).
2 The New European General Data Protection Regulation,
Data+Protection+Privacy/The+New+European+General+Data+Protection+Regulation (date of
access: 30.12.2015).