Comparison Of Turkish Data Protection Law With EU Directive 95/46/EC

Turkey's newly enacted Law on Protection of Personal Data ("Law") is based on EU Directive 95/46/EC ("Directive") on protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Although the Law is mainly based on the Directive, it is not identical and it differs from the Directive in certain points. The main difference between the Directive and the Law is that Directive focuses on the act of processing personal data rather than the parties to such processing; whereas the Law mainly provides rights and imposes obligations on the parties of a data processing act. Nevertheless this difference also arises due to the nature of these two different pieces of legislation, as the Directive is a supra-national regulation and the Law is a national regulation that is directly binding and applicable without requiring further need for another law. Below please find significant differences of the Law and the Directive: