Professor Filipe Brito Bastos Cited in the Historic WhatsApp Case

The case WhatsApp Ireland Ltd v. European Data Protection Board (C 97/23 P), currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union, focuses on issues arising from the administrative procedure that led to the imposition of a fine on WhatsApp by the Irish data protection authority. As several national data protection authorities, including the Portuguese one, initially opposed the position of the Data Protection Commission, the European Data Protection Board, a European agency, was called upon to resolve the disagreement.

This procedure, established under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is just one of many administrative procedures in European Union law that involve both national and European authorities. Due to their complexity, courts face significant challenges in reviewing decisions made through these procedures, known as “composite administrative procedures.”

The Opinion of Advocate General Ćapeta in the WhatsApp Case references the recently published book by Professor Filipe Brito Bastos on this subject, “Judging Composite Decision-Making: the Transformation of European Administrative Law“.

This is just one of many examples of the international impact of research conducted at NOVA School of Law.