In a judgment that few saw coming – and which many are now saying will have global repercussions for months to come – the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that public so-called 'beneficial owner registries, containing the details of those who own companies, financial accounts and other assets, are in breach of these owners' fundamental rights.

Campaigners against the way the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA is being enforced throughout Europe have begun writing to EU officials – and making this  correspondence public – to ask why it's taking so long for the EU to respond to questions formally raised more than a year ago over FATCA's compatibility with EU data protection regulations.

In July of 2018,members of the European Parliament resoundingly approved a resolution which supported the right of Europe's estimated 300,000 "accidental Americans"  to be allowed to cast off their American citizenship (and thus their taxation by the U.S.) more easily and cheaply than is currently possible under U.S. law. (The vote was 470 to 43, with 26 abstentions.) 

A top official at Lithuania's State Data Protection Inspectorate (SDPI) has told the founder of the main European advocacy organization representing "accidental Americans" that his department shares the Association of Accidental Americans' belief that a recent EU Court of Justice (CJEU) decision had "indeed made a change" in the way personal data transfers to third countries should be carried out.

The Association of Accidental Americans has filed an appeal with the Luxembourg Administrative Tribunal against a decision by the Luxembourg tax authorities not to halt transfers of the personal data of Americans resident in the country to the U.S., in compliance with FATCA.

Mishcon de Reya, the London-based law firm that has been a hard-to-miss presence in European data protection matters over the past year, on Tuesday said it had filed "a lengthy GDPR complaint in two languages (English and French) with the Luxembourg National Data Protection Commission," as it sought to "bring together the concerns raised by the European data protection community and relevant European judgements."

A report published on Wednesday that said an unknown number of Austrian citizens who lacked U.S. citizenship or residency had received U.S. coronavirus stimulus checks has drawn an immediate and unambiguous response from expats who have yet to receive their money, as well as from one of the most outspoken critics of the EU's existing data protection regime.

Last Wednesday, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced that it expects imminently to issue its decision in a closely-watched challenge over data protection violations that a U.S.-born, UK-resident complainant alleges have resulted from the way HMRC has forwarded her personal information to the U.S., in compliance with that country’s FATCA legislation.

Correspondence and other documents having to do with the way the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA was agreed upon, and is now enforced by EU governments – along with similar materials having to do with the OECD’s more recent automatic exchange of information (AEOI) regime known as the Common Reporting Standard – have been published by a campaigning lawyer with London’s Mishcon de Reya law firm.

A ruling last week by the UK's Supreme Court, in favor of a plaintiff who claimed that data protection laws had been broken in the transfer of her son's personal data to U.S. authorities, is being seen as potentially precedent-setting, as it is said to be the first such case involving questions about the legal transfer of personal data from Britain to the United States since the introduction of the GDPR across Europe in 2018.