The Personal Data Protection Principles

The dissertation aims at identifying and analysing the personal data protection principles operating in the Lithuanian legal system. These principles are neither directly declared by the Lithuanian legislator nor clearly defined and examined by national courts or in the national legal doctrine. The author’s position is that, in the absence of personal data protection principles, legal rules regulating the processing of personal data may not be properly and systematically interpreted and applied, which leads to the aim of establishing underlying legal guidelines that would determine and penetrate the rules on personal data processing. The personal data protection principles are derived from the explicit and implicit legal regulatory framework for the processing of personal data in Lithuania taking into account the concept of personal data and constitutional values which are protected by regulating the processing of personal data, i.e. the right to privacy, honour and dignity of an individual, etc. The dissertation demonstrates that there are general legal principles operating in the area of the legal protection of personal data (i.e. justice, reasonableness, fairness, carefulness, transparency, proportionality), as well as reveals the contextual content of these legal principles related to personal data protection. Moreover, on the basis of the existing legal regulation in Lithuania, including other legal principles operating in the area of the legal protection of personal data, the most specific personal data protection principle, namely the principle of the participation of the data subject in the processing of personal data, is derived. In the dissertation, insights into the personal data protection principles are concretised by analysing the determinative manifestations of these legal principles in the content and implementation of the obligations of the data controller and the rights of the data subject