The law and practice of international organizations’ interactions with personal data protection domestic regulation: At the crossroads between the international and domestic legal orders

The development and overlap of legal frameworks on personal data protection, on the one hand, by states and regional frameworks like the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and on the other hand, by International Organizations, raises fundamental questions about their coexistence and interaction, including questions concerning the interaction between the domestic and the international legal orders. This article considers how these different legal frameworks come into interaction and tension with each other, as well as how these tensions are addressed in the law and practice of International Organizations and in domestic laws. It reveals the pragmatism of a resulting approach which seeks to ensure effective protection of the fundamental right to personal data protection while respecting the need for IOs to be able to perform their mandate under international law in full independence.