Joe Cannataci has been appointed the first Special Rapporteur on Privacy by the UN’s Human Rights Council.
Prof. Cannataci is head of department of Information Policy and Governance in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences at the University of Malta.
This is the first time the UN has appointed a special rapporteur for privacy and also the first that a Maltese person has been appointed to the prestigious post in the field of human rights.
Thirty candidates from across the world were considered for the post, including Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the US Electronic Privacy Information Centre, Dutch Data Protection Authority chairman Jacob Kohnstamm, former German Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar and former Polish Data Protection Commissioner Joana Kulesza.
The new post was created following worldwide concern about surveillance and privacy in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.