New Standard Contractual Clauses

The European Commission has approved new Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) that facilitate the transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA) to third countries where there is no adequacy decision in place (you can find a list of countries that have been recognised as having an adequate level of data protection here).

The new SCCs provide appropriate data protection safeguards for such data transfers and resolve some of the issues that had been identified with the previous SCCs.

The new SCCs came into force on 4 June 2021. You can find the full text of the decision here.

Any contracts that rely on the SCCs as a data transfer mechanism must start using the new SCCs from 28 September 2021. For any existing contracts that rely on the old SCCs these will need to be transitioned to the new SCCs by 27 December 2022.