Data protection and humanitarian emergencies

Data protection can play a crucial role in humanitarian action, meaning assistance, relief, and protection operations in response to a humanitarian emergency (in particular arising out of armed conflicts or natural disasters) that poses a critical threat to the health, safety, security or well-being of a community or other large group of people over a wide area. This is the subject of the Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action published jointly in June 2017 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Brussels Privacy Hub (BPH) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and available for free download1 (in the interest of full disclosure, we should mention that Christopher Kuner is director of the BPH and was one of the co-editors of the Handbook). The Handbook illustrates a number of important issues about the implementation of data protection in humanitarian emergencies, and the balance to be struck between data protection and other important values.