Ireland¶
The Irish cases show the protection of Europeans’ records resting on one national regulator and the pace of its courts. Each stage of appeal can suspend the remedy while leaving the finding in place, so the penalty and the protection travel separately, and the protection is the slower of the two. The state whose laws reach the records takes no part in the proceedings, while the timing is set in Dublin.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Worth a look. European users, journalists, activists and officials among them, cannot easily learn whether their records were read abroad, and have no part in the proceedings that decide it. Other platforms learn that a finding can take years to become an order, and that a fine is the likelier cost. A foreign service that wants the records waits on neither. An order that takes effect pending appeal, or a ruling from Luxembourg that speeds the remedy, would shift the balance.
June 2026: Questions for Luxembourg¶
On 30 June 2026, in a follow-on judgment, the High Court held that the regulator was entitled to treat TikTok and its parent ByteDance as one undertaking and to have regard to ByteDance’s turnover, and that its limited errors in weighing the fine “do not merit revisiting the administrative fines imposed”. It proposed referring to the EU Court of Justice whether the parent’s liability had to be established first, how group turnover should enter the calculation, and whether fines for two infringements arising from the same processing may be added together. The clerks note that if the reference is made, only the size of the fine waits for that court.
June 2026: The court sends it back¶
On 3 June 2026 the High Court upheld the regulator’s findings that TikTok had infringed the rules on transfers and transparency, but found errors in the regulator’s assessment of whether to order the transfers to China suspended, and proposed vacating the corrective orders and remitting the question to the regulator. The suspension had been stayed since 2025 pending the appeal. The clerks note that the finding that the data was within reach stands, and the remedy is back on the regulator’s desk.
May 2025: Within reach of another law¶
On 2 May 2025 the Data Protection Commission fined TikTok 530 million euro for transferring the personal data of users in the European Economic Area to China without verifying that it was protected to an essentially equivalent level, and without addressing access by Chinese authorities under anti-terrorism, counter-espionage and other laws. It ordered the transfers suspended if the processing was not brought into compliance within six months. In April 2025 TikTok had told the commission that “limited EEA user data had in fact been stored on servers in China, contrary to TikTok’s evidence to the inquiry”. The fine is listed as pending appeal. The clerks note that the regulator found the data reachable under a foreign intelligence law, which is not the same as finding it was reached.