Privacy Notice
Introduction
This privacy notice applies to all the Council of Europe websites within the coe.int domain.
Processing of your personal data is governed by the Council of Europe Regulations on the Protection of Personal Data adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 15 June 2022.
The Council of Europe (“we”) is responsible for the processing of your personal data. At the same time, under Section 2.4 of the Council of Europe Regulations on the Protection of Personal Data any administrative entity, organ, institution or authority within the Council of Europe may act as “data controller”, if it has the decision-making power with respect to data processing.
If processing of personal data on a website within the coe.int is managed by a data controller within the Council of Europe, and if it differs in any respect from the data processing described in this privacy notice, you will be provided with a specific privacy notice in respect of that website.
Such specific privacy notices will contain the following information about the use of your personal data:
- details of the data controller
- categories of your personal data that are processed
- purposes of the processing
- legal grounds for the processing
- how long your personal data are kept
- how your personal data are secured
- who has access to your personal data
- what are your rights and how you can exercise them
- who to contact if you have questions or complaints.
When you visit Council of Europe websites within the coe.int domain, we may process limited amount of your personal data for the purposes described below.
Browsing websites within the coe.int domain
You can browse through most of these websites without sharing with us any personal data.
That said, websites within the coe.int domain use ‘first-party cookies’. These are cookies set and controlled by the Council of Europe, not by any external organisation.
Some websites within the coe.int domain may provide links to third-party sites. In order to use third party content on our websites, you may need to accept their specific terms and conditions, including their cookie policies over which we have no control.
IP address and device ID
When you access a Council of Europe website, the Council of Europe receives as an essential technical requirement the Internet Protocol address (IP address) or the device ID of the device used to access the website.
Without this information, you will not be able to establish a technical connection between your devices and the server infrastructure maintained by the Council of Europe and therefore will not be able to access the websites of the Council of Europe.
The Council of Europe only keeps this information for the time necessary to fulfil the request, namely for the duration of the browsing session. In addition, IP addresses and device IDs might be saved for five years in the log files of the Directorate of Information Technology operational environment for security or other purposes.
Contacting the Council of Europe
If you contact the Council of Europe via the contact form, you have to provide your name and e-mail address. You may also provide other personal information relevant for your query.
We process your personal data in order to reply to you.
The legal basis for the processing of your personal data when you use the contact form is your consent.
Once we received your query, it is forwarded by e-mail to the Council of Europe unit competent to deal with it. The Council of Europe staff members competent to respond to your query will have access to your personal data.
Your query together with your personal data are stored in Microsoft Outlook. We have put in place measures to protect the security of your personal information, including appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. We may keep your personal information provided in relation to your query as long as it is active.
Subscribing to a newsletter
If you decide to subscribe to the Council of Europe newsletter, you will find a specific privacy notice explaining how your personal data will be processed in relation to a newsletter subscription.
Storage of your personal data
Your personal data are stored on servers located in the European Union.
We have put in place measures to protect the security of your information, including appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In particular, the data are protected using modern encryption, intrusion prevention, and account access techniques.
Your data protection rights
You have the right to:
- request access to your personal information held by us;
- request that we correct incomplete or inaccurate personal information that we hold about you;
- request we delete or remove your personal information when there is no valid reason for us to keep it;
- object to the processing of your personal information on specific grounds relating to your situation;
- where data processing is based on your consent, withdraw the consent.
If you wish to exercise the above rights, or for any queries, concerns, or requests you may have in connection with the way your data is collected and used, please contact either the Council of Europe Directorate of Communications or the Council of Europe Data Protection Officer using the contact form.
If you feel that we have not adequately responded to your request and consider that your data protection rights have been violated as a result of our processing of your personal data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Council of Europe Data Protection Commissioner by sending an e-mail to datacommissioner@coe.int.