Did you know that in 2020, Mauritius was one of the 128 countries that have put in place legislation for data privacy?
With the accruing number of online transactions and social interactions since the mid 2010’s, the importance of privacy and data protection was increasingly recognized. This is why in 2016, the European Commission adopted the GDPR, to replace the outdated Data Protection Directive of 1995, and it was enforced in 2018.
The GDPR is considered as the reference when it comes to data protection and many countries used it to develop their data protection law. However, as at June 2021, there were only 13 countries outside the EU, that had legislation considered as adequacy (Equivalent) to the GDPR.
According to the statistics of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, on April 2020, only 66% of the 194 countries had legislation in place, 10% had draft legislation, 19% did not have any legislation and 5% were unknown.
Here below are some statistics of countries with data protection laws.
The picture below are statistics provided by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development on September 2020.
As we can see, Mauritius was among the 28 countries which already had a legislation regarding data protection, the Data Protection Act 2017.
On another note, Mauritius has recently adopted the Cybersecurity and Cybercrime bill 2021, which is a complementary of the Data Protection Act.
However, what is the level of those legislations compared to other countries?
The picture below shows a classification of countries accordingly to their data protection laws.
Red is considered as heavy, Orange is robust, Yellow being moderate, turquoise is limited and grey are unclassified.
As we can notice, Mauritius is considered to have a moderate data protection legislation, compared to other countries such as the EU, Canada, USA, Australia and even China. Even though, The Mauritius regulation is highly regarded and discussion with the EU has started concerning adequacy. This might lead to amendments of the data protection act 2017 in a near future.
It is worth to note that the Data Protection Act 2017 is based on the principles of the GDPR. Click on the link below if you want to know more.
If you need help on your data privacy policy, do not hesitate to contact us. At Ascentrix consulting, we can help you assess your level of compliancy with the data protection Act and the GDPR. If you need assistance, contact us.
References: