Pakistan Publishes IT Data Protection Laws

Pakistan's Ministry for Information Technology has published draft legislation creating a new foreign data protection regime, which will help European and US companies when outsourcing to the country, according to a report by Islamabad News.

EU law in particular restricts businesses transferring data to countries with weak privacy protection, and with the Ministry apparently expecting growth rates in business process outsourcing to Pakistan to be over 100% for the next few years, the state is keen to eliminate reasons for potential customers to outsource elsewhere.

The difficulty so far as European firms are concerned relates to the Data Protection Directive of 1995, which restricts the data that can be transferred or stored in countries without equivalent rules and enforcement procedures. At present, Pakistan has no such regulations, and relies on individual contracts negotiated between the main company and the Pakistani outsourcing contractor to address the data protection issues…