supervisory authority
noun · Aufsichtsbehörde
The supervisory authority is the Aufsichtsbehörde, the independent body each member state must establish to monitor the application of the GDPR, Art. 51 DSGVO. Überwachungsbehörde is a machine reflex that names no institution of German data protection law; and in Germany the office is federal, the Land authorities beside the BfDI, with the federführende Aufsichtsbehörde of Art. 56 as the one-stop shop for cross-border processing.
Which translation, when
Why
The supervisory authority of the GDPR is the Aufsichtsbehörde, and the institution comes with three features a translation has to keep. The first is its constitutional shape: Art. 51 Abs. 1 DSGVO obliges every member state to establish one or more independent public authorities to monitor the application of the regulation, and the independence is complete, the body acts free of external instruction. The German word for that body is fixed; the machine-made Überwachungsbehörde shifts the register towards surveillance and names no institution of German data protection law, and Datenschutzbehörde, common in the press, is loose usage rather than the statutory term. The second feature is the German federal split: the Länder maintain authorities of their own, competent as a rule for the private sector and for the public bodies of the Land, competence following the seat of the controller, while the BfDI, the federal commissioner, supervises the public bodies of the federation and certain sectors, telecommunications and post first among them; the authorities coordinate in the Datenschutzkonferenz. An English text that speaks of the German supervisory authority in the singular therefore flattens a landscape, and which body a company faces is a question of its seat, not of choice. The third feature is the cross-border mechanism: where processing crosses borders, the authority of the main establishment acts as the federführende Aufsichtsbehörde, Art. 56 DSGVO, the single interlocutor of the controller, the one-stop shop, with the other concerned authorities involved behind the scenes; lead supervisory authority is federführende, not leitende, Aufsichtsbehörde. The duties that run towards the body, the breach notification first among them, stay with their own entries; this one holds the institution, its name, its map and its lead role.
Typical mistakes
- Überwachungsbehörde is a calque with a surveillance ring and no statutory home, the term is Aufsichtsbehörde.
- German supervision is federal, Land authorities beside the BfDI with competence following the seat, so the German supervisory authority in the singular flattens the map.
- Lead supervisory authority is the federführende Aufsichtsbehörde of Art. 56 DSGVO, so leitende Aufsichtsbehörde misses the term of the one-stop shop.
What matters
A cross-border compliance memo naming the competent regulator: the translation should say Aufsichtsbehörde, identify the body by the seat within the German federal split, and render lead supervisory authority as federführende Aufsichtsbehörde under the one-stop shop of Art. 56 DSGVO.
What the machine misses
Rendered automatically, supervisory authority sometimes appears as Überwachungsbehörde, a word that shifts the register towards surveillance and names no institution of German data protection law; the GDPR term is Aufsichtsbehörde, Art. 51 DSGVO, and the mistranslation obscures which body in the federal German split, Land authority or BfDI, actually supervises the controller, and hides the federführende role of Art. 56 behind it.
Examples
| the competent supervisory authority | die zuständige Aufsichtsbehörde |
| the lead supervisory authority | die federführende Aufsichtsbehörde |
| to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority | Beschwerde bei einer Aufsichtsbehörde einlegen |
| acting with complete independence | völlig unabhängig handelnd |