Sample Solution

In law, selective enforcement occurs when government officials exercise enforcement discretion, which is the power to choose whether or how to punish a person who has violated the law. While selective enforcement can be efficient, it can also produce bias, corruption, and prejudice. The European Commission avoids phrasing its operations in terms of ‘selective enforcement’. Instead, the Commission relies on the term ‘prioritization’, which does not have the same definite and discerning connotation.

The Commission acknowledges that, in addition to prioritizing violations among policy sectors, it also prioritizes violations within each sector. A recent doctoral thesis published by the Department of Law at the European University Institute contends that the Commission’s policy of selective enforcement rests on four pillars: confidentiality, bilateralism, flexibility, and autonomy. For years, the European Parliament and various other stakeholders have pressured the Commission to reform its enforcement policy in order to increase its legitimacy in the eyes of EU citizens. They have sought to replace the Commission’s existing discretionary model of enforcement with a new approach characterized by standards such as transparency, trilateralism, objectivity, and accountability. The Commission, however, supported by the European Court of Justice, has in most part resisted these challenges. Indeed, the Commission is unwilling to improve its standards and formalize its enforcement procedures because doing so would create administrative burdens, which would in turn decrease its efficiency.
As stakeholders fail to effectively comply with GDPR regulations, EU politicians respond to panic by touting selective enforcement as a safety mechanism. Green Party Parliamentarian Jan Philipp Albrecht, the “father of the GDPR,” has assured critics that GDPR investigations will not focus on small to medium enterprises, but instead “will concentrate on the bigger ones that pose a threat to many consumers.” Albrecht made clear that the firms “already under suspicion of not complying with European data protection rules… will be the first to be looked at.” He further noted that “if smaller companies are trying in good faith to comply with the GDPR, it would be disproportionate to sanction them.” Albrecht’s statements m