In brief: Incoming Federal Data Protection Officer Hennemann is regarded professionally as continuous with his predecessor but publicly criticizes the GDPR as an innovation barrier and advocates for stronger geopolitical weighting in data transfers.
Union and SPD have agreed on Freiburg law professor Moritz Hennemann as the new Federal Data Protection Officer. The 41-year-old has expressed critical views of the GDPR in the past, whose enforcement will become his core task in the future.
Moritz Hennemann, professor of law at the University of Freiburg, is the candidate of the government coalition parties to succeed Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider. The incumbent Federal Data Protection Officer announced in March that she would resign from office for health reasons. Hennemann, born in 1983, meets the statutory age requirement of at least 35 years and at 41 would be the youngest Federal Data Protection Officer in some time. His academic path led through Heidelberg, Krakow and Oxford; after his habilitation in 2019 in Freiburg, he was initially a professor in Passau before returning to the University of Freiburg.