Legal Notice

This Privacy policy applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of WMCES including via its website.

WMCES is responsible for the processing of your personal data. WMCES is a European political foundation (0892.052.283), whose registered office is established at Rue du Commerce 10, 1000 (Belgium). This means that WMCES determines for what purposes and with what means your personal data will be processed.

We collect your personal data in two ways, either directly from you or via third parties:

Information provided by you

We collect your information and personal data that we get directly from you:

• when you visit our offices: data such as your name and company name.
• when you subscribe to receive newsletters, event invitations, papers and podcasts or alerts for common projects with our partners: data such as your name, e-mail address, name of your organisation, position, whether you are a member of the press or not, topics of interests and preferred format (HTML/Plaintext).     
• when you register for an event: data such as your name, e-mail address, name of your organisation, position and whether you would like to receive invitations for future events.   
• when you become a member of WMCES: data such as your name, e-mail address, name of your organisation, position, country, date of election/nomination and duration of mandate, phone number and postal address.
• when you contact us directly by e-mail, phone or otherwise: data such as your name, e-mail address, name of your organisation, phone number, the content of your correspondence with WMCES and any other personal data you provide that may be relevant to answering your question.
• when you give us your business card: data such as your name, e-mail address, name of your organisation and phone number.  
• when you apply for a job with WMCES: data such as your name, your contact information, your resume, your grades, your correspondence with WMCES and other documents you provide us with.
  

Information from other sources

We also collect information from other sources:

• when you visit our building: data such as camera images processed by surveillance cameras at the entrance of our building.
• when you browse our website: data we receive from cookie providers about your activity on our website.
• when you interact with us on social media platforms: data we receive from social media platforms.
• Automatically obtained information
  When you browse our website, we receive data from cookie providers about your activity on our website. This information does not allow us to identify you directly. Therefore, we cannot know who you are merely based on the automatically obtained information. We can combine the automatically obtained information with the information provided by you.

More information on the use of cookies by WMCES can be found in our cookie policy below.

We process your personal data for the following purposes:

• to protect our building from access by unauthorised persons;
• to send you event invitations and notifications for new releases and content such as papers and podcasts, blog posts, our monthly newsletter or the newsletter about our joint activities with our partners;
• to register your participation to events;
• to register your membership;to answer your questions and exchange information with you;to add your contact details in our database; 
• to contact you in the context of a selection and recruitment process;
• to secure and improve our websites and newsletters;  

Depending on the individual case, the processing of your personal data is based on:

• your consent, e.g. by ticking a box to this effect during your navigation on our site. In this case, you have the right to withdraw your consent for the future at all time (please refer to question 10);
• your request to take certain steps prior to entering into a contract (such as an internship), or when the processing is necessary for the performance of a contract with you (such as the membership with WMCES);
• a legal obligation to which WMCE is subject (such as the European Regulation regarding the statute and funding of European political foundations) or its legitimate activities to process personal data of members, former members or persons who have regular contact with WMCES.  

WMCES shares your data with the following third parties:

• service providers to provide services for us, such as marketing agencies, web hosting companies, mailing vendors (e.g. Mailchimp, Salesforce or Typeform);
• service providers to provide services for us in relation to our activities, such as the organisation of (network) events (e.g. event agencies, event hosting services, hotels, …);
• European institutions such as the Authority for European political parties and European political foundations, the European Parliament, OLAF, the Court of Auditors and Member States, but only for auditing and control purposes within the context of the European Regulation regarding the statute and funding of European political foundations);

In addition, WMCES may be obliged to disclose your personal data if this is required by law or a court order.

In all cases, we are committed to ensuring the confidentiality of your data, which includes among other things that we conclude adequate contracts with our partners and service providers which impose confidentiality obligations on them.

Some data may be stored or transferred outside the European Economic Area (EEA) for the purposes described in point 4 above. It is possible that this transfer occurs via third parties (as mentioned in point 5 above) established outside the EEA territory or because data are stored on a server located outside or accessible outside the EEA.

In this respect, WMCES is committed to ensuring an adequate level of protection for your data, in particular via an adequacy decision under article 45 GDPR for the country to which data are transferred by concluding standard contractual clauses under article 46.2 GDPR, or by any other appropriate safeguards.

In order to guarantee the security of your personal data we have set in place a series of security measures and safeguards. Your personal data is stored on secure networks that may only be accessed by a limited number of persons holding special access rights and who undertake to respect and maintain its confidential nature.

Despite these measures, due care should be taken when storing and/or sharing your personal data, particularly when connecting via unsecure or public networks.

WMCES furthermore has committed to ensure that the service providers that process personal data on behalf of us also implement sufficient technical and organisational measures.

The collected data are kept as long as necessary to provide our services and for the purposes described in question 4 above, while taking into account our legal and contractual obligations. This means for example that we will no longer use your personal data to send you our newsletters if you have informed us that you no longer want to receive them. Personal data may be stored for a longer period in order to establish, exercise and defend our legal position in the event of claims or disputes.

In addition, you have the right to request the deletion of your data. Please refer in this regard to question 10 below.

The website of WMCES contains references (e.g. via hyperlinks) to other websites, which are offered by other organisations (e.g. organisations in our network) or by social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn or Soundcloud). WMCES is not responsible for the processing of personal data via these websites. Nor does this Privacy policy apply to these websites. WMCES advises you to check the privacy policies of these social media.

If you share content from our website via social media, your personal data will be visible for the visitors of these social media. WMCES is not responsible for the processing of personal data via these social media. Nor does this Privacy policy apply to these social media.

You have a number of rights with regard to your personal data. Some of these rights may be subject to conditions or exceptions.

You have a right of access to your data, a right to correct your data, a right to the erasure of your data, a right to limit the processing of your data and a right to ask the portability of your data.

You also have a right to object to the processing of your data in general as well as to the processing of your data for direct marketing and profiling purposes.

If the processing of your data is based on consent, you also have the right to withdraw your consent at any time, without this affecting the legitimacy of the processing done prior to the withdrawal of your consent.

You can send your request by e-mail to avo@martenscentre.eu or by mail to the address mentioned below. To protect your privacy and security, we will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before processing your request.

In every e-mail that we send, there is an option to update your information or unsubscribe.

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority of your habitual residence, your place of work or the place of an alleged infringement of the GDPR. The Belgian Data Protection Authority is the supervisory authority for Belgium and can be contacted at contact@apd-gba.be.

If you have further questions or complaints about this website or about this Privacy policy, you can also contact us:

• by e-mail at tla@martenscentre.eu
• by mail at Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, Rue du Commerce 10, 1000 Brussels (Belgium);
• by phone at the number: 0032 (0) 2 300 80 04