Amendment of Act on KSC inconsistent with international law: Lewiatan

In accordance with the proposed amendment to the KSC (national system of cybersecurity) Act, which the government has been working on for over half a year, national and political criteria will largely determine whether a given technology company will be excluded from the Polish market. Lawyers stress that this is against international law on free trade and the freedom to conduct a business.

“Discrimination against suppliers based on a difficult to prove level of danger of their equipment, only due to the country of their origin, will be difficult to defend under international law. International disputes won by excluded suppliers mean huge losses for the Treasury,” Aleksandra Musielak from the Lewiatan Confederation believes.

In her opinion, the project initiator resigned from substantive, objective technical criteria for evaluating hardware and software.

“Highly political criteria will be used by the College of Cybersecurity when assessing suppliers, including the likelihood with which the hardware or software supplier is under the control of a country outside the European Union or NATO, or the degree and type of relationship between the hardware or software supplier and that country,” Aleksandra Musielak adds.

The first proposed amendment even contained provisions that allowed to exclude from the market a company from a country where human rights are not respected. After numerous comments from the market, the government withdrew from this provision, but in the draft, it left a number of other discretionary criteria, which – as experts point out – are aimed primarily at technology companies from China.

According to the expert, the new draft amendments to the Act on KSC is doubtful from the point of view of its compliance with international and EU regulations concerning, inter alia, free trade and freedom of business. It includes art. 49 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which prohibits, inter alia, restricting the freedom of establishment.

(Newseria)