Art. 51 GDPR · Chapter VI: Independent supervisory authorities · Section 1: Independent status
Article 51 GDPR: Supervisory authority
Text as of 28 October 2026 Reviewed by Sergio Maldonado Elvira on 29 October 2026
Official text
Each Member State shall provide for one or more independent public authorities to be responsible for monitoring the application of this Regulation, in order to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons in relation to processing and to facilitate the free flow of personal data within the Union (‘supervisory authority’).
Each supervisory authority shall contribute to the consistent application of this Regulation throughout the Union. For that purpose, the supervisory authorities shall cooperate with each other and the Commission in accordance with Chapter VII.
Where more than one supervisory authority is established in a Member State, that Member State shall designate the supervisory authority which is to represent those authorities in the Board and shall set out the mechanism to ensure compliance by the other authorities with the rules relating to the consistency mechanism referred to in Article 63.
Each Member State shall notify to the Commission the provisions of its law which it adopts pursuant to this Chapter, by 25 May 2018 and, without delay, any subsequent amendment affecting them.
Source: Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Official Journal L 119, 4.5.2016, as corrected. Only the text published in the Official Journal is authentic. © European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu
Text as of 28 October 2026.
This is reference material, not legal advice.
Related recitals
This list is under review.
Court of Justice judgments
- C-252/21, Meta Platforms Inc and Others v Bundeskartellamt
Judgment of 4 July 2023ECLI:EU:C:2023:537
A competition authority may find GDPR breaches when examining abuse of dominance, in cooperation with data protection authorities; collecting off-platform data that reveal sensitive traits is special-category processing; personalised advertising from such data cannot rest on contract necessity and only narrowly on legitimate interest; dominance does not bar valid consent but weighs on whether it is freely given.