Ireland’s High Court Monday granted Facebook leave to seek judicial review of a preliminary ruling by the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC), temporarily halting its probe into EU-US data flows. The preliminary ruling concerned a standard contractual clause (SCC) used by many countries to transfer European data globally. Facebook took legal action on the grounds that the IDPC’s  so-called Section 11 order could prevent the company from transferring data from the EU to the US, arguing that the underlying SCC had been found valid by the European Court of Justice in July.

In its decision, the Irish High Court issued a stay of the IDPC investigation. No date for judicial review of the ICPC order has yet been set.