[1] http://www.euractiv.com/specialreport-eu-us-trade-talks/liti...
Google are suing France because they conform to EU Law rather than French law, and would like European courts to resolve the issue.
The EU can issue Directive, that laws that represent the strict minimum to comply. Then the individual state has to actually pass a national law that implements the directive.
Three options here. The state does not want to implement the law and get fined. The state implements the law following closely the Directive. Or it can go further than the directive, like, in the case of the French privacy law, add more requirements.
Our system as flaws but I'm not to kind on Google messing around it. It could very well set an unfortunate precedent. EU Directive are sometimes quite weak so it would be a problem to me that instead of representing the min they end up representing the max requirement.
Google is suing because they want EU to invalidate the French law. But I don't see how it could happen since AFAIK the French privacy laws predate the Directive by a quite large amount. Right now I think EU can only overrule a state law if it does not offer minimal citizen protection or if there are contradictions with the Directive. Not if they offer more protection.
As for a treaty allowing US corps to invalid EU Directives ... well, good for you but we still have national laws. I don't see how the invalidation of a Directive would invalidate automatically national law.
I might be wrong though. Would love input from someone more knowledgeable on the matter.
And more importantly goes further than the directive in protecting citizen's rights. By comparison the french "garde à vue" — a form of police custody — is also ancient but it restricts citizen's defence rights far below the mandatory minimum and has gotten repeatedly hammered by the ECHR both indirectly (via similar turkic cases e.g. Salduz v Turkey and Dayanan v Turkey) and directly (e.g. Brusco v France, Vassis v France) as France (incorrectly) refused to consider the turkic cases applicable.