ELDR Focus Year

Already the second Constitutional Court of an EU Member State has ruled the implementation of the data retention directive (directive 2006/24/EC) and the subsequent general storage of citizens' communication data as unconstitutional: first the Romanian Constitutional Court (Curtea Constituţională a României), and now this morning the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht).

LYMEC President Aloys Rigaut reacted to the news: “We can only warmly welcome such judgement! This is yet another blow to the directive which required member states to store communication data of all their citizens for at least six months. While the actual content of phone calls and emails is not stored, the persons involved in the communication as well as all surrounding data is. For a phone call this means telephone number, name and address of the caller and the person called, duration of the call, in case of mobile phones the locations from and to where the call was made. For emails the name, address and IP-address of all persons involved, time of sending, as well as the whole header of the email message has to be stored. That data is collected for 500 million citizens and kept for six up to twenty-four months. Is that proportional to the terrorist threat? We do not think so.”

LYMEC Vice President Alexander Plahr adds: “This rightly is the beginning of the end of the data retention directive! In two big member states the implementation of the directive has already been declared unconstitutional, in many more the courts are still occupied by it, all across Europe the data retention directive is heavily criticised by civil society, political groups and human rights organisations. However, every day the laws implementing this directive are still effective in the parts of the European Union where the constitutional courts have not yet annulled them, is a day to long! Therefore we call on the European Commission to now immediately revoke the directive!”