EU legal advisers cast doubt on data retention legality

The European Parliament’s legal advisers have issued a report into the repercussions of 2014’s ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, in which the CJEU struck down the EU Data Retention Directive. And the lawyers’ opinions suggest that surviving national data retention laws are on shaky ground.

The Directive forced EU member states to have a data retention regime in which telecommunications and Internet service providers had to maintain records of their customers’ communications -- metadata about who contacted whom and when, as opposed to the contents of those communications. After the CJEU judgement in April 2014, countries including Austria, Slovenia and Romania scrapped their national data retention laws (a couple others, notably Germany, had already rolled theirs back on constitutional grounds). However, some countries have continued or -- in the case of the UK with its DRIPA surveillance law -- even expanded their national data retention regimes. The CJEU ruling will make it hard to justify the continuation of this situation, and even in the case of terrorism and more serious crime, the British government may have a struggle proving the proportionality of its mass surveillance regime. Proper reviews of data retention laws in other countries such as Sweden may uncover similar problems.