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The European Court of Justice has confirmed that the storage of communication data without cause also violates EU law if it is used to fight serious crimes such as murder.
Judges in Luxembourg ruled on Tuesday that national rules were unlawful which, for the purpose of fighting serious crimes, "preventively provide for a general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data" when this data "concerns electronic communications" (Case C -140/20 ).
They also made it clear that particularly serious crime cannot be equated with a threat to national security.
According to an earlier ECJ ruling, exceptions to the ban on data retention apply in the event of an acute threat to national security.
In such cases, the ECJ considers a time-limited, justified data storage to be permissible.
The background to the ECJ ruling is a case from Ireland.
There, a man convicted of murder defends himself against the fact that his communication data was used as evidence in the trial against him.
The court dealing with the case asked the ECJ for clarification.
According to the ECJ, the “quick freeze” is legal
In Germany, too, data retention has been a source of disputes between civil rights activists and security politicians for years.
A German regulation on data retention has been on hold since 2017 due to an ongoing legal dispute.
According to an ECJ spokesman, there is no date for the ECJ judgment in this case.
The traffic light coalition wants to use the so-called “quick freeze” method instead of data retention.
Internet providers are only asked to store data on individual participants for a certain period of time if there is initial suspicion.
The ECJ has now confirmed, among other things, that it considers such a procedure to be legal in order to combat serious crime and prevent serious threats to public security.
The targeted storage of traffic and location data according to geographical criteria is also lawful.
This could be about the average crime rate in an area.
There does not even have to be any evidence that serious crimes are being prepared or committed in the area.
There could also be data retention in relation to heavily frequented places such as airports or train stations.
The ECJ also ruled that national laws oblige people to store the identity of people who buy prepaid SIM cards.
mak/dpa
