Yui Mok/PA Archive/PA Images. All rights reserved.For critics of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, the Court of Justice of the European Union in its ruling on MP Tom Watson’s challenge against the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) has given us an early Christmas present. The court has ruled that the indiscriminate retention of electronic communications data by governments is incompatible with a modern democracy.
The CJEU reaffirms the individual’s right to privacy and outlines the necessarily stringent thresholds necessary to ensure that the retention of data remains “justified within a democratic society”. In regards to DRIPA, this threshold was not met: “National legislation such as that at issue in the main proceedings therefore exceeds the limits of what is strictly necessary and cannot be considered to be justified, within a democratic society”.
The ruling offers a stark rebuttal to the government’s justification for DRIPA and by implication the IP Act, which codifies a great deal of powers that indiscriminately retain data on UK citizens. This includes measures that collect data on the many to find the few, an approach that is undermined by the ruling’s position that “the retention of data is limited, with respect to the categories of data to be retained, the means of communication affected, the persons concerned and the retention period adopted, to what is strictly necessary”.
