Ireland’s challenge to an EU law requiring retention of Internet ...

lacks standing to legislate on processing of personal data, including Internet and telephony traffic data, in the context of public safety and law enforcement, said Ralf Bendrath. A political scientist and privacy policy researcher at Technical University Delft in the Netherlands who serves on the German Working Group on Data Retention, Bendrath hopes the court also weighs privacy and freedom of expression concerns cited in an April brief by 43 civil rights groups, he said. His working group expects the Irish challenge to the measure’s legal basis to kill it, he said. If the ECJ tosses the directive, the EC will be “out of the game,” since it only can only draft legislation for the internal market, Bendrath told us. The Council of Ministers -- EU governments -- theoretically could revive the attempt, but all member countries would have to approve it, he said. The resulting instrument, a framework decision, would be less binding than a directive, a 2005 version of which EU states failed to agree on, he said. “We expect that the EuCtJ will end this forum shopping and policy-laundering,” he said. Since the directive was passed, opposition to data storage and increased surveillance has grown, making consensus in the Council even more elusive, he said. The German Federal Constitutional Court has indicated it will “comprehensively examine” that country’s data retention laws’ compatibility with fundamental German rights, the working group said. “On that basis we are confident that we will win our class action against the permanent blanket registration of our communications behaviour and movements.”